Damn it has been ages since I last updated my blog lol A dents amount of stuff has occurred since I last updated – Apple has released macOS 11.3.1, iOS 14.5.1 (plus others) to fix up a pretty serious security hole found in the webkit rendering engine. To be honest, I have a lot hate relationship with Webkit and although I praise its strengths I cannot help but get the feeling that apple is deliberately holding back development as to ensure that web based applications don’t become a viable threat to their App Store revenue model. I remember when the App Store was first launch, the idea of revenue sharing was to keep the lights on but it was never way to generate profits but it appears that the current Apple executive team, rather than seeing the App Store as a means to an end, are now viewing it as venue generating opportunity which is influencing the priorities when it comes to the allocation of resources to any given project.

I thought I was going crazy thinking this but it appears that zI am not alone (link) and many others in the discussion who are programmers for the iOS platform are also seeing the patter as well (link).As the article outlines, although improvement are coming (the update with macOS 11.3 made some big improvements – bringing Skype Web support) it still lags behind Chrome/Edge in some areas by months. I really do wish that Apple would go out and hire another 50 programmers to work on Webkit – to fully implement Webextensions API so that there is at least parity with Firefox so then popular extensions like uBlock Origin can be used. If Safari can get to parity in both implementation and correctness of the various open standards I would be a happy lad.