> When Apple is the only company allowed to ship browser features with such high and user visible impact as eliminating captchas, it will directly contribute to them increasing the market share of the devices people use to access the web.

At which point we'll start criticizing Safari more frequently than Chrome. But I don't think you need to worry about that, I can't even run Safari on Linux or Windows in the first place. I already don't test any of my web projects in Safari specifically because I can't, I don't own a device that I can test Safari on. So good luck getting devs to build Safari-only websites. I think it's misguided for us to worry so much about a theoretical future monopoly that we avoid correctly prioritizing efforts to combat a present monopoly.

Of course incidentally, "we" (whatever that means on HN) do criticize Safari all the time. "Safari is the new IE" didn't come out of nowhere. And another reason why this issue in particular matters much less for Safari is because those criticisms seem to have worked and I fully suspect at some point in the next 5 to 10 years it's very possible that Apple will be required by regulators to open up iOS to support multiple browser engines.

And that will be great for certain parts of the Open web, I'm hoping that if iOS opens up its browser restrictions PWAs might get a lot better. But it's also very dangerous because it means Chrome's monopoly will grow even more, and it makes it even more pressing that we deal with specifically Chrome's dominance on the web. So there are plenty of areas where iOS presents a larger threat to user autonomy than Google/Android does (app store policies, user lock-in, sideloading, etc), and I have no shame about subjecting Apple to stricter standards than Google in those areas. This isn't one of those areas.

> and suddenly the critiques have turned to full-on excuses

I'm not offering a single excuse for Safari, it's bad that Safari implemented attestation. I am offering an accurate assessment of the threats that Safari and Chrome currently pose to the Open web.

My standard rule -- consistently applied to everyone in every situation -- is "don't break the Open web", and even with both browsers implementing attestation, Google's implementation is breaking the Open web more than Safari is right now.

> The rules have to be the same for everyone, and the discussions around the WEI on HN have made it clear they aren't.

I don't get to set the rules, or else nobody would be doing attestation anywhere including on native app stores. But it is naive to look at a browser with 20% marketshare doing something harmful and to say, "well, this deserves exactly the same amount of attention as Google." It doesn't. I criticized Brave inserting its ads into webpages, but I'm not going to pretend that my reaction to Chrome doing the same thing wouldn't be a lot harsher, because Brave is not the dominant browser on the web. It's not a double standard to take context into account when prioritizing where coordinated community efforts should go.

In this case, "fairness" for outrage over browser features effectively means ignoring the largest threat in the room to the web and pretending that we're not in a market with a dominant browser. But we are.