Personally, I see this as an opportunity for Apple to actually invest heavily in Safari. But Apple's walled garden is no different than Chrome or Edge from a risk perspective and poor Mozilla is so captured by the search traffic payment they get that I really don't see any progress here for many years to come.
As we return to "browsers with an editorial opinion" market differentiation is based on that opinion. Apple has been pushing privacy really strongly to move people to the Apple ecosystem. As the "browser that won't let you be tracked or compromise your privacy" they have an opportunity to further "choke" the data/advertising streams of competitors.
It is the advantage of having a weapon that you can use that damages your competitor but not you. Chrome started out that way[1] as a way to attack Microsoft (and to some extent Firefox)
When you see things like Tim Cook saying he will "end" Facebook, you might reasonably ask, "Wait how could he possibly do that? He doesn't control the web." And you would be right, with the exception of understanding that Facebook makes its money on data extraction[2], and a lot of Facebook users are also Apple device users. So on the Apple device Apple can build a browser that lets their users access Facebook while taking away as much data as possible from Facebook. This damages Facebook revenue, forces them to invest in counter measures, and doesn't change Apple's revenue model hardly at all.
As a result, from a business perspective, I think Apple could justify investment here in a browser that puts forward a point of view that makes it harder for Google and Facebook to make money.
[1] FWIW I worked at Google when Chrome was launched and understand that there was the 'open standards' narrative but there was also a pretty obvious 'hurts Microsoft/Apple' narrative. So the technical reasons to invest aside, my opinion is that the real reason any large enterprise invests in anything is because they have a reason to believe it will make their business stronger, more difficult to attack, more profitable, or with luck all three.
[2] I think the term 'surveillance capital' a bit too inflammatory.
Well perhaps if we talked about browser perspective?
Chrome - we own the world so use our browser with its proprietary extensions and only works completely if you hand over a Google account.
Firefox - we try to follow standards and be good to users as long as we don't piss off the people who are paying our salaries too much.
Edge - So much faster and better than Chrome all you need to do is let us know all about you and what your doing and use our services that give us more 'stickyness' over your use of our browser.
Safari - Oh hey, we need a web browser so uh, here is a web browser.
Brave - Crypto currency is the best, oh here's a browser.
Chromium/Konquerer/etc/etc - Opensource is the best! Only we don't do what all the other browsers do, and half the time you'll find the web page is rendering weird but you can fix the code and send us a PR and we'll look at it and contemplate it.
Sure that is a cynical view, just trying to share what it feels like that to me.
> Chrome - we own the world so use our browser with its proprietary extensions and only works completely if you hand over a Google account.
I've never logged into a Chrome browser with my Google account. What am I missing? I know you do have to log in if you want to purchase certain Chrome extensions, but now that Google killed their payment infrastructure, this seems not to be an issue anymore.
Oh I agree it is an excellent browser for many things, and it is nicely "unOpinionated" on many things. It really only trips me up with web sites that are trying to "guess" my web browser and they guess wrong and then Safari ends up doing something stupid because the webdev thought it was firefox or chrome.
