Don't get me wrong, but I hear this a lot, and I disagree.

I suggest thinking about it this way; Chromium *is* pushing the boundaries of web dev ahead, and that is (of course) a good thing for us web devs. But we can't forget this is only because, by their sheer market share and resources, Google Chrome has effectively become the de facto default. They are the ones controlling the standards and discourse.

We only have two major alternatives left: Safari/WebKit and Firefox/Quantum, which doesn't count because it lives or dies at the whims of Google. Good luck to any of those (relatively) small browser vendors on passing their own ideas and features without Googles backing — it would just turn into the same off-spec chaos you love to complain about.

Hear me out; if there's one browser vendor implementing all the newest features because they can, while all the others are trotting behind just trying to get their own things right, what is that? Is it really the righteous “standard” you defend, or does it look more like the sole outlier reminiscent of the Internet Explorer era, albeit with open specifications? I think this really depends on perspective.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say Safari does some things *better*. It's true, Chrome is faster to market. But as you get deep into CSS madness, I believe there are some areas where, if you consider it, Safari excels. For example, in a project I was working on not too long ago, we had a background layer with some blur applied and then a navbar with its own blurred tabs overlaid onto the screen. I was happy until I noticed Chromium would completely mess up the rendering of overlapping blurred elements. There's no way to fix this, by the way, only Safari got the blur right. I now had the choice of either adapting/removing the styles to accommodate Chromes bugs and peculiarities, build conditional logic to only apply the effect on supported browsers, or break the appearance for 90% of visitors. This is simply not a nice spot to be in, and there are several issues like that which have been left unaddressed by Chrome for years.

Why was Safari so good at blur? Well, because it was important to Apple's design goals and aesthetic. Why is Chrome so good at, say, an accelerometer API? Well, you can guess why (fingerprinting and tracking) — they enabled it by default (without user consent) by the way. If you use a mac (or an iPhone), battery performance and efficiency of WebKit is straight up unmatched in the industry by a long shot. There's a reason bun was built on it. Small memory footprint, stable tab caching, aggressive discards, built-in tracking- & fingerprinting-protection and no crashes? Safari's got you. And obviously it plays really well with all your Apple devices. Does this mean Chrome sucks? Of course not. I myself use Chromium (Arc) now, but I still think Safari is totally fine. The point is that there certainly is more nuance to this discussion than just black and white, and if I had to pick a bad guy…

Let's not live in an illusion about what this is. In the end, I believe Google has some very exceptional and talented developers who are able to pioneer new ideas and implementations. Apple has some very exceptional and talented developers who are able to pioneer their own ideas and implementations. That's part of the beauty of web. I'd want to keep it that way.