> Safari's track record on privacy technologies is longer and better than everyone.
Certainly I would say Apple is doing better on privacy than Google, but when it comes to the browser specifically, I don't think they're doing significantly better.
Google, for instance, pioneered Incognito mode (edit: nope, Safari beat them). They developed and deployed their privacy-preserving telemetry tool RAPPOR in Chrome a few years before Apple adopted the technology for anything. Chrome allowed you to configure DuckDuckGo as your default search engine pretty much from the beginning (as long as you did it manually), whereas Safari took years to allow it.
Safari has been slowly shutting out many forms of third-party extensions which are frequently for ad and tracker blocking. (To be fair Apple has a design that reduces the amount of trust you need to put in an ad blocker to see your browsing behavior, but it is far more limited, and likely sees far lower adoption.)
I do think Apple is prioritizing privacy-protecting features higher than Google is, so it would not surprise me to see Safari come ahead with features like Intelligent Tracking Prevention which conflict with Google's business interests.
I think there's an excellent case for Safari. It had private browsing in 2005, before Chrome even existed. It was the first to block third party cookies by default, and today only Chrome still allows them. It added DDG as an option in 2014, while Chrome added it only this year.
> It added DDG as an option in 2014, while Chrome added it only this year.
There's a nuance here. Apple's list of search engines comes from a cryptographically signed file which only they can modify. Chrome allowed you to manually configure DDG, but omitted it from the pre-configured list of search engines that included Bing and Yahoo!.
Certainly I would say Apple is doing better on privacy than Google, but when it comes to the browser specifically, I don't think they're doing significantly better.
Google, for instance, pioneered Incognito mode (edit: nope, Safari beat them). They developed and deployed their privacy-preserving telemetry tool RAPPOR in Chrome a few years before Apple adopted the technology for anything. Chrome allowed you to configure DuckDuckGo as your default search engine pretty much from the beginning (as long as you did it manually), whereas Safari took years to allow it.
Safari has been slowly shutting out many forms of third-party extensions which are frequently for ad and tracker blocking. (To be fair Apple has a design that reduces the amount of trust you need to put in an ad blocker to see your browsing behavior, but it is far more limited, and likely sees far lower adoption.)
I do think Apple is prioritizing privacy-protecting features higher than Google is, so it would not surprise me to see Safari come ahead with features like Intelligent Tracking Prevention which conflict with Google's business interests.