De facto veto power

John Gruber lays out a nice chain of logic that explains why Safari (and through it, Apple) does not control the web. Instead, it has the same veto power as the other web standard bearers:

The web today is nothing like that. No single browser (or rendering engine) has an overwhelmingly dominant position. Four browsers/rendering engines share the world: Microsoft’s IE/Trident (and now the modernized Windows 10 browser, Edge), Mozilla’s Gecko, Apple’s Safari/WebKit, and Google’s Chrome/Blink. In a world where one rendering engine does not rule the entire web, conflicts between the various popular engines are inevitable.

Apple can stand in the way of a web standard that acts against its interests (that’s a veto). But Apple cannot force a standard on the other players. And that’s a critical difference.

Head over to Daring Fireball and read this for yourself.