Allowing alternative browser engines does not mean Firefox gets a footing. It means Chromium gets a footing even on iOS, and we start seeing Electron apps on iOS, with every app bundling their own Chromium renderer.
If Apple were forced to allow 3rd party engines on iOS, they might as well shut down WebKit. All hail Blink, the universal engine.
I remember reading that Chrome had worked on fixing a lot of that bloat (so did FF). But Safari was a breath of fresh air in how fast it worked and didn't seem to constantly kill my battery.
Yes it has the occasional quirks. But I do like that Apple focuses more on UX than just DevEx by trying to implement everything and the kitchen sink web standards.
As others have said, we definitely need alternative browsers and browser engines.
But at the end of the day, it's just mostly WebKit (and Blink derived from it) and Firefox, so it's not like there's all that much competition.
If Safari was better then Safari would stay #1 on iOS. They shouldn't be allowed force this any more than Microsoft was allowed to force IE.
If 3rd party browsers were allowed we'd have had WebGL2 on iOS 4 years earlier. WebGPU 2 years earlier. WebXR several years earlier (Apple is only adding it now and only for Vision Pro), and many other features.
Still, while I also experienced the problems you referenced with Firefox on my M1 for months or a year, it has greatly improved and IMO is at this point on par with Safari. With the plus of being open, having a huge community and heavy customization options, and privacy. But with the minus of being ugly in comparison to Safari, I must say.
So yeah I mostly am in line with your opinion, apart from one thing:
> so it's not like there's all that much competition.
This, at least this is my opionion, is no argument. It's playing down the importance of free choice IMO. It should not be more okay to disallow alternative browsers based on the existence of alternatives. I mean, if they never allow it, there will never be any. We can just hope that at some point some competitors will rise again, maybe Firefox will get a bigger foothold, or Ladybird, or Servo, or whatever. I'm just trying to keep my hopes high here, haha.
That said, as a frontend dev, I very very rarely run into real world issues between Safari and Chrome. More often it's Firefox/Gecko that lags behind, usually in some sort of graphics optimization (SVG and canvas stuff). Also some differences in WebGL and webgpu support, but those are niche enough that it's not a big deal yet.