I like Safari, but nobody should be required to use it
I've tried all the browsers (not Arc, but that's a big stack of nonsense dressing up Chromium) and I always return to Safari. I've been a longtime resident of Apple's walled garden/prison, my grandmother bought stock during Apple's IPO and my whole family uses, well, all of it. I'm technical support and firmly tethered by familial and financial bonds here.
Chrome is — still — a memory hog and getting inexorably worse as Google bolts on AI, hampers ad blocking and tacks on gimmicky shopping features. Firefox feels unsteady as Mozilla shuffles about, aimlessly looking for a plan — any plan. Additionally, as anyone will readily tell you, on iOS, they're both just cosmetic wrappers around WebKit/Safari and that is untenable.
An operating system as broadly popular and adopted as Apple's should not be held to a single browser engine. It's not more secure — it's less. Apple ships and patches vulnerabilities, but it leaves other browsers unable to ship their own fixes because they can't ship their own engines.
Safari isn't some brave champion holding off a Chromium monoculture. It's a snappy, enjoyable to use, but features are shipped slowly (if at all) and their implementation can be haphazard. Its development isn't a priority anymore than it's required to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Apple's concern is offering a browser that's just good enough not to interfere with rents generated by the App Store.
All of this is bad.
The web is the platform and Apple should open up their's. I don't want to use Chrome, but I want Safari to compete on the merits, not as an accomplice to the preservation of App Store interests. I was thrilled when Apple added Safari web extensions and other browsers should be able to offer the same functionality.
I work on the web, I love the web (I'm repetitive when it comes to this particular point) and I want Safari to be a better browser than it is and I want everyone to be able to make the choice to use something else.