Sure, it does have some benefits. Like lower energy consumption, I hear good things about JavaScriptCore (Safari's JS engine), that said, so many of the features are missing, and one part is it encroaching on the iOS apps territory.
The features missing thing was true years ago, but Apple significantly increased their investment in Safari about 3 years ago and it really gained ground. If you subtract all the Chrome-invented features, they aren't too far off.
And some of them, like WebGPU, are Khronos IP that Apple has no reason to object to except on an ideological and profit-maximizing basis. I wonder why Apple would deliberately avoid an API that might obsolete the requirement for games to use the App Store? Do you have any ideas?
> Apple is the original author of a lot of tech they end up abandoning.
Doubtful
> Certainly a lot of Khronos IP, paging through their history.
Everyone abandons Khronos IP, or doesn't really supports it, paging through history in general. Because Khronos IP ends up a designed-by-committee crapfest. Meanwhile WebGPU is not and has never been a Khronos IP. It's developed within a w3c working group: https://www.w3.org/2020/gpu/
> Based on a 4 year (!!!) porting time from MacOS Safari to iOS Safari.
Based on a 4-year porting of what from MacOS Safari top iOS Safari?
- WebGPU spec is literally in draft status, so things can still change. It's literally in stage 2 of 5 of spec development
- Neither Safari nor Firefox have enabled WebGPU yet. The fact that Chrome rushed and enabled it by default does not make the spec or the standard finished and ready to be enabled everywhere
- webgpu can be enabled with a toggle in advanced settings in Safari on iOS (as is the case with most new features for in all browsers)
