Okay, but then you're going to have to be content with the fact that extension developers are largely going to just ignore Safari.
There's a little bit of mutual blindness that happens here both with anti-Apple commenters and pro-Apple commenters. It's absolutely true that Apple's tight integration and control over how developers work allows them to do things with their platform that no one else can do. It is also true that Apple is playing a very dangerous game with the MacOS ecosystem, and a lot of developers are looking at it and saying, "this is not a healthy relationship, there's zero reason for me to ever support this platform."
To a certain extent, Mac users don't care -- many of them are happy to be part of a diverging software ecosystem and to use apps that only work on their computers. Apple critics sometimes underestimate just how OK Mac users are with the idea of living in an isolated software world. To many Mac users, being in their own isolated, incompatible world of software is the point. But, it is also true that browsers like Safari are tangibly suffering for this, that Open Source developers and tool authors are starting to look at Mac as a losing battle, and that ultimately, if things continue in the same direction, this is going to mean that there is a lot more pivotal indie software/games/tools that decide not to support Mac -- and some of those will be programs that people on Mac actually want.
As an Apple critic or at least an Apple skeptic (even though I do some development on Mac hardware), I am curious what the future of Mac as a development platform is going to be. There was a period where I recommended Macs as a next-best alternative to Linux because of that Unix base. Now it is a very cautious recommendation, if it is a recommendation at all. I've run into more than a few really weird dev problems on Mac over the past year that have been kind of disruptive, and I haven't even updated to Big Sur yet -- which, from what I can tell introduces even more problems. In contrast, developing software (especially web-based software) on my Linux machines is pretty painless. And when I need to test in Windows, I can spin up free, official VMs. I don't have to have a special secondary computer to run tests on. So unless I'm building software specifically for Mac, it just kind of doesn't make sense to support anymore.
And frankly, if you're a solo developer who's into Open Source development or tools development or game development, you're very probably not going to be building software specifically for Mac, and you're probably willing to drop Mac if it means you can easily target Linux/Windows -- given the choice between MacOS and Windows, most devs are not going to choose to drop Windows. I mean, we can debate OpenGL and Vulkan, but I'm sure as heck not going to write a game that targets Metal, that would just be a colossal waste of time for realistically a rounding error in market share. This is something that Mac users are currently able to just shrug off (in no small part because of 'lazy' cross-platform apps/games that use Electron, QT, and Unity), but it might be a harder problem to ignore in the future.
> As an Apple critic or at least an Apple skeptic (even though I do some development on Mac hardware), I am curious what the future of Mac as a development platform is going to be.
As an Apple fan -- albeit one who came back to the platform after years with FreeBSD, Windows 2000/XP, and BeOS (yes, full-time for over a year) and who uses Linux via ssh daily -- I am concerned what the future of the Mac as a development platform is going to be. I think your first paragraph is right on point.
I don't mind Apple going their own way with Safari to some degree, and there are things I just like about it as a browser -- it's fast, I find its minimal UI a bit more to my taste than either Chrome or Firefox, and I like that it syncs tabs and bookmarks between all my devices. (Yes, I know I could get that if I fully committed to either Firefox or Chrome.) But adapting WebExtensions support and then requiring developers to wrap those extensions in Xcode-built Mac applications that have to be published on the App Store just seems like Apple shooting themselves in the foot. It may be a handsome space gray gun milled out of a single block of aluminum, but it's still a problem.
(I'm also not sure why Apple won't at least support Vulkan in addition to Metal, but that's probably a different discussion.)
> I'm also not sure why Apple won't at least support Vulkan in addition to Metal, but that's probably a different discussion.
Likely for the same reason Microsoft doesn't support Vulkan - they want to have full control over their own graphics API.
The only commercially licensed/supported platform that requires Vulkan AFAIK is Android 10+ on 64-bit devices. However, I don't believe Google ever stepped up to standardize high performance graphics, so Vulkan was their best jump after OpenGLES started to sink.
> am curious what the future of Mac as a development platform is going to be.
iOS is the future of Mac as a development platform. You can't develop for the iPhone without a Mac, many more developers care about iPhone than Mac, and Mac now offers (bad) support for running iPhone apps and cross-platform apps with Catalyst.
There's a little bit of mutual blindness that happens here both with anti-Apple commenters and pro-Apple commenters. It's absolutely true that Apple's tight integration and control over how developers work allows them to do things with their platform that no one else can do. It is also true that Apple is playing a very dangerous game with the MacOS ecosystem, and a lot of developers are looking at it and saying, "this is not a healthy relationship, there's zero reason for me to ever support this platform."
To a certain extent, Mac users don't care -- many of them are happy to be part of a diverging software ecosystem and to use apps that only work on their computers. Apple critics sometimes underestimate just how OK Mac users are with the idea of living in an isolated software world. To many Mac users, being in their own isolated, incompatible world of software is the point. But, it is also true that browsers like Safari are tangibly suffering for this, that Open Source developers and tool authors are starting to look at Mac as a losing battle, and that ultimately, if things continue in the same direction, this is going to mean that there is a lot more pivotal indie software/games/tools that decide not to support Mac -- and some of those will be programs that people on Mac actually want.
As an Apple critic or at least an Apple skeptic (even though I do some development on Mac hardware), I am curious what the future of Mac as a development platform is going to be. There was a period where I recommended Macs as a next-best alternative to Linux because of that Unix base. Now it is a very cautious recommendation, if it is a recommendation at all. I've run into more than a few really weird dev problems on Mac over the past year that have been kind of disruptive, and I haven't even updated to Big Sur yet -- which, from what I can tell introduces even more problems. In contrast, developing software (especially web-based software) on my Linux machines is pretty painless. And when I need to test in Windows, I can spin up free, official VMs. I don't have to have a special secondary computer to run tests on. So unless I'm building software specifically for Mac, it just kind of doesn't make sense to support anymore.
And frankly, if you're a solo developer who's into Open Source development or tools development or game development, you're very probably not going to be building software specifically for Mac, and you're probably willing to drop Mac if it means you can easily target Linux/Windows -- given the choice between MacOS and Windows, most devs are not going to choose to drop Windows. I mean, we can debate OpenGL and Vulkan, but I'm sure as heck not going to write a game that targets Metal, that would just be a colossal waste of time for realistically a rounding error in market share. This is something that Mac users are currently able to just shrug off (in no small part because of 'lazy' cross-platform apps/games that use Electron, QT, and Unity), but it might be a harder problem to ignore in the future.