Why is it so expensive to develop a web browser?

nebulaone@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 127 points –
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There is Safari, which uses a different rendering engine, but yeah, there's basically 3 browsers. Chromium, Safari, and Firefox.

I don't use Safari and never have, so I can't speak to its compatibility or quirks for the user or for developers.

Safari still has the best power management and speed in most cases. I mainly use safari but swap back and forth with Vivaldi on a daily basis.

Safari is behind on a ton of features from what i know i would not use safari even if i had the option.

It's known as the new Internet Explorer in web development circles. And just like IE, it's exclusive to an operating system so you have to figure out a way to get macOS to even test it out. On iOS it's the only browser engine even available, and when the EU stuff finally comes through, it's still an IE situation because defaults and OS integration. You can't ignore iOS for any serious web jobs.

I've been out of web development for a little while now, but the bugs were very IE-esque.

At least they finally just implemented WebPush, at long last.

Wasn't Safari available for Windows at some point? I swear I remember it being installed on my school laptop like 10 years ago.

According to the Safari (web browser) wikipedia article: «Between 2007 and 2012, Apple maintained a Windows version, but abandoned it due to low market share», so yes.