Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that’s really how it rolls out, doesn’t it also mean that Safari wasn’t viable on itself and nobody wanted to use it in the first place ? Apple is no underdog anymore, if their browser couldn‘t compete on its own merit I won’t be crying a river over it. Firefox, while mired with its own problems, is another story; but I don’t see Mozilla losing from this decision.
Safari is possibly the biggest competitor to chrome, since Firefox is falling out of use. It’s important for the ecosystem to have a strong competitor who isn’t dependent on google
Why ? Seriously - this competition argument gets brought up and I see 0 benefit. There is almost no innovation in the low level aspects and the foundations are opensource with several tech giants contributing.
The only thing "competition" adds at this point is fragmentation, compatibility issues and slower feature adoption.
This idea that competition beats cooperation is silly - innovation in browser rendering and JS engines is mostly done - the only real innovative effort was Servo and that died - modern variants are there just for political/commercial reasons.
If every browser out there converted to Blink/V8 and development resources were focused the web would be better.