This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding, much like how many think standards groups (e.g. W3C) decide how the browsers works.
(Standards groups can invent the best feature ever for the Web ... and it won't matter in the slightest if browser makers don't adopt it. ALL STANDARDS ARE SET BY BROWSER MAKERS ... the standards bodies are just the mechanism they use to do it.)
Likewise, the browser a web developer user uses is already set for them. EVERY web dev (except those at companies big enough to care about the "long tail" of browsers) uses one browser: the most popular one.
It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"
No, it doesn't. I wasn't talking about web standards bodies. I'm talking about the practical reality of the web as a platform that is resilient against slight differences between browsers. Such resilience can only come from developers who understand that their job is to target the web and not just Chrome.
It is you who misunderstands:
> It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"
You are literally arguing for the web to become the Chrome Platform for the convenience of web developers. Sure we can have other browsers, so long as they're perfectly compatible with Chrome's quirks. This is precisely what it means for the web to be the Chrome Platform, not the open web. We've already reached the point where it's assumed that Chrome is perfect and anything that deviates from Chrome is someone else's bug. It's sad.
This is a wild statement. For an individual user, what is the point of browser diversity if you are locked into your browser by OS? A weird number of people here are okay with this particular example of anti-consumer behavior simply because it offsets the chrome monopoly. That's not a healthy web, that's competing layers of dysfunction.
There's no reason for Safari to have a sub-par experience except for the laziness of some web developers.
A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.
Says who? I certainly don't agree with that statement, the "web as an open platform" was unrecognizable when proprietary clients were the norm.
(And before you say it, consumers can choose Android, where 99.9% of people use Chrome, but apparently that's okay because they "chose" it.)
WebKit is a second-class citizen on the web, and we can argue about why that is, but nobody can sincerely deny it. Apple's strategy has been dead in the water for over a decade. iOS lost.
Meanwhile we have people bitching and moaning and meanwhile, as a Firefox user, I go to Safari when I encounter a website that doesn't work in Firefox. Because at the end of the day, developers are forced to test in Safari, and that is a Good Thing. No developer is forced to test in Firefox.
Maybe you don't understand that I have to spend several hundred dollars for the privilege to debug Safari's shitty bugs. That's FUCKED UP. It isn't "being lazy". I shouldn't have to spend money so I can cater to a shitty browser. And Apple does some weird-ass things with their browser that make it wonky, and you can't debug some things without an apple device. Touch events are one particular iffy thing Apple does differently, because "think different" apparently means "we do whatever the fuck we want so pay us to debug things that shouldn't need debugging".
>Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
Give me $500 to buy an Apple device and I'll fix things so it works for the shitty browser iOS users are forced to use. It has not a single fucking thing to do with "being lazy", and you're a shitty person for suggesting that's how this works.
If the cost really is an issue for you, I'm sure you know that you aren't forced to pay $500 to Apple. You can easily find hand-me-down Apple devices that still runs a current operating system for a pittance -- or free if you have a network of friends or family. No need to pay Apple anything.
I wouldn't be complaining if I could install the iOS simulator on any other platform - but even on iOS the iOS simulator sucks badly, and it only works on MacOS. It doesn't "simulate" touch events as they function on a real iOS device.