The mobile community has long had one simple distribution principle: Safari for iPhone, Chrome for Android. And it doesn’t matter that Android doesn’t have Safari, but iOS has Chrome. It just happened. Therefore, usually, no one compared them, except perhaps Apple, which recently got used to boast about the speed and efficiency in the allocation of resources of its Safari compared to Chrome. Moreover, there was still no global difference between them. But with the release of iOS 15, everything will change dramatically.
On Monday, June 7, Apple introduced iOS 15. One of the key innovations in the update was support for Safari extensions. Moreover, these should be not just full-fledged extensions with a wide range of capabilities, but also universal ones. Versatility in this case means compatibility with the desktop version of Safari, which is used on the Mac. This means that in terms of functionality, mobile extensions will be in no way inferior to desktop ones.
Mobile browser with extensions
Despite the fact that mobile Safari had some kind of extensions before, they were not full-fledged extensions. Everything their functionality boiled down to was limited to ad blocking, and perhaps the automatic translation of the foreign text. Now everything will be different. Safari extensions will be able to do many of the tasks that were previously beyond the power of the mobile version of the browser – from creating links to a specific part of the page and checking to spell to quickly save files to the cloud.
So, why is Safari better than Google Chrome? Obviously, the presence of extensions that are about to appear. Despite the fact that Google has had a desktop version of its proprietary browser with support for extensions for many years, it has never made an attempt to adapt them for mobile. I understand that most likely Google decided not to do this, so as not to unnecessarily burden Chrome for smartphones. But this only means that she did not put in the due effort like Apple.
Why Chrome for Android doesn’t have extensions
Despite the fact that Google itself did not try to transfer desktop extensions to Android, it was done for it by enthusiastic developers. One of them even released a custom version of Chrome with full extension support.
