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Safari at WWDC '25: The Ghost of Christmas Past

Infrequently Noted

At Apple's annual developer marketing conference, the Safari team announced a sizeable set of features that will be available in a few months. Substantially all of them are already shipped in leading-edge browsers. Here's the list, prefixed by the year that these features shipped to stable in Chromium:

In many cases, these features were available to developers even earlier via the Origin Trials mechanism. WebGPU, e.g., ran trials for a year, allowing developers to try the in-development feature on live sites in Chrome and Edge as early as September 2021.

There are features that Apple appears to be leading on in this release, but it's not clear that they will become available in Safari before Chromium-based browsers launch them, given that the announcement is about a beta:

The announced support for CSS image crossorigin() and referrerpolicy() modifiers has an unclear relationship to other browsers, judging by the wpt.fyi tests.

On balance, this is a lot of catch-up with sparse sprinklings of leadership. This makes sense, because Safari is in usually in last place when it comes to feature completeness:

A graph of features missing from only one engine. Over the past decade, Safari and WebKit have consistently brought up the caboose.
A graph of features missing from only one engine. Over the past decade, Safari and WebKit have consistently brought up the caboose.

And that is important because Apple's incredibly shoddy work impacts every single browser on iOS.

You might recall that Apple was required by the EC to enable browser engine choice for EU citizens under the Digital Markets Act. Cupertino, per usual, was extremely chill about it, threatening to end PWAs entirely and offering APIs that are inadequate or broken.

And those are just the technical obstacles that Apple has put up. The proposed contractual terms (pdf) are so obviously onerous that no browser vendor could ever accept them, and are transparently disallowed under the DMA's plain language. But respecting the plain language of the law isn't Apple's bag.

All of this is to say that Apple is not going to allow better browsers on iOS without a fight, and it remains dramatically behind the best engines in performance, security, and features. Meanwhile, we now know that Apple is likely skimming something like $19BN per year in pure profit from it's $20+BN/yr of revenue from its deal with Google. That's a 90+% profit rate, which is only reduced by the paltry amount it re-invests into WebKit and Safari.

So to recap: Apple's Developer Relations folks want you to be grateful to Cupertino for unlocking access to features that Apple has been the singular obstacle to.

And they want to you ignore the fact that for the past decade it has hobbled the web while skimming obscene profits from the ecosystem.

Don't fall for it. Ignore the gaslighting. Apple could 10x the size of the WebKit team without causing the CTO to break a sweat, and there are plenty of great browser engineers on the market today. Suppressing the web is a choice — Apple's choice — and not one that we need to feel gratitude toward.