Getting rid of Flash was never ever about using HTML5 for Apple. It was always to obviously to make battery life better and ofc adding more experiences to their walled garden store.
Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox. And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged. E.g like Screen Wake Lock API finally implemented in iOS 16 but to this day broken on Home screen. And like not quite obvious to use in Safari too.
Because working web standards support would make cross platform mobile apps possible outside of App Store.
> Safari is lagging on HTML5 features
I don't think it's lagging behind that much, and you could also argue that you don't need to implement every single feature blindly. A lot of features are strictly not needed, and if you do decide to do them - it needs to be done in an efficient way.
There's a reason why Safari is considered the most energy efficient browser.
> And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged.
From "Every site can be a web app on iOS and iPadOS" [1]
Now, we are revising the behavior on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. By default, every website added to the Home Screen opens as a web app. If the user prefers to add a bookmark for their browser, they can disable “Open as Web App” when adding to Home Screen — even if the site is configured to be a web app. The UI is always consistent, no matter how the site’s code is configured. And the power to define the experience is in the hands of users.
This change, of course, is not removing any of WebKit’s current support for web app features. If you include a Web Application Manifest with your site, the benefits it provides will be part of the user’s experience. If you define your icons in the manifest, they’re used.
We value the principles of progressive enhancement and separation of concerns. All of the same web technology is available to you as a developer, to build the experience you would like to build. Giving users a web app experience simply no longer requires a manifest file. It’s similar to how Home Screen web apps on iOS and iPadOS never required Service Workers (as PWAs do on other platforms), yet including Service Workers in your code can greatly enhance the user experience.
Simply put, there are now zero requirements for “installability” in Safari. Users can add any site to their Home Screen and open it as a web app on iOS26 and iPadOS26.
[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/17333/webkit-features-in-safari-26-0...
> Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox.
Really?
Safari was first to ship :has() in March 2022; Firefox couldn't ship until December 2023.
I listed a bunch of web platform features Safari shipped before Chrome and Firefox [1][2].
Even now, Firefox hasn't shipped Anchor Positioning, Scroll-driven animation, text-wrap: pretty, Web GPU, Cross-document view transitions, etc. but Safari and Chrome have.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074789
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44067706
>but Safari and Chrome have
Not on iOS. On iOS, it's all Safari, all the time, for every web browser app. Apple forbids any web browser engine other than Safari on iOS.
> It was always to obviously to make battery life better
I don't think it was about saving battery power. Jobs was smart in convincing people to focus on web stack for apps - Flash was king of rich app experiences, and java [inc applets] for corporate apps. Apps went iOS native batteries got drained in other ways (large video & photos, prolonged use). Just think of the costs, energy and time spent over the next 15 years maintaining multiple code-bases to deliver one service. The web remained open, where as mobile went native and closed-in.