The nice thing about the web is that while it’s no company’s favoured platform, it’s valuable to all of them as a way into each other’s platforms. That’s why whoever is “winning” the platform war a particular point tends to neglect the web. See Microsoft in the 2000s, and Apple now. But all their competitors are incentivised to push the web forward, because it’s a useful fallback as a way to get their apps into the walled garden. Then, eventually things shift and the company that was dominating falls behind a bit, or is facing antitrust problems, and suddenly they care about the web again. In that way, the web is a perpetual underdog, but never goes away.
> The nice thing about the web is that while it’s no company’s favoured platform
It is effectively Google's favored platform. They effectively get to be the gatekeepers for what standards become accepted. They control the most widely used engine, and fund the only opposition so they have an incentive to avoid going against them. Just look at how everyone dropped the ball in the recent JPEG-XL vs WebP news.
This. Apple's Safari (on iOS and macOS) is the Microsoft IE of 2020s. It's unbelievably behind the more sophisticated browsers (Firefox, Chrome) and yet, Apple couldn't care less.
It's not IE by any imaginable standard. And it's only "unbelievably behind" if you count all the non-standard APIs that Chrome ships by default and calls them standard.
A browser that doesn't support extensions unless they're installed as separate apps on the platform is not worthy of the name "browser"; it's a lock-in mechanism.
