It's a lot of work and a relatively small market, in addition to have to ship it as a separate version that's different from the version in the rest of the world, and subject to Apple's onerous restrictions and review policy, and it's clear that Apple is not looking to make this as frictionless as possible.
I think so, yes, but there's still a big stretch going from "prototyping in case they open it up" to "being a full-fledged stable product that works well for everyone". But fingers crossed that it'll work out!
I guess yeah. That makes sense. I was thinking abandoning the WebKit version would give them one fewer, but of course they can't do that since the rest of the market needs it.
I still believe they'd do it, though. The EU market isn't as small as it's made out to be, and maybe they could win some marketshare just by doing it. Even if it's not that big.
There was like a 10 year period where Firefox had a pretty large market share, and they still have a respectable one despite being in a competition with GOOGLE. I don't agree that Firefox as a whole is just a tiny niche considering it's still used by nearly a couple hundred million people. That's bigger than the population of most of the world's countries.
It's also worth noting that, by the nature of the demographic Firefox appeals to, Firefox users are much less likely to allow their browser to report telemetry and the stats are therefore probably quite a bit under-reported.