Everybody is talking about Chrome, but I tell ya what I have that disabled on my Android in favor of Firefox. Firefox on mobile with full-fat uBlock Origin is the closest thing to parity with desktop web access you can get.
I don't just block ads, I block elements on sites I don't care about with :has-text RegEx rules. You can't do that on Chrome even on desktop anymore.
I'm this close to swapping to the Android as my primary device-- it's iMessage that has me chained. It's just too dang nice to respond to chats from my Mac during work so I don't need to pick up my phone.
Everything else is better on the Android. Don't get me started about the iOS keyboard or Siri.
FF with uBO was the killer app that kept me on android. If Apple let me run that, I'd have bought into it years ago.
Have you considered messages.google.com? I think you need to use Google's messages app (not the Samsung messager or equivalent) but it does as you describe and supports RCS.
Can i share my history and bonus with my desktop, ie linux?
Oh, it's closed source ios/macos only? Yeah, no thanks.
I also kinda doubt it's compatible with most firefox addons, addons can and do rely on details of firefox that ios does not provide the ability to emulate.
I've been using https://messages.google.com to get something like the desktop iMessage experience with Android- does that work for your use case? (I don't use iMessage so I could just be missing some killer feature it has, or something.)
The consent-o-matic extension is also incredibly worth it on mobile firefox. Automates clicking through almost every cookie banner I've come across, which is much more annoying to do manually on a phone than on desktop.
I have the Easylist one enabled, is there a more reliable one?
It doesn't catch them all, especially more niche sites that do more custom stuff to prevent you using the site until you interact with the notice. e.g. screen overlay, prevent scrolling using css rules.
If you can live with SMS instead of iMessage: KDE Connect on Android works very nicely for messaging from the desktop (the Desktop application is available for Linux, Windows and MacOS. Functionality varies per platform but SMS works on all of them). https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
If its the difference-maker for you: Google Messages has a web experience, and in my not-recent experience it works great.
The iOS 26 keyboard (public beta) is the biggest regression I've ever seen Apple make, and they're a company infamous for regressions. It for me has been the tipping point.
Something significant changed about the spellchecking and swipe to type algorithms. Significant performance degradation, especially in those "i just need to get a quick message out while walking" situations. Hopefully we see some improvement by GA.
No Apple hardware or software/service (when it comes to Apple software/services they deserve a LOL) has me chained.
It's just how disgusting Google has kept Android for anyone who wants privacy, safety (both usage and data safety in case of loss etc), and reliable updates that people stay in Apple ecosystem even though software/services wise technically they are miles ahead.
If someone ever even proceeds to tell me that "something in apple's stable is technically comparable/better than Google's.." I might rudely ask them to get their head examined.
I just can't reconcile with the fact that Google would track me every milisecond and then use my data for ads and I can't do anything about it. The good news is very soon Apple will start doing the same, if they have not, because they are already an ad company now.
As far as ditching iMessage is concerned - the last time I ditched WhatsApp in my country, I ditched it and after I didn't feel a thing. And WhatsApp in my country is not only instant messaging - it's literal-bllody-ly everything. Everything!
PS. Signal should launch a "Import from iMessage and WhatsApp" :D (Oh, but then how would they prioritise crypto ;-))
I will second Google Messages, your SMS messages go to your phone and your desktop at the same time. Easily respond from either. I don't know if SMS messaging gets to iMessage, because I don't use Apple products.
I can relate to not wanting any of the tech giants near my shit but may I ask what your Google concerns are on GrapheneOS?
I also have an iPhone as well as a GrapheneOS phone. They are different but I'm quite happy with those alternatives to the apps you mentioned:
Etar as a calendar frontend app. DAVx5 for syncing CalDAV and CardDAV (so calendar data, contacts and optionally also tasks). I manage tasks within my notes, so I do not really use a todo/reminder app at all but there are different options. tasks.org plugs into DAVx5, for example.
Depending on your server-side setup and your willingness to compromise on open source, are also other options. For example, if you work with an Exchange server, there is the "Nine - Email & Calendar" app which is a very powerful all-in-one-client similar to traditional Outlook on the desktop.
For photos, there are quite a few solid options, depending on what you want. I use the Fossify Gallery with only my Camera folder visible for day-to-day stuff and also have Aves Libre installed for a more advanced interface to my pictures and videos.
Interesting. Can I ask if you use Apple's cloud services? If so, I understand. I don't use those, even on Apple devices, so to me, the whole setup is similarly annoying on both platforms with maybe a very slight edge towards the iPhone because it has most things I need out of the box. Other than that, I really don't think I miss anything on the "basic stuff" front on my Pixel compared to my iPhone (I use them both daily, with the former being my personal phone and the latter the job-issued one).
I've been doing the dual-driving iPhones and Android devices for a long time and times were definitely worse, in my opinion. The last thing I remember really annoying me on the regular was the lack of AirDrop but with alternatives like LocalSend and KDE connect, that's fixed as well.
Looks like Japan learned from the malicious compliance shenanigans Apple is pulling with the EU. I hope Apple gets served some substantial fines that really hurt when they try to pull the same shit there. And I say, "when", not "if".
If you're talking about Apple Intelligence that's also region locked and that's much more difficult to bypass. Device language has has nothing to do with it.
I think you're extrapolating America's materialism to other cultures that don't necessarily care so much. There's not really any feature of the iPhone that can't be replaced by another product. It's only Americans that feel the need to slake brand loyalty with army-of-one boycotts.
I stand by what I said. Apple used to be the leading smartphone manufacturer in China, now they aren't even in the top 5. Sometimes things change, and I doubt China's in shambles because Airdrop isn't ubiquitous. I see no reason why Japan would be different.
The notion that American tech companies are invincible is really only a view held by Americans. The overwhelming majority of people I speak to internationally don't care that much about computer brand loyalty.
Maybe not brand loyalty... but people, universally, want the best product available. Today, for a large portion of the world, that is perceived to be the iPhone.
The iPhone being banned in Japan because of some policy dispute with the government is going to go over like a bag of wet cement. People may not care that it's "Apple", but they do care the "Best" is being banned for reasons the population doesn't care about.
"people, universally, want the best product available"
Maybe I'm not a person, but I almost always pick one of the cheaper if not cheapest option. Rarely, if ever, do I care enough to get the best of anything...
Japan has such a high share of iPhones because it's a winner takes it all market. People prefer to be in the majority by default, and it will take a lot more than just being good to dethrone the major platform.
Reminds me that I still don't know why Samsung is chained so hard to docomo. It can't just be a marketing thing.
Who told you that these are reasons the population doesn't care about? I know at least in Europe there has been wide support for initiatives such as the DMA, even knowing what it would entail. You're running on conjecture here.
You think the population of Japan will be ok with banning iPhones because their governments thinks other web browsers should run on the devices too?
How many iPhone users, outside of a small group of "techies" are even aware there are other mobile browsers?
Think about your parents or grandparents - not you, someone who has vastly more knowledge in this area. How many "normals" really care... I'd wager near zero.
Apple stop selling iphones won't take the iphones away, not many people care about their next one. The impact would be negligible and every other country would notice they can demand compliance.
> You think the population of Japan will be ok with banning iPhones
Why wouldn't they? Japan has no codified Apple-specific lock-in. Their citizens won't miss a criminally illegal iPhone any more than they demand to import the gold Escobar phone, Huawei handsets or the FBI's ANOM. It would be effortless from a legislation perspective and harm Apple far more than it harms Japanese people.
Japan isn't part of FIVE-EYES, their government doesn't rely on Apple for surveillance purposes. There's no real potential for political blowback unless America's politicians take it personally. Japanese citizens would just buy different phones, no different from what China has already done (without any pushback). If America demands that they give Apple market access, they can embargo the iPhone under security pretenses instead.
But I like the walled prison where I can't screw up and make choices for myself. I appreciate that Apple makes it so I can't accidentally give my coordinates and have some Monarch track me and murder me or leak my noods.
+4500 upvoots
(I always thought it was suspicious that the anti-apple headline had +30k upvoots on reddit, but the top comment was pro-apple with significantly less. Its almost like they paid an external marketing team/troll farm to do reputation management)
You’re thinking like an end user and not like someone who has provide tech support for others. One of the best things I did to make my life easier was getting mom a Chromebook.
I would welcome if this global legislative push would end up in a more open app ecosystem for iOS overall.
BrowserEngineKit is a thin wrapper over XPC and iOS' extension system. The system would be so much better to develop for if XPC was an open API, and JIT for isolated sub-processes was permitted without Apple's blessing.
* Messengers could have separate sub-processes for preprocessing untrusted inputs -- iMessage already does this, third-party messengers are single-process and cannot.
* Applications could isolate unstable components for better user experience and crash recovery.
* Emulators, e.g. for retro systems, would benefit from speedy emulation.
* WASM would become useful in iOS.
* Browser could use XPC without special-purpose API wrappers such as BrowserEngineKit.
But alas, all of this would make it easier to load code that runs at native speed into an iOS app after a store review happened, and as we all know that'll be the end of the world.
>and as we all know that'll be the end of the world.
I'll enjoy seeing all the accounts on MacRumors clawing their eyes out when that happens.
It would be naive to think that Apple isn't funding sites and narratives on the internet to serve their economic interests.
One of the most outlandish one being that freedom to use your phone however you want would necessarily compromise security and privacy for everyone. It's such a bizarre and indefencible take, and yet it's repeated over and over again on those Apple-worship platforms.
>freedom to use your phone however you want would necessarily compromise security and privacy for everyone.
For a large enough definition of "everyone", it would. "Everyone" has a Meta app installed. We've seen them pull evil tricks over and over to suck up data 24/7 - most recently running a local server on Android that their websites could talk to to bypass anonymization - and the moment a crack appears in the walled garden Meta will say "go install the FB/Instagram app from our app store with no privacy policy reviews" and a large enough definition of everybody will be much the worse for it.
Most people on desktops / laptops interact with these services via a web browser, which has very limited permissions on the system. Not sure how you could control that tightly on a fully open iOS.
It does, doesn't it? Even if you stretch "web app" to mean "PWA" iOS supports them. And it definitely supports the literal definition of "web app" (i.e. loading a website in a browser that runs JS or whatever to perform its "app" functionality).
I don't see the relevance of this question. Neither what I do nor whether I own a desktop/laptop impact the overwhelming trends of how society interacts with technology.
> and the moment a crack appears in the walled garden Meta will say "go install the FB/Instagram app from our app store with no privacy policy reviews"
People keep saying this, but how do you explain the years and years of Meta/Facebook operating on Android without ever doing this?
It hasn't been possible until very recently. The Epic case has still been going through the courts, so there's been no reason for Meta to show their hand before that's final.
They HAVE been finding every loophole, crack in the Play Store policies, or Android bug they can exploit to steal data.
> One of the most outlandish one being that freedom to use your phone however you want would necessarily compromise security and privacy for everyone.
I suppose in a round-a-bout way, it could, more specifically around iMessage, which is Apple's baby in the US and a big part of their lock in effect for US users.
Right now, you can reasonably assume that using iMessage with another iPhone user that both ends are reasonably secure and private. Break open the walls of the garden and now you could say that you can't trust that the other end you are communicating with hasn't installed some random crapware or malware that's scraping their messages, or recording the screen during a facetime call, thereby compromising your own privacy by interacting with a bad devices.
In that instance, Apple is correct - but what Apple doesn't tell people is that all other forms of digital communication are open to the same risks so they aren't special.
> Right now, you can reasonably assume that using iMessage with another iPhone user that both ends are reasonably secure and private.
I'd disagree, given that many people have iCloud Backup enabled, which (at least without "Advanced Data Protection") uses encryption keys available to Apple and includes all iMessage and SMS messages.
“These memes will be leaked to the feds if my friend causes Apple to be subpoenaed” is much more palatable than “every text I send my girlfriend is being used to train an LLM by iPhoneFolderCleanerLLCAssociates”
I know iCloud backups are not perfectly secure. I like the privacy aspect of iMessage as it stands, even if it’s not quite Cone of Silence. _Definitely_ we could have more freedom on iOS! Just without worrying about adware scrapers somehow… without worrying about grandma increasing my tech support burden when a scammer calls her… (shrug)
Only in the US, where Apple has an AOL-like lock-in. The market share for iOS in Canada is similarly large but there is no iMessage lock-in here as Canada had Blackberry Messenger (also a lock-in app) way before iMessage, and shifted to FB Messenger and Whatsapp once BBM faded. Nowadays most people have both apps installed, and what you use depends on where the group chat was started.
Yes, people use iMessage to securely share/collaborate on many objects in iOS, like a shared Apple Note. It is used for much more than just sending text messages back and forth.
I use Signal but it leaves much to be desired relative to iMessage for a lot of uses.
Folks do like renaming group chats, typing indicators, perhaps scheduled send (though too new to say without asking around).
And it feels a little better, personally, sending an innocuous iMessage—even though I won't get in trouble if a stingray happens to pick up “gm” “Happy birthday!” “Kevin forgot the biscuits again!” over SMS.
Self-destructing Signal for the most personal messages for sure. But SMS just feels dirty. Too exposed even if I’d shout the same message contents in a public square.
I want to use my phone locked down hard and apps reviewed by Apple. I sleep better with things as they are. I suspect 99% of normal users are in the same boat.
They don't, no need, Android works for them. They don't on iOS too, iOS alt app stores did not hit US yet. They will, if iOS alt stores will become global thing, or the hypothetical "lockdown opt-out", that started the whole thread.
Fair enough, and then your iOS should just report the list of permissions the app demanded, maybe even compare to the AppStore version, and then let people make their choice. It doesn't have to be a "one click" easy way to make mistakes. Most users won't bother to go through 3 extra steps to install the "alternative" app if they aren't missing anything in the regular one.
The OS should anyway sandbox everything, and be as isolated as possible from any app running on top of it. That's the real security, everything else is mostly privacy - as in it's not really a security issue that the FB app siphons all the data I allowed it to access.
I think the real issue is that without enforcement measures, apps by bad actors like Facebook have free rein to find holes in the sandbox and similar. Even in the event that iOS allows choice of App Store globally, it might not be the worst thing to let them keep a kill switch on automatic distribution of individual apps (which once flipped off, users would need to sideload the app in question) so when some third party dev tries to pull that kind of stunt there will be consequences.
Then Apple can just work harder on securing the OS. When desktop OS security is discussed does anyone ever seriously float the idea that maybe we should only allow MS, Apple, or Linus approved apps to run on the OS to avoid hackers having free rein to find holes?
The market for sideloading apps is anyway much smaller than the whole mobile market because most people can’t be bothered to do it. The ones determined to install that shady flashlight app they downloaded from the internet will just as well give their banking credentials to any app that asks for them.
No matter how much Apple invests into security, parties like Meta will find holes to exploit because it’s profitable to do so. It’s a cat and mouse game, and so even though Apple should be investing in security they also need to be able to put an end to the game when there’s obvious abuse afoot.
I’m not as supportive of this ability for computers, but the market is so broad and large for mobile devices that I feel it’s a bit of a different creature.
And yes, I agree that for sideloaded apps all bets are off. That’s why I mentioned Apple having a kill switch only on automated distribution, e.g. through app stores (first party or otherwise). So for example if it turns out that Facebook has been making constant use of exploits for a while, jumping from one to the next as they’re fixed — in this situation Apple can stop it from being installed or updated from any app store (even one run by Meta), meaning the only way to install or update it is through fully manual side loading until they clean their act up.
Meta doesn’t need to hack your OS. It’s not only cheaper to just ask you to give them all the access that matters to your data, it also poses less legal risk. You accept to install their alternative app and give them all the data they ask for.
Whatever technical tricks Meta is using today pass Apple’s review and implicit endorsement. Whatever tricks they use in the future to escape the sandbox and access (hack) the OS with the sideloaded app are unilateral. Could open up a legal can of worms.
I’d be more concerned about the shady flashlight app downloaded from some corner of the internet. Or the Fakebook app, the all-in-one social media aggregator, the fake banking apps.
Whatsapp is probably the hardest to avoid for most people in parts of the world where it's dominant. The number of people who need to use Facebook or Twitter is likely much smaller, and very few of those need to install a native app instead of using the website.
Twitter is incredibly avoidable. Everything about it is likely faked and exaggerated. Revenue/profit for sure. Number of users for sure. Number of users that aren’t bots for sure too.
I use Twitter everyday because of my politics interest but it isn’t that popular any more (I know the supposed numbers say otherwise)
They absolutely are not. No more than alcohol or tobacco addiction are de-facto unavoidable. And the people who are absolutely addicted to those platforms will always have the option of the web page no matter what you do to the app.
How is it that the answer to an American megacorp trying to hoover all of your personal data is to try to get another American megacorp to add universal barricades to your device?
> How is it that the answer to an American megacorp trying to hoover all of your personal data is to try to get another American megacorp to add universal barricades to your device?
Because only Apple has the power to stop Chrome from being the only browser (like IE) or to stop Meta from insisting you give up all privacy. A government may be able to do it within their own borders for a period of time, but Meta, Google and Apple are all larger and more powerful than the majority of countries out there.
> A government may be able to do it within their own borders for a period of time
Part of the problem is the governments are proving they aren’t interested in doing it. Aside from the fact that law enforcement agencies are happy to have easily legally compelled data like this, the governments are actively fighting e2e encryption and strong on device encryption. And then on top of that, if they really were interested in solving that problem, you’d think they’d be spending legislative power on solving that before solving forcing the 2nd place market competitor to open their OS up.
In regards to browser lock down Apple wants to be the only game in town. Safari allows plug-in's but Apple doesn't allow 3rd parties to provide plugins themselves. They do this to create an unequal advantage.
What you want is not relevant, because you have no choice.
Apple depriving you of that choice may not inconvenience you, but you are still being deprived of that freedom in the first place. I suspect 100% of iPhone users are in the same boat.
The security thing is BS anyway; Apple aren't perfect at security and having only one option can make this worse.
Google's Project Zero uncovered quite a few 0 days in Apple's "perfect" operating system. They're not magical wizard cult gods over there, they're just a buncha developers same as 'em all. And given the quality of what's been coming out of Apple _and_ Google recently sometimes I wonder if someone's dug a pit under their supposedly high bars they held in the 2010s. Even just Youtube is a disgustingly buggy app nowadays.
On iOS, I can trust that pretty much everyone in my family won't download something silly that then creates a security hole in their devices. Not sure how you could guarantee that if you could load code post-review. What would be the point of the review, then? Wouldn't the App Store be littered with trojan horses in waiting?
Freedom to use your phone however you like would make bug tracking on Apple's side more complicated and therefore more expensive and therefore it damages their profit bottom line. They would happily freeze development altogether if it was a feasible option.
This also shifts a tremendous amount of the burden for preventing system-level malware onto the app sandbox, which today is only one component of a multi-layered defense-in-depth system of notarization, entitlements, app review, etc.
To be clear I support letting people run whatever apps they want, but let’s not pretend that this won’t make the median iPhone more prone to have a malware infection (like Android). There are reasons other than anticompetitive greed that Apple does things this way (although I am sure greed is the primary motivator).
I think it depends on the app and the entitlements. I would assume apps that request entitlements for system-level VPN apis are scrutinized more than calculators.
All they do either way is poke at the GUI and maybe watch the HTTP requests.
The real goal of the review process is to maintain control over the UX, not prevent malware. If you want to see a review process that stops malware read a Linux distribution mailing list.
The rules for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to get kicked out of the App Store are not the same as the rules for other companies’ apps to get kicked out of the App Store.
The browser itself is some kind of app store, and we run app from it all the time without Apple's review. Given this, I'm not sure why Apple and its fanboys make so much of this supposed security of the AppStore
Not only speedy emulation, but more efficient too, since it doesn't have to struggle so much through interpretation. That would help battery life and keep phones from heating up just playing a game from 2008.
So after the EU and the UK, Japan is now putting an end to Apple's iOS alternative browser engine ban too.
Those are 3 large jurisdictions, I wonder if that's now a market big enough for Chrome and Firefox to invest into iOS versions of their browser that use Blink and Gecko under the hood. From what I heard this was one of the main reasons they haven't done it yet.
Weakly might even be overstating it. Their roadmap has all this ambitious stuff like sideloading and competing app stores and allowing apps to link to their own payments, that they are aiming to have categorized into priority-buckets by the middle of next year. This could take the rest of the decade to actually be implemented on Apple's side.
Yeah other reasons I've heard of include the obligation to adopt iOS-specific APIs for features like scrolling and text inputs; developing a separate app for these markets and therefore loosing their existing userbase; and signing a pretty crazy contract, among other things.
But the bigger the market they can reach, the bigger the reward, and so at some point it may justify investing resources to work around those roadblocks and accept the drawbacks.
> Yeah other reasons I've heard of include the obligation to adopt iOS-specific APIs for features like scrolling and text inputs
TBH I'm fine with that. Applications, browsers or not, should use the operating system's components and APIs for things for a unified experience across all apps and interactions. On the desktop side of things, I hate when an application breaks convention for the OS it's deployed on. If I'm using macOS, for example, I want every app on my mac to look and behave like any other, consistent with the rest of the OS.
I’d say it’s even more important on mobile than it is on desktop. Third parties re-implementing things like the keyboard and IMEs are unlikely to do those anywhere near as well as the OS does, not to mention how custom implementations would break password manager integration, user-selected third party keyboards, etc.
Don't expect Apple to just open the gates and say anything goes as far as the browser is concerned. Instead, look for an Apple build of Firefox and maybe an Apple build of Chrome that you will be able to install.
Culturally, the Japanese aren't likely to care. Take a look at Linux usage in Japan to get what I mean. You will have a small but very dedicated group of users who won't change for anything, and then the masses who just use what is convenient. They don't like tweaking.
I wonder if it would make more sense and be easier for Firefox to switch to Blink, working together with Google making an alternate browser engine for iOS.
The issue that you bringing up was more of an issue of Microsoft thinking they were finished with the web and the lack of automatic updates. It was not due to lack of diversity of engines, but of market share of a single product. This is very different from having the dominant browser engine invested in the success of the web with automatic updates to ensure that the web platform is able to advance and not stagnate.
As a counterpoint, this does make it so that one group has disproportionate power over what features make it into that engine, or how they are implemented. What if their incentives change over time and are no longer aligned with what we might consider the success of the web?
The problem with forking Blink/Chromium is that in order to be able to counter Google, the organization maintaining the fork is going to need dev manpower on the order of Google’s to be able to keep up with upstream patches, which is prohibitively expensive for all but a handful of orgs (not to mention, skilled talent capable of working on web engines doesn’t grow on trees). Without that any fork that differs substantially from mainline is eventually doomed as the divergence grows and overwhelms the team.
It does not take the same order of engineers for only integration. That is false as you can see by the existing integration teams for forks that exist. And I'm sure Mozilla is able to find talent capable of working on web engines.
There are no Blink forks with appreciably large differences yet, though. In the aftermath of Google turning “evil” and working against the better interests of the web in multiple ways, you’re looking at a fork with divergences as large or larger than those that prompted Google to fork Blink from WebKit, making integration of patches from mainline Blink a full time non-trivial job.
Personally I’d rather see Mozilla working on Gecko or maybe consider switching to Servo or something instead.
Monopolies are bad regardless. It’s similar to dictators — even if you have a “good” one that works in the interest of the people, that can all come crashing down and turn to despotism in an instant.
In the case of the web, it’s also bad for any single company to have as much influence as Google has on web standards development. There’s simply too much conflict of interest at play. As a web engine developer they should have some amount of sway but if any party is to have disproportionate power it’d be better if it were an org like Mozilla that’s more likely to give issues like privacy and potential for abuse greater consideration.
Is it even worth investing in? It would require massive capital spend and the ongoing costs to stay afloat would be similarly high. There is little to no certainty to believe you could acquire users or a revenue model either. None of the chromium derivatives have managed to gain traction other than edge. It seems wiser to invest in the next platform rather than ones with big players already in the space.
Today I was asked to give permission to transmit my personal data to Google Maps to view my train route. I wondered why they didn't use Open Street Maps. Systems exist, but the people with the money don't care to use them.
My new phone is full of many more libre apps than my old phone.
I was suggesting Mozilla could help with the development. Firefox gains an engine that has a lot of other engineering hours being invested into it that can fulfill their needs.
Gecko doesn't support ios, so it wouldn't fulfill their needs here. Since Blink is known for being easier to embed then Gecko I think it would be easier for Firefox to move from Webkit to Blink than to Gecko.
Google's dominance is due to Chrome's market share. Using their browser engine doesn't affect their dominance.
AFAIK the main reason is that only the EU+UK cared about these rules and their market share is too small for companies like Google or Mozilla to invest into.
Because of the way the App Store works, browser engines segregated by region need to be two different apps. That means maintaining two source trees (EU+UK+JP vs worldwide) and two releases with two reviews.
I expect niche browsers to have a go at porting to iOS at some point (I'd love to see a project like Ladybird be the first non-Safari browser on the app store!) but for the major companies it seems like too much of a hassle at the moment.
> the determination is made based on the degree of likelihood that [it will prevent alternative browser engines]
If you interpret that very liberally, doing a region-locked "you can release
alternate browser engines but only regionlocked to japanese apple accounts" could be seen as intentionally preventing alternative browsers from existing.
Why would mozilla port firefox when it can only target a tiny fraction of its users?
I know it's not super realistic, but maybe there's a path to global browser choice in there.
> oing a region-locked "you can release alternate browser engines but only regionlocked to japanese apple accounts" could be seen as intentionally preventing alternative browsers from existing.
That's one of the things Apple has been doing with EU
Partly because the EU law's phrasing wasn't as "I'll know it when I see it", and partly because apple seems to not care about the spirit of the law and just want to exploit its users.
The japanese law's phrasing is apparently better, but I kinda expect apple to still ignore it and then drag whatever comes through court as long as possible
It's still a huge amount of work to support two ios builds for such a small audience. Also, the prototype they had no has jit because apple makes targeting ios a moving target (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1904546), and it has never been polished enough for end users.
Not having JIT is a showstopper on the modern web where most sites take more javascript than all of windows 3.1 and word perfect combined.
We thought the same when the Slovenian government passed a law requiring Apple (among others) to translate their operating systems to Slovene. Apple was the outlier here, as Android, Windows, even various Linux distros had all been translated years ago. To the surprise of many, they complied, releasing a full translation of decent quality in a stunningly short time.
The market they'd otherwise lose access to would be roughly 2 million people. The Japanese population is over 60 times that. I don't think they want to risk losing that.
Translating the OS to Slovene really just costs whatever a translation service costs, plus review & a bit of ongoing maintenance. Even on the high end, I doubt it would push 8 figures up front, and probably 6 in yearly maintenance.
If compliance with the Japanese law means every iOS build in every region must support alternate browser engines, what's the cost to Apple? They clearly must believe it's high (otherwise they would have done so already). Brand risk? Maybe, and hard to price that, but at Apple's valuations and revenues that could be 9+ figures depending on severity. Loss of revenue from Google (if they still pay to be the default search engine in Safari)? That could be a large number too.
It all comes down to the numbers. How much will Apple lose by pulling out of Japan (possibly betting on such a move being temporary, hoping Japan changes their mind, and also hoping that their reputation worldwide doesn't suffer) vs allowing alternate browser engines worldwide?
> Why would mozilla port firefox when it can only target a tiny fraction of its users?
Mozilla is used to only a tiny fraction of users anyway. Why would this be any different? It could also be a chance to release a version for QA by the users before the rest of the market opens up.
Comparing all "tiny fractions" as if they're identical is nonsense.
"Why wouldn't apple make an iphone mini even though it only targets a tiny fraction of people? They already only target a tiny fraction of the living animals on earth because they don't make iphones for fish"
The reality is that japan is less than 5% of iphones, and mozilla has to focus it's limited resources.
Also, if mozilla's, mostly US based, developers can't run firefox on ios, they can't even build it in the first place
Safari is not a good browser, by design, because it's in Apple's interest to cripple the Web as a platform. If they want their browser to be actually competitive instead of forcing people to use it, they should make a good browser. That is markets working as they are supposed to.
Counterpoint: Safari is by far the best mainstream browser, because it's got the only engine that gives half a shit about battery life, and because they push back on shitty features Google wants to make "standard" so they can trash my UX and the computing ecosystem even more.
Counterpoint: Your whole narrative is just Apple PR talk in disguise.
If Safari were even remotely close to being "the best mainstream browser" as you claimed, it would manifest itself in Safari capturing a dominant market share i.e. people would naturally gravitate towards Safari without Apple forcing it upon users. Apple would also invest much more into Web technology, but they don't have any interest in doing that since it would threaten their App Store business model.
"Pushing back on features" translates directly to "preventing web apps from becoming a viable threat" and none of this is about UX, which is just one of the convenient pretexts to make Apple's devious and self-serving behavior more palatable. No matter how often Apple shills try to rephrase and euphemize it, anyone who has recognized Apple's conflict of interest in this regard will see through it.
FWIW, Mozilla seems to share the same sentiments about many of the standards that Google has been pushing for. They may have different incentives, but Apple does not sit alone on every one of their views.
Mozilla doesn't have a multi-billion dollar App Store creating a direct conflict of interest. Their motives aren't comparable. A few overlapping concerns don't refute the primary evidence of Apple's self-serving behavior. The key decisions that hobble web apps and protect the App Store moat are specific to Apple's conflict of interest.
Of course there's conflict of interest. I'd prefer we address all the things their actions motivated by that conflict of interest are shielding me from before we smack them down, though. After that, yeah, I'll take up a pitchfork, too.
For now, they're my AnCap-approved optional private enforcement regime against a bunch of the antisocial and market-capturing behavior of the rest of tech, since public regulators are asleep at the wheel. I'd much prefer real, very aggressive (by modern standards, if not historical) enforcement of meaningful consumer protection, standards mandates, and trust-busting across the board, but this is the only option I've got (aside from "just use less tech, and far less-usefully")
All hurting them now does is hand more control of the tech ecosystem to Google.
Meanwhile: yes they in fact have the best mainstream browser, and it's not even close.
My initial suspicion of you being a bad faith actor who is just regurgitating "Apple PR talk" has been proven true.
1) Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813704 you regurgitate the classic Apple propaganda of "web apps are akshually not 'real' apps" - what makes apps 'real' for Apple propagandists is clearly when everybody is forced to pay Apple 30% tax.
2) The hallmark of the irrational Apple shill is also how increasingly bizarre and contradictory the apologia in defense of the trillion dollar company's anti-competitive business practices becomes, as you've just proven: "private enforcement regime against a bunch of the antisocial and market-capturing behavior of the rest of tech" - what kind of absurd logic is that?
Apple should be allowed to break the law according to you, so they can pretend to oppose something they are also guilty of themselves!? Then you disingenuously claim that "I'd much prefer real, very aggressive enforcement of meaningful consumer protection, standards mandates, and trust-busting across the board, but this is the only option I've got", but that's clearly not the "only option you've got" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... ) since you are literally opposing the other option by fighting regulators through spreading of disingenuous talking points in defense of Apple's unlawful business practices.
You've got some serious biases sending you some weird places in evaluating my posts.
> 1) Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813704 you regurgitate the classic Apple propaganda of "web apps are akshually not 'real' apps" - what makes apps 'real' for Apple propagandists is clearly when everybody is forced to pay Apple 30% tax.
Yeah, that's my opinion on every platform, including back when I used Android. It's my opinion on Void Linux. It's my opinion everywhere, whether or not Apple's getting a cut (why would I possibly care that they make more money? Hell I'd love for them to have actual competition in their specific niches, to put downward pressure on their profitability, as far as their actual products they sell go). I've come to it through extensive engagement with the Web and various native ecosystems over decades, as both a user and developer. Webtech is a steaming pile of ass. It's so bad it makes the prior standard-setters for "steaming pile of ass" in its field look good. If I were somehow made Dictator of Technology for the World by a wish-granting genie, I would ban web apps, flat out (and do a lot of other things that would make market-distorting massive tech companies, including Apple, very sad)
> Then you disingenuously claim
Frankly, fuck off. You're being a dick for absolutely no reason. That's the flat-out truth. I could wrap that in HN-friendly passive-aggression, but screw that, you need to chill the fuck out, to be blunt.
>You've got some serious biases sending you some weird places in evaluating my posts.
You are talking about a "serious bias" after spamming the same debunked Apple propaganda, with a 5 days old account? lol.
>> 1) Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813704 you regurgitate the classic Apple propaganda of "web apps are akshually not 'real' apps" - what makes apps 'real' for Apple propagandists is clearly when everybody is forced to pay Apple 30% tax.
>Yeah, that's my opinion on every platform, including back when I used Android. It's my opinion on Void Linux. It's my opinion everywhere, whether or not Apple's getting a cut (why would I possibly care that they make more money? Hell I'd love for them to have actual competition in their specific niches, to put downward pressure on their profitability, as far as their actual products they sell go). I've come to it through extensive engagement with the Web and various native ecosystems over decades, as both a user and developer. Webtech is a steaming pile of ass. It's so bad it makes the prior standard-setters for "steaming pile of ass" in its field look good.
Well your opinion is biased nonsense and conveniently regurgitates propaganda designed to defend anti-competitive business practices. Web Apps do an excellent job despite being actively sabotaged and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about since your rhetoric is drenched in misinformation.
>Frankly, fuck off. You're being a dick for absolutely no reason. That's the flat-out truth. I could wrap that in HN-friendly passive-aggression, but screw that, you need to chill the fuck out, to be blunt.
I get that you're not used to getting called out on your dishonest and manipulative rhetoric, but you should have anticipated that before spamming the same debunked Apple propaganda for the 1000th time with a fresh account, because you know that it's bullshit propaganda.
Oh stop this fake incredulity. You're shilling for Apple and did such a bad job of it that you were found out while your account is still green. Take it on the chin instead of lashing out. Better luck with your next shill account.
>Meanwhile: yes they in fact have the best mainstream browser, and it's not even close.
You have lost all credibility. I mean, you had very little to begin with using a 5-day old Apple-shill account, but now you have zero.
Safari is the absolute worst browser, by far, approaching Internet Explorer levels of wtf. On iOS it implements touch gestures completely differently than other browsers, because Apple does what Apple wants - forcing developers to buy a real iPhone just to debug their shitty browser. Their lack of webAPIs is absolutely to push developers to their App store - and I know this first hand because I have a web app that works on every other browser but Safari due to its lack of APIs. So if I want to support apple, I have to pay them for the privilege to develop said app, as well as pay them to buy their hardware to develop and test the app. Fuck all of that. I don't have to do that for any other browser or platform.
There's a grain of truth to it — Apple has learned from Microsoft's history that making the whole browser shitty is too obvious and annoys users. Apple was smart enough to keep user-visible parts of the browser in a good shape, while also dragging their feet on all the Web platform features that could endanger the App Store cash cow.
I don't want web apps on my phone (or, in an ideal world, anywhere else) so that's also a good thing. If they're not viable, it forces developers to make real apps or else just make a web page instead of whatever awful-UX nonsense they were planning.
>I don't want web apps on my phone (or, in an ideal world, anywhere else) so that's also a good thing. If they're not viable, it forces developers to make real apps or else just make a web page instead of whatever awful-UX nonsense they were planning.
Well what you personally want is irrelevant to the law and what regulators judge to be unlawful, so that's the real good thing.
>If they're not viable, it forces developers to make real apps or else just make a web page instead of whatever awful-UX nonsense they were planning.
They are perfectly viable and it has nothing to do with UX, but you have already exposed your bias and made clear that you are arguing in bad faith by spreading misinformation in your other comments.
I remember there was a time years back when there were "light" variants of apps, usually intended for underpowered or older Android phones, but that also came in handy if you were in a situation where you had shitty cell service, or if you needed to preserve your battery. You could run the Opera Mini browser on a trash phone and it was blazing fast without wrecking your battery. Maybe 5% of sites would have a rendering issue, but you could always switch back to your main browser if you needed to use it.
Nowadays, I think the trend is more toward putting a battery-saver or data-saver mode inside an existing app, rather than creating an entirely new app, and I don't see any reason why Apple couldn't do something like this in Safari if they wanted to.
About a quarter of that list is stuff I don't want a browser futzing with... volume control, autofocus, background sync (assuming this has huge battery implications), WebUSB, WebNotifications, and a few others.
That said, about half the list appears to be stuff I don't care about one way or the other. At least not without spending way more time researching those CSS elements than I care to invest.
And I'd be totally fine with an "Allow Alternate Browser Features: Y/N" setting or similar, as long as it defaulted to the current behavior (locked down Safari only).
> About a quarter of that list is stuff I don't want a browser futzing with... volume control, autofocus, background sync (assuming this has huge battery implications), WebUSB, WebNotifications, and a few others.
Yeah, looks like a nice checklist of things to turn off to me…
Half those are genuine missing features; the other half are the things I'm glad Apple doesn't implement because websites would use them (or I'd be spammed with permissions dialogs).
> What is your argument that Safari is not a good browser?
Safari is often the hold-out on implementing features[1] that would be useful to users - presumably because it would make web apps viable on iOS, and compete with App store apps where Apple takes a 30% cut
> Using market forces to encourage more consolidation into a single engine is bad.
Competition on a level playing-field is not bad, even if you dislike the superior product (as determined by the free hand of the market.)
1. If memory serves: various APIs useful for PWAs were delayed or kneecapped on Safari
Where Apple is doing everything they can to make that “market” work in their interests instead of as it is supposed to from a user perspective. And when you don't have a choice, it's not really a market either.
It's funny, I prefer to use Safari on iOS instead of native apps because I have more control over shaping my experience (through user scripts and custom css) and Apple's focus on user privacy which may be all lip service, but at least it's part of their talking points; something I don't see with Chrome.
I'm sure Safari sucks to support for web developers and is missing a lot of cool apis, but I'm willing to take those tradeoffs for the increased privacy I get as a result.
That being said, I do think Apple should allow third party browser engines.
Yes exactly. As much as Apple needs to open iOS, Google needs to be forced to stop pushing Chrome through every avenue it can. No more cross-promotion, no more bundling Chrome into random Windows program installers, no more use of APIs that favor Blink browsers, etc. Google has sucked all the air out of the web engine room through these things.
They won't. OWA are unapologetic Chrome shills, going as far as calling many of Chrome-only non-standards "essential" and saying that Edge is a completely different browser than Chrome
>On the other hand it just leads to Chrome monopoly.
If a browser engine continues to exist not on its merits but because its users are locked in, there is zero value in it. If 100% of people switch to chromium based browsers (an open source project) while they have free choice that's how it is. There's nothing inherently wrong with this.
We don't need browser engine DEI. Even the term monopoly is spurious in the world of open source software. Say if in 30 years we have 100% linux market share because open source won, do we need to protect Microsoft so they can lock people into Windows, like some sort of endangered animal program for proprietary software?
There's an inherent contradiction to apply the competitive logic of proprietary platforms to fundamental OSS infrastructure. They'll tend to be natural "monopolies" just by virtue of how resource intensive they are and the desire to standardize.
They can do nothing to Android because as the article points out Samsung or the entirety of China and the billions of other people in the world will just work on a fork and that will become consensus. If you have one company acting as the dominant player in an open source project, the fact that everyone else can walk away puts an implicit limit on what they can do.
To literally take Chromium as an example. Look at Google's manifest v3 changes. Brave and all the other chromium based browsers just put their own ad blocking shim on top and they're fine.
> billions of other people in the world will just work on a fork and that will become consensus.
Yes, yes, billions of people will work on the fork.
> To literally take Chromium as an example. Look at Google's manifest v3 changes.
That literally changed nothing in Chrome dominance.
> Brave and all the other chromium based browsers just put their own ad blocking shim on top and they're fine.
You mean: they literally just slap a skin on top of a Google-developed project, do no actual browser development of their own (do they even participate in web standards?), have vanishingly few users and are likely hemorrhaging money?
You'd be able to use proper Firefox there. And it is a good thing, it weakens Apple's malicious control over Web standards (sabotage of using SPIR-V for WebGPU is Apple's fault).
You've missed the point. Once the restriction on which browsers can be used is lifted, people won't be switching to Firefox in vast numbers. They will be switching to Chrome. Just because someone is able to use Firefox does not mean they will use Firefox.
May be not, but currently they can't switch to anything at all. So it can't be worse than it is already. Let users decide what they want to use instead of deciding for them. Just the fact that you could use alternatives will already put more pressure on Apple to behave.
Basically it's not an argument at all against forcing Apple to remove that ban.
Firefox is overall a fine browser. Still has 2% marketshare.
There's also the fact that websites themselves need to be mindful of multiple browser engines existing because of Safari. Once users are able to install Chrome on iPhones, developers will just abandon every other engine wholesale.
Google has been bombarding Firefox users with "Upgrade to Chrome" notices on their properties. Google kept having "oopses" that blocked browsers based on User-Agent strings, rather than capabilities.
Google also plays "fire and motion" with Web standards. They have a tendency to use non-standard(-yet) features on their websites. This gives them a perfect excuse to make other browsers look technically inferior (when the features are missing or the browser is blocked) or slow (when the features are implemented using inefficient polyfills). The unfairness is the one-sided choice of using whatever cutting-edge or Google-specific feature Chrome has, while they'd never do this in other direction. If Firefox implemented a new feature first, Google would never tell Chrome users that Chrome sucks and they need to upgrade to Firefox.
> Once users are able to install Chrome on iPhones, developers will just abandon every other engine wholesale.
This is the thing that is most concerning. We’ve seen this happen before. We ended up with an Internet Explorer monoculture that paralysed front-end development for over a decade. Huge numbers of developers were happily writing Internet Explorer-only websites and didn’t care about any other browser at all. There’s a real danger that this ends the open web and turns it into a Chrome platform controlled by Google.
> Firefox is overall a fine browser. Still has 2% marketshare
Firefox used to have a 25-30% share before Mozilla shat the bed by neglecting it while treating Firefox like a money-piñata to fund a series of dead-end, copy-cat projects in their big-tech cosplay era.
Blaming Chrome for Firefox and Safari being shit (as reflected by the percentage of users who voluntarily use the respective browsers) removes their culpability. Chrome had to grow their share from 0%.
Chrome did that three ways: 1) performing better and crashing less than mainstream alternatives (just IE and Firefox, then) on non-Mac platforms (so, most desktop computers) for a good long while; 2) aggressive advertising to trick people who don't actually give a shit what browser they're running (or even know) into downloading it because "google said it would make my gmail work better" or "I dunno, google just told me to download this so I did"; and, later in the race, by 3) being the default on most Android installations.
One of three major factors involved actually being good, and I'd bet the other two factors overwhelm that one.
Many people have memory-holed Chrome's malware-grade tactics like including an installer in unrelated sourceforge downloads and now think that Chrome won strictly on its merits.
People have similar misconceptions about Google search.
The reality is that both had significant advantages over their competition when launched, but the company also used anticompetitive tactics to ensure dominance once those gaps closed.
I forgot how often individual webpages could take down your entire browser! On Chrome, it'd just crash the perpetrator tab. Chrome was also fast - really, really fast. Even if one was "tricked" into using it, you wouldn't want to go back to using other browsers - they put in the work.
> One of three major factors involved actually being good, and I'd bet the other two factors overwhelm that one
Counterpoint: Microsoft Edge on Windows has the same 2 factors going for it, but failing to replicate Chrome's ascendancy. Edge and Windows pleading with you to not install Chrome is kinda sad.
Edge (and basically every other browser besides Safari and Firefox) is a chromium fork though, so even though it only has like a 5% market share, it's still bumping up the engine's overall market share.
My point was that Chrome didn't win on marketing alone (as disproved by Edge dismal numbers). That said: browser marketshare metrics breakout the "brand" and not just the engine: for a long time, Chrome's rendering engine was downstream of Safari's WebKit before being forked outright as Blink.
That Microsoft abandoned Trident for a Chromium fork speaks volumes on the amount of innovation and engineering effort Google poured into Chrome/Chromium - I don't understand how it can be controversial to suggest that Chromium wins on its merits. The gaggle of browsers opted to fork Chromium rather than WebKit or Gecko because Chromium is best-in-class.
I agree that Chrome won mostly on merit, but I think it stays winning on inertia and marketing. There's just not that big of a difference now to the end user when using Safari or Firefox vs Chrome based browsers in my opinion. Safari's performance is fine. Let's not forget that Google retired their public benchmark suite because V8 wasn't beating JSC.
I can't say the same about the Trident based Edge though, it just wasn't as nice to use.
> The gaggle of browsers opted to fork Chromium rather than WebKit or Gecko because Chromium is best-in-class.
If I was making the decision to make browser, and finances were on the line, I'd pick Chromium just because other people have already done it. If I was doing it for fun, I'd rather just contribute to Ladybird.
The only reason why Safari is "shit" is because web developers are too lazy to develop for the web and instead develop for Chrome. The point of the web is that it's an open standard. Expecting everyone to use the bleeding edge version of the most aggressively feature-laden browser isn't just unreasonable, it's counter to the spirit of the platform.
Microsoft got into trouble for pushing Netscape users over to Internet Explorer, but what they did isn't half as evil as the dark patterns Google is using to get Chrome and other Google apps onto the few devices left which don't have them.
> The only reason why Safari is "shit" is because web developers are too lazy to develop for the web and instead develop for Chrome.
Safari is only available on Apple devices, Chrome is available everywhere. Let's not pretend that laziness is the only reason why Chrome has the largest marketshare.
> The point of the web is that it's an open standard. Expecting everyone to use the bleeding edge version of the most aggressively feature-laden browser isn't just unreasonable, it's counter to the spirit of the platform.
I don't expect Safari to be the bleeding edge. I just expect the features to work. Lets take for example: IndexedDB
- IndexedDB was first brought up in two propsals in 2009/2010
- IndexedDB was available for pubilc testing in early 2012 by Firefox and Chrome and was released for both browsers unprefixed in late 2012.
- IndexedDB was "released" for Safari in late 2014. However:
1. The released version was so bad and buggy that it basically didn't work at all.
2. It essentially broke all the websites/web-apps that were using it, and there was no easy alternative to use. The affected websites/webapps had to essentially be rearchitected and remade or just plain shut down.
3. Apple had no interest in fixing it which essentially poisoned the feature for all developers. It was so egregious it was actually used in the lawsuits against Apple their monopolistic app store practices, which eventually led to the EU to create their new sweeping anti-trust regulation changes for app stores and browsers.
- IndexedDB didn't have a working release on Safari until mid-2016 and didn't have the industry standard "last two major version" support until late 2017.
That means we had developers affected by IndexedDB's poisoning for about 5 years.
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So by my earlier request of "I don't expect Safari to be the bleeding edge. I just expect the features to work.", Safari completely and utterly shit the bed. They shit the bed so bad it helped lead the EU to create new anti-trust regulations.
And that was just Apple trying to meet a standard feature.
Safari being Apple-only only has the appearance of a problem when the only alternative is one browser that happens to be almost everywhere. Again, the point of the web is to be an open platform, not the placing at a single corporation.
Chrome has plenty of problems but nobody cares because when Chrome doesn’t support something properly, no one uses it.
I agree that Safari is not perfect either. But let’s assume for a moment that nothing is going to make Apple invest more into WebKit than they are already. Which of the following worlds would I prefer?
1. WebKit remains the exclusive browser on iOS devices. The bleeding edge of the web doesn’t advance quite as quickly. A tiny number of developers who don’t already have access to an Apple device have to spend literally tens of dollars buying or inheriting 5+ year-old devices in order to test on a diversity of platforms.
2. Blink becomes available on iOS and Google continues use dark patterns to trick users into installing their browser. A small but non-trivial number of developers start assuming that everyone uses Blink/Chromium, and end users no longer have a choice of browser.
I’m sorry, I forget, isn’t the whole point about giving people a choice of browser? Because some people on Hacker News have some fairly dystopian blinders on and don’t actually care about user choice, they’re just lazy arseholes who don’t want to deal with an open web and resent having to test in more than one web browser.
Between these two alternative futures, I’ll pick number one every time, no hesitation. The open web is far more important to me than developer convenience.
> Chrome has plenty of problems but nobody cares because when Chrome doesn’t support something properly, no one uses it.
The difference between Chrome and Safari not supporting features is that Safari is developed by one company (Apple) whereas Chrome is developed by two (Directly by Google and indirectly by Microsoft). So Apple can have an incentive not to add a feature and end up harming the entire industry. But if Google has an incentive not to add something, Microsoft can still add that thing anyway (and vice versa), we only need one actor to act good for their not to be harm caused.
> 1. [...] A tiny number of developers who don’t already have access to an Apple device have to spend literally tens of dollars buying or inheriting 5+ year-old devices in order to test on a diversity of platforms.
This is flat out wrong.
One Safari is not equal to another.
You need to buy one of each device because Safari will change how it works across different devices.
Example 1: Safari adds depth touch to some devices which adds weird box overlays around parts of the website while the user is trying to use it, which blocks the content and interferes with which elements are supposed to be interactable unless you add special webkit-prefixed rules (e.g. -webkit-touch-callout, -webkit-tap-highlight-color, etc...) to different parts of your pages.
Example 2: Safari adds different buffer areas around their browser which you need to test with (using the env() css function) on each device with a different screen to make sure content isn't flowing off the screen or elements are being cut off at incorrect spots when they're supposed to flow past the edge.
And so on...
Apple keeps adding device specific ways of breaking websites.
Furthermore, each device can only run one version of Safari. Every time a new version comes out, you need to upgrade your OS to get the new version of Safari. And you also can't downgrade your OS to get the older version. And because some users can't upgrade and others won't, you need multiple of each device running each one on a different version of the OS to test correctly.
We have to spend 1000s of dollars each year on new devices just because Apple keeps inventing new ways of breaking things.
-----
Side question: But what about just buying a mac and running the iOS Simulator to test different versions of Safari on different devices?
It's no good, the iOS Simulator is a simulator, not an emulator. So the bugs that are on the device are not the same as the ones in the simulator.
-----
So out of your two options, what will happen is:
Some users will switch to Blink/Chromium and find that things start working better. That will start to build up a reputation of Chrome/Edge/etc... working better than Safari.
Meaning Apple will need to invest more money and effort into improving Safari.
Meaning Safari will be improved.
So either users start migrating to a better browser, or Safari improves to the point that it isn't a problem anymore.
I'm going to set aside your rather mid-tier developer criticisms of Safari, and I'll refrain from vomiting out verbiage of similar problems developing for Chrome, which nobody cares about because Chrome is what web developers think the web is. Chrome is seen as the standard whereas lazy minds desperately try to dismiss Safari as an inconvenience.
Your analysis is flawed at the core because you persist in making the same logical error which mid-tier web developers always make. Only web developers choose/change browsers because another one is "better". Ninety-nine percent of everyone else doesn't choose/change browsers, or if they do, it's because they were unwittingly exposed to an external influence, e.g.
1. Dark patterns (e.g. as employed by Microsoft in the 1990s, or Google in the 2020s);
2. Herd mentality ("my Son told me to use Chrome instead");
3. Because a website is broken (because the developer stubbornly refuses to believe that any web browser exists other than the bleeding edge release of Chromium)
And sorry but I just laughed when you said you need to spend "1000s of dollars each year on new devices". The only people who might need to do that are large corporations which already spend 1,000,000s of USD each year on developer salaries. A one-man team needs, at most, one desktop Mac made in the past 8 years ($200–1000 every 3–6 years) and one iOS device made in the past 5 years ($100–500 every 2–4 years). And that's assuming they don't already have either or both of these. And that's assuming that you're trying to do very complicated things. Most web developers shouldn't be doing anything that would break on a 10-year-old version of any major web browser (with the exception of TLS root certificates).
As an independent web developer with a Mac and iPhone, I begrudgingly buy and maintain a Windows computer and an Android phone, but you don't see me bitching and moaning about that, even though it's exactly the same thing.
No, it's not different because you're "forced" to acquire a new or used Apple product. As a developer, you are "forced" to acquire a reasonable spectrum of products based on what your audience is using. You are "forced" to test in Chrome. You are "forced" to pay taxes on income. You can wish the world was different, but wishes don't change practical realities.
Japan has a funny relationship with Apple. For example, the Felica ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa ) based ticket system is built into every iPhone globally, making life in Japan significantly easier for foreign iOS users. More surprisingly actually using the tickets does not require any app at all - you just use Apple Pay.
This is all narrowing the scope of what advantages native apps have (they do still have advantages), but it's hard to argue they simply aren't moving gatekeeping to other areas.
FeliCa Networks support is the direct result of the fact that mobile transit and mobile payments use in Japan predates the iPhone. Mobile Suica and Osaifu-Keitai already existed, and Apple needed to compete. It started with Japanese SKU iPhones but expanded globally.
Even now in Japan, mobile payments are anything but a monopoly. When Apple is forced to compete, they do things like add Suica with Express Transit. PayPay, a made-in-Japan QR code payments app is more prevalent than credit card payments here.
Android phones don't support it globally so saying that Apple is "forced" to compete where Android doesn't proves the point that they're doing more than needed.
Just because you can provision Felica cards outside of Japan doesn't mean that you can actually use them. It's not really global support if you can add Suica in the US and then not use it. More likely is that Felica Networks agreed with this logic and Apple is only paying the license fee for JP devices, or has some side deal about not delineating between regions. If Apple didn't support Felica, it would just move more users in Japan onto physical cards or Android.
On recent US SKU iPhones — don’t know how recent —- you can add a Suica card directly to Apple Wallet annd use it anywhere the physical card is accepted. No weird regional deals.
iPhone just wasn't going to exit the curious gadget status and become a first class citizen in the Japanese phone market without it. Same for emoji support and flick inputs and lots of those little things.
They were never forced to compete in the sense that no one is forced to be first class citizen anywhere. Apple just wanted to be by its own free will. That's technically correct.
But that part is on Apple. They could have made it Japan SKU exclusive. It isn't solely because it's their policy that an iPhone is universally an iPhone and there will never ever be Verizon backplates or brown box CostCo specials with plastic backplates. No one else cares, so everyone else make FeliCa enabled versions as Japan specials.
Apple having such a dominant hold of market share in the smartphone space gave a lot of leverage when negotiating royalties with Sony who makes the felica stuff. From what I heard it was basically just gifted to them, because if Apple says no we wont support it, then you lose a huge amount of users. Whereas with other manufacturers they pay on a per device basis tracked by the underlying osaifu-keitai stuff. If you are rooted though it is usually just 1 flag or something you need to change. Been using my US Pixel 6 for years daily on my commutes.
* in Japan. Apple has made it clear that they are willing and able to only allow consumer choice if they are in the jurisdiction where they are required to. I live in Norway, so I’m not able to sideload apps, because Norway, despite usually being lumped in with “the EU” is not actually part of the EU, and thus not covered by the EU ruling.
Small percent of sites will start breaking down in Safari, making small percent of users switch to Chrome. Process will start slow but will only go in one direction, and accelerate.
Apart from ChromeOS, most desktop operating systems default to other browsers. Yet Chrome is estimated to have ~70% of desktop browser market share. So defaults can't be much of a defense against browser advertising, especially on Google-owned properties.
I found the power of "It can be done" amazing. One country does it, everyone else thinks "It can be done, we don't want to be left behind" after 20 years of this being impossible.
We've got to assume that Google have internally been developing "real" Chrome for iOS for a long time, so that it'll be ready to go immediately, right?
Presumably they would have invested more resources into it and been done by now, if there was a viable path to release, which there isn't yet due to Apple's EU geofencing, and because there were a number of bugs and limitations in Apple's BrowserEngineKit which browsers are forced to use.
> The iOS build supports compiling the blink web platform. To compile blink set a gn arg in your .setup-gn file. Note the blink web platform is experimental code and should only be used for analysis.
I think this is a net good in the long term. Even if you completely exclude obvious benefits, like being able to support more APIs than Safari, it forces Apple to actually compete with other browsers and implement things if they start getting real market share.
Not that you really should, but Safari has a limit of 500 tabs. Why? It's arbitrary. Safari doesn't support WebRequest in blocking mode, so you can't have real adblockers (just MV3 style content blockers, like uBOL). There are all sorts of edge cases too, like if you want cross-browser sync and extensions. Sure, you can totally run Safari with extension support, but extensions in e.g., Orion are shaky at best.
The biggest claim that Apple made about this whole thing was that web browsers offered an attack surface increase as a result of giving JIT to other browsers, and they could be owned. Frankly, though, I would take a browser without JIT if I had a real adblocker.
The EU did make these requirements, Apple ignored them, the EU made Apple pay a big fine, and Apple put out some token process for browser engine approval that's not actually possible to pass but looks to bureaucrats like it meets the requirements.
What does Firefox give you, I mean what are the benefits? Some extensions that only work in Firefox, I guess? This is the only annoyance I'm aware of but it's real.
There's a lot of nonsense buried in safari and webkit. For example, loading certain URLs will deep link to on-device apps. If you surf to amazon urls in the browser, the amazon app will be notified. I'm pretty sure this is unblockable snooping people don't realize is going on.
So I think this is great news, maybe we get rid of nonsense like that.
However, I'll bet apple will make this japan specific just like eu laws don't affect their behavior in the US.
For example, a japanese iphone will always make a sound when you take a picture. If you leave the country, that will go away, unless you're in airplane mode and then it will start making sounds for every picture again. country-specific behavior.
I don't see why apple wouldn't do the same thing -- firefox works in japan, but not outside japan.
This is good news, the US should join in aswell in stopping this despicable behaviour by Apple. Apple handicaps browsers because web apps are the only viable alternative to Native Apps which generate huge commission for Apple.
It's a factor in the DOJ antitrust case that's going to trial soon -
> 43. Developers cannot avoid Apple’s control of app distribution and app creation by making web apps—apps created using standard programming languages for web-based content and available over the internet—as an alternative to native apps. Many iPhone users do not look for or know how to find web apps, causing web apps to constitute only a small fraction of app usage. Apple recognizes that web apps are not a good alternative to native apps for developers. As one Apple executive acknowledged, “[d]evelopers can’t make much money on the web.” Regardless, Apple can still control the functionality of web apps because Apple requires all web browsers on the iPhone to use WebKit, Apple’s browser engine—the key software components that third-party browsers use to display web content.
More likely because otherwise companies would have no reason to support Safari, they'd tell everyone to download chrome like they do on desktop - then google would have no incentive to optimize chrome for iOS because what would you use otherwise?
Finally, Japanese will experience popups, location requests, notifications and constant tracking along with battery drain and zero days as glorious first party android users.
IOS don’t need more spyware in form of chrome or firefox. If you need it, get spydroid with ios theme.
If we get there maybe it'll lead to a culture of something beyond "people on iOS don't truly use Chrome so I guess it's not really a problem worth doing anything about yet".
Ideally, the next step is for the US FTC to break up Google. This will probably have to wait until 2028, but it could happen earlier — it doesn't seem to be hard to get on this administration's bad side.
if chrome ever ends up with a majority browser share on ios/ipados, apple won't have any way to keep up. at this point, google already almost 100% controls web standards, and they can push new features (no matter how privacy-hostile or overreaching) without even allowing apple the chance to keep up.
at that point, the incentives for apple to keep developing safari would slowly dwindle away.
(oh, and gecko is a joke, especially on mobile - no need to even bring it up)
ugh... so much pain and time trying to get pages to look nice on that decaying pile of bits. I was overjoyed when those sneaky veternan engineers at YouTube put up their banner: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
It's the only reason you don't see a lot more broken websites on Firefox, which would drive its market share even lower.
Lots and lots of Web development projects target Chrome, then make sure it works on Safari. In that second step, they accidentally fix a lot of bugs that'd show up on Firefox, too.
Not a lot of them are bothering to check Firefox directly these days. Hell, a decade ago it wasn't making the test list in tons of cases.
Apple is the only thing keeping web standards in place. Many vendors we work with only support Chrome, including Chrome... on iOS. Which means because on iOS that's just Safari, the website has to meet web standards. So we know thanks to Apple, it'll work on Firefox!
Soon as this happens, Chrome is the web. The OWA knows this, it's their goal, it's an astroturf outfit.
Can you please elaborate on what your point is here? Previously you've made comments in support of opening up the Apple ecosystem, but now it seems that you're no longer in support of the idea after a sudden realization that opening up the platform to everyone means that it's also opened up to Google?
Very specifically: Safari is a critical lynchpin for Google's control of the web and we need to be extremely careful how we address it. A more open Apple ecosystem would be wonderful, I'm strongly in favor of sideloading and third party app stores. Both companies need to be heavily regulated, but the "Open Web Advocacy" idiots are just trying to push a Chrome monoculture, and it's important we do not accidentally make one monopoly worse while addressing another.
Ideally, Google will be broken up and forced to divest Chrome (this is in progress, but at the speed of the US federal government, so could be a decade if it succeeds), and then we can require Apple to remove their browser ban. Doing this out of order will destroy the web as we know it.
Chrome is the IE of today: It's the single platform developers are developing for instead of web standards. The fact developers have to support Safari, a least common denominator, is the only thing protecting the web.
I disagree. Safari is safer to use than Chrome, because Chrome implements antifeatures at a breakneck pace which introduce tracking and security vulnerabilities. Choosing not to implement a feature is as important or more than implementing one.
I'm not a Mac user, but I wish I had Safari on desktop as an option today.
> I'm not a Mac user, but I wish I had Safari on desktop as an option today.
Webkit browsers do exist on other platforms. They're far and away the best-performing sorts of actually-usable (in terms of supported Web features and ability to render real pages in the wild—sure, lynx works, but...) browsers on low-end machines, should you have to use one, to the point that they may be viable on a machine that's otherwise basically incapable of using the modern Web at all (which confirms for me that there's some fundamental, deep-down plumbing reasons behind why Safari's so much better on battery life than Firefox or Chrome-based browsers)
None of them are Safari and I can't vouch for how they are as daily drivers long-term, but it's nice to have one semi-up-to-date engine around that still kinda works on bad hardware (and by "bad" I mean still several times stronger than my workhorse many-tabs-browsing multi-tasking machine circa 2003—you'd be amazed how strong a machine has to be these days before trying to use the Web at-all normally in Chrome or Firefox is anything but terribly painful).
Normally, I'd agree with you -- defaults are a very, _very_ powerful thing.
But if you're using Google's web tools, they make it (too) easy to download their apps and push you in that direction in a million little ways. For example, GMail's native iOS app will either open a link in a WKWebView or Chrome (if it's not installed, it'll prompt you to install it), but you have to jump through some hoops if you want to open a link in the system's default browser. Similarly, if you're searching for something via google.com, they'll put up a prompt to download their search app, with the default "Continue" option taking you to the store rather than continuing with your current task (and then click-jack the back button).
But what's for-sure is that Apple is hugely profitable. And that browser control is a relatively important part of that profitability. Plain old greed will give Apple ample motive to keep Safari going.
Personifying corporations of thousands (or nations of millions) as if they had driving emotions such as a single person would have is almost always a grave logical error.
The way Google handles the Chromium source (one big Git monorepo that's undergoing near-constant refactoring) means anything that doesn't want to hard fork is limited to bolting on a new UI and features around the core rendering engine -- but anything inside that core rendering engine won't be long-lasting.
So Brave, Arc, Dia, Edge, et al., all add their own sauce on top of Chromium, but none of them can make changes like back-porting Manifest V2 back into their Chromium.
Brave is also contributing to the Chrome monoculture, same as how the Android forks are contributing to the Android culture. The base projects are so large that no team will do a proper job updating it if, or when, the source project stops being open source. They are entirely beholden to the original developers, and they will also merge whatever change the original developers do, as the cost of maintaining a fork is big enough as it is, without breaking changes.
I do appreciate these being open-source. But there must not be an illusion that these large projects being open source means that "just forking" works. A culture is much more than a repository.
The main issue with Chromium is not that it's not that it benefits Google.
The main issue is that it's so mainstream, it strongarms standardization bodies making them ineffective.
Chromium is so mainstream that developers think developing for other browsers is irrelevant, even putting notices of deprecation for Safari and Firefox.
W3C is on the brink of irrelevancy, because if it works on Chromium, why bother with the others? if W3C cannot enforce the standard.
> Chromium is so mainstream that developers think developing for other browsers is irrelevant, even putting notices of deprecation for Safari and Firefox.
Hugging Face's spaces does this, throwing banners saying it only supports Chrome. Makes me throw up a little bit every time I have to switch over.
i kind of agree - although all of this does end up indirectly benefitting google. while the project is open source, they're the ones maintaining the project, and believing that they won't do anything they think they can get away with to grow their power and influence is extremely naive.
if safari dies, firefox won't be far behind, and by then there's no way a fork of chromium will be able to "keep up" when google starts pushing chrome-only features, killing ad-blockers etc etc etc
(not sure if any of this matters, though. will there even be any real people left on the web in a 5 years?)
How has chrome abused there'd position? Generally from what I've seen most of their standards are sane and improve the web.
I was told they were breaking adblockers, using ublock lite which complies with the changes I don't notice a difference. And even this change I could have switched browsers it didn't break the web.
There's some pwa features only they support, and that's a feature I think could actually benefit me.
Chromium is in such position that their implementation of new elements and APIs set the de-facto standard for the Web and Safari and Firefox have to follow suit.
This overpowers the governing body (W3C), where they have to accept it and pretend they remain relevant.
A bit of history: When Internet Explorer was the dominant browser of the Internet, other browsers existed and their usage was in healthy proportion, among each other. People could choose whatever browser they wanted and be sure its browser engine was independent.
When Chromium/Chrome came in 2008, it changed the game to what we have today: 85% Chromium-based browsers, 8%-10% Safari/WebKit and 2%-3% Gecko-based browsers (Firefox)
Whatever Chromium does, others have to follow suit. The bulk of the userbase is there (unfortunately). No real choice exists for a governing body to effectively apply standards.
The ability to contribute and the rights granted by the license are two separate issues. Google isn't obligated to accept and is more than likely to reject patches that don't align with its incentives (reversal of recent anti-adblock changes, removal of telemetry/spyware, etc.)
> This results in no effective browser competition on iOS, and web apps being deprived of the APIs and performance they need to compete with native apps.
To my eyes, the regulators hit the nail on the head here. It's not about other browsers, it's about keeping the iPhone browser crummy so the app store and the 30% Apple Tax stays humming along.
Of all the things that iOS could do, why browser engine is so important? Is there anything to them other than UI nowadays, especially on small form factor?
Everybody is talking about Chrome, but I tell ya what I have that disabled on my Android in favor of Firefox. Firefox on mobile with full-fat uBlock Origin is the closest thing to parity with desktop web access you can get.
I don't just block ads, I block elements on sites I don't care about with :has-text RegEx rules. You can't do that on Chrome even on desktop anymore.
I'm this close to swapping to the Android as my primary device-- it's iMessage that has me chained. It's just too dang nice to respond to chats from my Mac during work so I don't need to pick up my phone.
Everything else is better on the Android. Don't get me started about the iOS keyboard or Siri.
FF with uBO was the killer app that kept me on android. If Apple let me run that, I'd have bought into it years ago.
Have you considered messages.google.com? I think you need to use Google's messages app (not the Samsung messager or equivalent) but it does as you describe and supports RCS.
Kagi made a safari based w är my browser that can use both FF and chrome addons on iOS. I use full uBO and I still don’t care about cookies.
Can i share my history and bonus with my desktop, ie linux?
Oh, it's closed source ios/macos only? Yeah, no thanks.
I also kinda doubt it's compatible with most firefox addons, addons can and do rely on details of firefox that ios does not provide the ability to emulate.
uBlock Origin for iOS was released yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44795825
If you are on another locale, search “ublock origin lite” with double quotes.
Still not as good as full fat ublock origin.
or kdeconnect/gsconnect?
I've been using https://messages.google.com to get something like the desktop iMessage experience with Android- does that work for your use case? (I don't use iMessage so I could just be missing some killer feature it has, or something.)
I've been doing this too! You can install it as a PWA and get a nice desktop experience.
The consent-o-matic extension is also incredibly worth it on mobile firefox. Automates clicking through almost every cookie banner I've come across, which is much more annoying to do manually on a phone than on desktop.
uBo has a filter list for blocking out cookie popups, why not use that instead?
I have the Easylist one enabled, is there a more reliable one?
It doesn't catch them all, especially more niche sites that do more custom stuff to prevent you using the site until you interact with the notice. e.g. screen overlay, prevent scrolling using css rules.
If you can live with SMS instead of iMessage: KDE Connect on Android works very nicely for messaging from the desktop (the Desktop application is available for Linux, Windows and MacOS. Functionality varies per platform but SMS works on all of them). https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
If its the difference-maker for you: Google Messages has a web experience, and in my not-recent experience it works great.
The iOS 26 keyboard (public beta) is the biggest regression I've ever seen Apple make, and they're a company infamous for regressions. It for me has been the tipping point.
[1] https://messages.google.com/web/
What did they change on iOS 26 in the keyboard?
Something significant changed about the spellchecking and swipe to type algorithms. Significant performance degradation, especially in those "i just need to get a quick message out while walking" situations. Hopefully we see some improvement by GA.
They moved the emoji thing to where the globe is and gave you a bigger space bar. Also changed the font slightly.
> Firefox on mobile with full-fat uBlock Origin
I think uBO is not disabling PPA, does it?
- June 2024. Mozilla acquires Anonym, an ad metrics firm.
- July 2024. Mozilla adds Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA), feature is enabled by default. Developed in cooperation with Meta (Facebook).
- Feb 2025. Mozilla updates its Privacy FAQ and TOS. "does not sell data about you." becomes "... in the way that most people think about it".
if you also switch your phone, messages.google.com has you covered.
> it's iMessage that has me chained
No Apple hardware or software/service (when it comes to Apple software/services they deserve a LOL) has me chained.
It's just how disgusting Google has kept Android for anyone who wants privacy, safety (both usage and data safety in case of loss etc), and reliable updates that people stay in Apple ecosystem even though software/services wise technically they are miles ahead.
If someone ever even proceeds to tell me that "something in apple's stable is technically comparable/better than Google's.." I might rudely ask them to get their head examined.
I just can't reconcile with the fact that Google would track me every milisecond and then use my data for ads and I can't do anything about it. The good news is very soon Apple will start doing the same, if they have not, because they are already an ad company now.
As far as ditching iMessage is concerned - the last time I ditched WhatsApp in my country, I ditched it and after I didn't feel a thing. And WhatsApp in my country is not only instant messaging - it's literal-bllody-ly everything. Everything!
PS. Signal should launch a "Import from iMessage and WhatsApp" :D (Oh, but then how would they prioritise crypto ;-))
I use brave on ios, the built in adblocker works fine as a substitute to ff + uBlock imo.
>It's just too dang nice to respond to chats from my Mac during work so I don't need to pick up my phone.
I've been doing this on Signal for years.
I will second Google Messages, your SMS messages go to your phone and your desktop at the same time. Easily respond from either. I don't know if SMS messaging gets to iMessage, because I don't use Apple products.
I think it bounces thru your phone since if your phone is off you can't use it on the web.
Wake me up when someone makes a better Reminders, Calendar and Photos app on Android...
I'm using AdGuard for blocking ads in Safari. Works fine.
I do have a GrapheneOS pixel 7a as well but I'd rather not let Google near my shit.
I can relate to not wanting any of the tech giants near my shit but may I ask what your Google concerns are on GrapheneOS?
I also have an iPhone as well as a GrapheneOS phone. They are different but I'm quite happy with those alternatives to the apps you mentioned:
Etar as a calendar frontend app. DAVx5 for syncing CalDAV and CardDAV (so calendar data, contacts and optionally also tasks). I manage tasks within my notes, so I do not really use a todo/reminder app at all but there are different options. tasks.org plugs into DAVx5, for example.
Depending on your server-side setup and your willingness to compromise on open source, are also other options. For example, if you work with an Exchange server, there is the "Nine - Email & Calendar" app which is a very powerful all-in-one-client similar to traditional Outlook on the desktop.
For photos, there are quite a few solid options, depending on what you want. I use the Fossify Gallery with only my Camera folder visible for day-to-day stuff and also have Aves Libre installed for a more advanced interface to my pictures and videos.
I've tried most of that. It's really nowhere near any of the basic Apple stuff.
I have no issues with GrapheneOS just stock android.
Interesting. Can I ask if you use Apple's cloud services? If so, I understand. I don't use those, even on Apple devices, so to me, the whole setup is similarly annoying on both platforms with maybe a very slight edge towards the iPhone because it has most things I need out of the box. Other than that, I really don't think I miss anything on the "basic stuff" front on my Pixel compared to my iPhone (I use them both daily, with the former being my personal phone and the latter the job-issued one).
I've been doing the dual-driving iPhones and Android devices for a long time and times were definitely worse, in my opinion. The last thing I remember really annoying me on the regular was the lack of AirDrop but with alternatives like LocalSend and KDE connect, that's fixed as well.
Looks like Japan learned from the malicious compliance shenanigans Apple is pulling with the EU. I hope Apple gets served some substantial fines that really hurt when they try to pull the same shit there. And I say, "when", not "if".
Imagine banning sale and import, wonder how long Apple stores have to be closed for Apple to give in....
Wouldn't people in Japan riot because they can't buy iPhones and be part of the tribe?
There are few things in life people like more than their iPhones.
Hehehe, like Apple tried to pull "we'll keep back AI from EU as a punishment" ? Were there riots? :)
Just change your language to English on your device and you have it. They did not really try.
If you're talking about Apple Intelligence that's also region locked and that's much more difficult to bypass. Device language has has nothing to do with it.
Where is apple intelligence blocked? I’m in Germany right now and it’s available as far as zu can tell.
I think you're extrapolating America's materialism to other cultures that don't necessarily care so much. There's not really any feature of the iPhone that can't be replaced by another product. It's only Americans that feel the need to slake brand loyalty with army-of-one boycotts.
That's totally why 68.75% of Japanese smartphone users own an iPhone[1]...
[1] https://magmatranslation.com/stats/en/mobile-usage-trends-in...
I stand by what I said. Apple used to be the leading smartphone manufacturer in China, now they aren't even in the top 5. Sometimes things change, and I doubt China's in shambles because Airdrop isn't ubiquitous. I see no reason why Japan would be different.
The notion that American tech companies are invincible is really only a view held by Americans. The overwhelming majority of people I speak to internationally don't care that much about computer brand loyalty.
Maybe not brand loyalty... but people, universally, want the best product available. Today, for a large portion of the world, that is perceived to be the iPhone.
The iPhone being banned in Japan because of some policy dispute with the government is going to go over like a bag of wet cement. People may not care that it's "Apple", but they do care the "Best" is being banned for reasons the population doesn't care about.
"people, universally, want the best product available"
Maybe I'm not a person, but I almost always pick one of the cheaper if not cheapest option. Rarely, if ever, do I care enough to get the best of anything...
Look at Nubia, you can have a cheap phone that is also better and more performant.
Japan has such a high share of iPhones because it's a winner takes it all market. People prefer to be in the majority by default, and it will take a lot more than just being good to dethrone the major platform.
Reminds me that I still don't know why Samsung is chained so hard to docomo. It can't just be a marketing thing.
Who told you that these are reasons the population doesn't care about? I know at least in Europe there has been wide support for initiatives such as the DMA, even knowing what it would entail. You're running on conjecture here.
You think the population of Japan will be ok with banning iPhones because their governments thinks other web browsers should run on the devices too?
How many iPhone users, outside of a small group of "techies" are even aware there are other mobile browsers?
Think about your parents or grandparents - not you, someone who has vastly more knowledge in this area. How many "normals" really care... I'd wager near zero.
Apple stop selling iphones won't take the iphones away, not many people care about their next one. The impact would be negligible and every other country would notice they can demand compliance.
> You think the population of Japan will be ok with banning iPhones
Why wouldn't they? Japan has no codified Apple-specific lock-in. Their citizens won't miss a criminally illegal iPhone any more than they demand to import the gold Escobar phone, Huawei handsets or the FBI's ANOM. It would be effortless from a legislation perspective and harm Apple far more than it harms Japanese people.
Japan isn't part of FIVE-EYES, their government doesn't rely on Apple for surveillance purposes. There's no real potential for political blowback unless America's politicians take it personally. Japanese citizens would just buy different phones, no different from what China has already done (without any pushback). If America demands that they give Apple market access, they can embargo the iPhone under security pretenses instead.
> but people, universally, want the best product available
I fear you've been overly influenced by Apple's marketing. They are in no way the best product, but they certainly have the best advertisements!
Which has absolutely zero bearing on what he said.
Nobody is gonna riot over an iphone lmao
But I like the walled prison where I can't screw up and make choices for myself. I appreciate that Apple makes it so I can't accidentally give my coordinates and have some Monarch track me and murder me or leak my noods.
+4500 upvoots
(I always thought it was suspicious that the anti-apple headline had +30k upvoots on reddit, but the top comment was pro-apple with significantly less. Its almost like they paid an external marketing team/troll farm to do reputation management)
You’re thinking like an end user and not like someone who has provide tech support for others. One of the best things I did to make my life easier was getting mom a Chromebook.
You can root a Chromebook if you choose to accept the risks involved. This is officially supported.
Sure, it's a nice feature, but I probably wouldn't. Maybe I'd put a sticker on it saying "my other computer is a Raspberry Pi Pico."
It's not necessary to root every device you own. You can use one to do your banking and web browsing and have entirely separate devices for hacking.
Unless you want to look like a criminal, I probably wouldn't carry around two phones everywhere you go.
I would welcome if this global legislative push would end up in a more open app ecosystem for iOS overall.
BrowserEngineKit is a thin wrapper over XPC and iOS' extension system. The system would be so much better to develop for if XPC was an open API, and JIT for isolated sub-processes was permitted without Apple's blessing.
* Messengers could have separate sub-processes for preprocessing untrusted inputs -- iMessage already does this, third-party messengers are single-process and cannot.
* Applications could isolate unstable components for better user experience and crash recovery.
* Emulators, e.g. for retro systems, would benefit from speedy emulation.
* WASM would become useful in iOS.
* Browser could use XPC without special-purpose API wrappers such as BrowserEngineKit.
But alas, all of this would make it easier to load code that runs at native speed into an iOS app after a store review happened, and as we all know that'll be the end of the world.
>and as we all know that'll be the end of the world.
I'll enjoy seeing all the accounts on MacRumors clawing their eyes out when that happens.
It would be naive to think that Apple isn't funding sites and narratives on the internet to serve their economic interests.
One of the most outlandish one being that freedom to use your phone however you want would necessarily compromise security and privacy for everyone. It's such a bizarre and indefencible take, and yet it's repeated over and over again on those Apple-worship platforms.
>freedom to use your phone however you want would necessarily compromise security and privacy for everyone.
For a large enough definition of "everyone", it would. "Everyone" has a Meta app installed. We've seen them pull evil tricks over and over to suck up data 24/7 - most recently running a local server on Android that their websites could talk to to bypass anonymization - and the moment a crack appears in the walled garden Meta will say "go install the FB/Instagram app from our app store with no privacy policy reviews" and a large enough definition of everybody will be much the worse for it.
i take it you dont use desktops or laptops then?
Most people on desktops / laptops interact with these services via a web browser, which has very limited permissions on the system. Not sure how you could control that tightly on a fully open iOS.
So iOS must allow web apps.
It does, doesn't it? Even if you stretch "web app" to mean "PWA" iOS supports them. And it definitely supports the literal definition of "web app" (i.e. loading a website in a browser that runs JS or whatever to perform its "app" functionality).
According to this discussion, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39563618, they don't behave in the same way or have all features.
E.g., For support, the Progressive Web Apps will still need to be built on WebKit, with all that entails.
I don't see the relevance of this question. Neither what I do nor whether I own a desktop/laptop impact the overwhelming trends of how society interacts with technology.
> Meta will say "go install the FB/Instagram app from our app store
This didn't happen even on Android. Why would it happen on iOS?
> and the moment a crack appears in the walled garden Meta will say "go install the FB/Instagram app from our app store with no privacy policy reviews"
People keep saying this, but how do you explain the years and years of Meta/Facebook operating on Android without ever doing this?
It hasn't been possible until very recently. The Epic case has still been going through the courts, so there's been no reason for Meta to show their hand before that's final.
They HAVE been finding every loophole, crack in the Play Store policies, or Android bug they can exploit to steal data.
Alternative stores on Android have been possible since day one - there are several of them. That's not what the Epic case is about.
> One of the most outlandish one being that freedom to use your phone however you want would necessarily compromise security and privacy for everyone.
I suppose in a round-a-bout way, it could, more specifically around iMessage, which is Apple's baby in the US and a big part of their lock in effect for US users.
Right now, you can reasonably assume that using iMessage with another iPhone user that both ends are reasonably secure and private. Break open the walls of the garden and now you could say that you can't trust that the other end you are communicating with hasn't installed some random crapware or malware that's scraping their messages, or recording the screen during a facetime call, thereby compromising your own privacy by interacting with a bad devices.
In that instance, Apple is correct - but what Apple doesn't tell people is that all other forms of digital communication are open to the same risks so they aren't special.
> Right now, you can reasonably assume that using iMessage with another iPhone user that both ends are reasonably secure and private.
I'd disagree, given that many people have iCloud Backup enabled, which (at least without "Advanced Data Protection") uses encryption keys available to Apple and includes all iMessage and SMS messages.
>reasonably secure
“These memes will be leaked to the feds if my friend causes Apple to be subpoenaed” is much more palatable than “every text I send my girlfriend is being used to train an LLM by iPhoneFolderCleanerLLCAssociates”
I know iCloud backups are not perfectly secure. I like the privacy aspect of iMessage as it stands, even if it’s not quite Cone of Silence. _Definitely_ we could have more freedom on iOS! Just without worrying about adware scrapers somehow… without worrying about grandma increasing my tech support burden when a scammer calls her… (shrug)
Random crapware or malware is still subject to app sandboxing.
Can you give an example of what your concern is?
You could be talking to someone who has a Mac, though.
Is iMessage really that big a deal to people, for privacy / security particularly?
Practically speaking I can’t even tell the difference, apart from text messages sometimes failing to send, and getting the option to retry as SMS.
If I want something private / secure, I use Signal.
Only in the US, where Apple has an AOL-like lock-in. The market share for iOS in Canada is similarly large but there is no iMessage lock-in here as Canada had Blackberry Messenger (also a lock-in app) way before iMessage, and shifted to FB Messenger and Whatsapp once BBM faded. Nowadays most people have both apps installed, and what you use depends on where the group chat was started.
Yes, people use iMessage to securely share/collaborate on many objects in iOS, like a shared Apple Note. It is used for much more than just sending text messages back and forth.
I use Signal but it leaves much to be desired relative to iMessage for a lot of uses.
Folks do like renaming group chats, typing indicators, perhaps scheduled send (though too new to say without asking around).
And it feels a little better, personally, sending an innocuous iMessage—even though I won't get in trouble if a stingray happens to pick up “gm” “Happy birthday!” “Kevin forgot the biscuits again!” over SMS.
Self-destructing Signal for the most personal messages for sure. But SMS just feels dirty. Too exposed even if I’d shout the same message contents in a public square.
> ... freedom to use your phone however you want
I want to use my phone locked down hard and apps reviewed by Apple. I sleep better with things as they are. I suspect 99% of normal users are in the same boat.
Apple must provide opt-in or opt-out for the lockdown.
Then Facebook will grant its app all permission entitlements, and will direct all users to opt-out lockdown for the app to work.
Are they doing that on Android right now?
OP, nuker, please answer, i'm genuinely curious what you think about this
They never answer this one.
"Former Facebook insiders explain why the company is making such a big fuss over Apple's upcoming privacy change"
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/03/11/why-facebook-is-so-upset...
I have not heard similar tantrum from FB over Android. Makes sense as it is made by an Ad company.
that was not the question the question was:
You:
>Then Facebook will grant its app all permission entitlements, and will direct all users to opt-out lockdown for the app to work.
input_sh:
> Are they doing that on Android right now?
So is Facebook granting its app all permission entitlements, and directing all users to opt-out lockdown for the app to work on Android?
They don't, no need, Android works for them. They don't on iOS too, iOS alt app stores did not hit US yet. They will, if iOS alt stores will become global thing, or the hypothetical "lockdown opt-out", that started the whole thread.
Fair enough, and then your iOS should just report the list of permissions the app demanded, maybe even compare to the AppStore version, and then let people make their choice. It doesn't have to be a "one click" easy way to make mistakes. Most users won't bother to go through 3 extra steps to install the "alternative" app if they aren't missing anything in the regular one.
The OS should anyway sandbox everything, and be as isolated as possible from any app running on top of it. That's the real security, everything else is mostly privacy - as in it's not really a security issue that the FB app siphons all the data I allowed it to access.
I think the real issue is that without enforcement measures, apps by bad actors like Facebook have free rein to find holes in the sandbox and similar. Even in the event that iOS allows choice of App Store globally, it might not be the worst thing to let them keep a kill switch on automatic distribution of individual apps (which once flipped off, users would need to sideload the app in question) so when some third party dev tries to pull that kind of stunt there will be consequences.
Then Apple can just work harder on securing the OS. When desktop OS security is discussed does anyone ever seriously float the idea that maybe we should only allow MS, Apple, or Linus approved apps to run on the OS to avoid hackers having free rein to find holes?
The market for sideloading apps is anyway much smaller than the whole mobile market because most people can’t be bothered to do it. The ones determined to install that shady flashlight app they downloaded from the internet will just as well give their banking credentials to any app that asks for them.
No matter how much Apple invests into security, parties like Meta will find holes to exploit because it’s profitable to do so. It’s a cat and mouse game, and so even though Apple should be investing in security they also need to be able to put an end to the game when there’s obvious abuse afoot.
I’m not as supportive of this ability for computers, but the market is so broad and large for mobile devices that I feel it’s a bit of a different creature.
And yes, I agree that for sideloaded apps all bets are off. That’s why I mentioned Apple having a kill switch only on automated distribution, e.g. through app stores (first party or otherwise). So for example if it turns out that Facebook has been making constant use of exploits for a while, jumping from one to the next as they’re fixed — in this situation Apple can stop it from being installed or updated from any app store (even one run by Meta), meaning the only way to install or update it is through fully manual side loading until they clean their act up.
Meta doesn’t need to hack your OS. It’s not only cheaper to just ask you to give them all the access that matters to your data, it also poses less legal risk. You accept to install their alternative app and give them all the data they ask for.
Whatever technical tricks Meta is using today pass Apple’s review and implicit endorsement. Whatever tricks they use in the future to escape the sandbox and access (hack) the OS with the sideloaded app are unilateral. Could open up a legal can of worms.
I’d be more concerned about the shady flashlight app downloaded from some corner of the internet. Or the Fakebook app, the all-in-one social media aggregator, the fake banking apps.
> and then let people make their choice.
Some apps are de-facto unavoidable, like Facebook, Whatsapp and X.
I have, in fact, none of these on my phone.
That seems like a bit of a stretch.
Whatsapp is probably the hardest to avoid for most people in parts of the world where it's dominant. The number of people who need to use Facebook or Twitter is likely much smaller, and very few of those need to install a native app instead of using the website.
Twitter is incredibly avoidable. Everything about it is likely faked and exaggerated. Revenue/profit for sure. Number of users for sure. Number of users that aren’t bots for sure too.
I use Twitter everyday because of my politics interest but it isn’t that popular any more (I know the supposed numbers say otherwise)
They absolutely are not. No more than alcohol or tobacco addiction are de-facto unavoidable. And the people who are absolutely addicted to those platforms will always have the option of the web page no matter what you do to the app.
WhatsApp is used to talk to people across the world. It’s not like tobacco at all.
If I got off WhatsApp which I use for like 10 minutes a week, I’d have a harder time communicating with a handful of people outside the US
Ah yes, like "alcohol or tobacco," communicating with people is an addiction that must be stopped. Participating in society is a choice. /s
The only one of those on my phone is X and it's definitely avoidable.
You should probably not use Facebook then.
How is it that the answer to an American megacorp trying to hoover all of your personal data is to try to get another American megacorp to add universal barricades to your device?
> How is it that the answer to an American megacorp trying to hoover all of your personal data is to try to get another American megacorp to add universal barricades to your device?
Because only Apple has the power to stop Chrome from being the only browser (like IE) or to stop Meta from insisting you give up all privacy. A government may be able to do it within their own borders for a period of time, but Meta, Google and Apple are all larger and more powerful than the majority of countries out there.
> A government may be able to do it within their own borders for a period of time
Part of the problem is the governments are proving they aren’t interested in doing it. Aside from the fact that law enforcement agencies are happy to have easily legally compelled data like this, the governments are actively fighting e2e encryption and strong on device encryption. And then on top of that, if they really were interested in solving that problem, you’d think they’d be spending legislative power on solving that before solving forcing the 2nd place market competitor to open their OS up.
In regards to browser lock down Apple wants to be the only game in town. Safari allows plug-in's but Apple doesn't allow 3rd parties to provide plugins themselves. They do this to create an unequal advantage.
You can choose between a locked down system, iOS, and a free one, Android. No-one is forcing you to buy an Apple device.
And you will get 20 times telemetry as a bonus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
Opt-in is at time of purchase
The market provides these options already.
Those "99%" wouldn't be affected by this change as they can continue to use Safari and the App Store exactly as they do now.
What you want is not relevant, because you have no choice.
Apple depriving you of that choice may not inconvenience you, but you are still being deprived of that freedom in the first place. I suspect 100% of iPhone users are in the same boat.
> What you want is not relevant, because you have no choice.
You got this backwards. I chose Apple because of the choices they made and it suited me.
... In which case literally nothing changes for you. You can keep using safari.
I don't know what it is with this recent redefining of freedom to mean "the freedom to restrict others freedoms".
Even if 99.9999% of users want to only use safari, ever, you don't need to only allow safari. There's no gun to your head making you download Firefox.
Want to use a locked down browser? That's totally fine, that's always been allowed.
The security thing is BS anyway; Apple aren't perfect at security and having only one option can make this worse.
Google's Project Zero uncovered quite a few 0 days in Apple's "perfect" operating system. They're not magical wizard cult gods over there, they're just a buncha developers same as 'em all. And given the quality of what's been coming out of Apple _and_ Google recently sometimes I wonder if someone's dug a pit under their supposedly high bars they held in the 2010s. Even just Youtube is a disgustingly buggy app nowadays.
On iOS, I can trust that pretty much everyone in my family won't download something silly that then creates a security hole in their devices. Not sure how you could guarantee that if you could load code post-review. What would be the point of the review, then? Wouldn't the App Store be littered with trojan horses in waiting?
> Wouldn't the App Store be littered with trojan horses in waiting?
It already is littered with outright scams, apps pretending to be other apps etc.
I remember when HN would literally shadowban you for suggesting they do this.
Now with 'troll farms'/'reputation management' being so ubiquitous, we'd call Apple irresponsible to not be doing this.
You know what I got my parents an iPhone? To avoid having to worry about stuff.
Now I have to worry about the inevitable phone call from ‘Apple Technical Support
Freedom to use your phone however you like would make bug tracking on Apple's side more complicated and therefore more expensive and therefore it damages their profit bottom line. They would happily freeze development altogether if it was a feasible option.
This also shifts a tremendous amount of the burden for preventing system-level malware onto the app sandbox, which today is only one component of a multi-layered defense-in-depth system of notarization, entitlements, app review, etc.
To be clear I support letting people run whatever apps they want, but let’s not pretend that this won’t make the median iPhone more prone to have a malware infection (like Android). There are reasons other than anticompetitive greed that Apple does things this way (although I am sure greed is the primary motivator).
Apple doesn't instrument apps when they review them. That burden is already there, they've just convinced you otherwise.
I think it depends on the app and the entitlements. I would assume apps that request entitlements for system-level VPN apis are scrutinized more than calculators.
All they do either way is poke at the GUI and maybe watch the HTTP requests.
The real goal of the review process is to maintain control over the UX, not prevent malware. If you want to see a review process that stops malware read a Linux distribution mailing list.
And Facebook spies on users and competitors for years despite all the "reviews": https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47281906
Apple doesn't review apps the way people think it does.
The rules for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to get kicked out of the App Store are not the same as the rules for other companies’ apps to get kicked out of the App Store.
The browser itself is some kind of app store, and we run app from it all the time without Apple's review. Given this, I'm not sure why Apple and its fanboys make so much of this supposed security of the AppStore
thank fuck i dont have to deal with that shit
Not only speedy emulation, but more efficient too, since it doesn't have to struggle so much through interpretation. That would help battery life and keep phones from heating up just playing a game from 2008.
So after the EU and the UK, Japan is now putting an end to Apple's iOS alternative browser engine ban too.
Those are 3 large jurisdictions, I wonder if that's now a market big enough for Chrome and Firefox to invest into iOS versions of their browser that use Blink and Gecko under the hood. From what I heard this was one of the main reasons they haven't done it yet.
From the same website, there are still blocks put in place by Apple to discourage anyone, especially large browsers, from publishing their own engine: https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban...
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44557348
I thought in the UK, the government decided to only weakly enforce the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.
Weakly might even be overstating it. Their roadmap has all this ambitious stuff like sideloading and competing app stores and allowing apps to link to their own payments, that they are aiming to have categorized into priority-buckets by the middle of next year. This could take the rest of the decade to actually be implemented on Apple's side.
The UK is kinda trying to balance both the US and EUs commercial interests when it comes to regulation right now
I thought it was because Apple still put so many roadblocks in the way of browser developers that nobody was able to pass them.
Yeah other reasons I've heard of include the obligation to adopt iOS-specific APIs for features like scrolling and text inputs; developing a separate app for these markets and therefore loosing their existing userbase; and signing a pretty crazy contract, among other things.
But the bigger the market they can reach, the bigger the reward, and so at some point it may justify investing resources to work around those roadblocks and accept the drawbacks.
> Yeah other reasons I've heard of include the obligation to adopt iOS-specific APIs for features like scrolling and text inputs
TBH I'm fine with that. Applications, browsers or not, should use the operating system's components and APIs for things for a unified experience across all apps and interactions. On the desktop side of things, I hate when an application breaks convention for the OS it's deployed on. If I'm using macOS, for example, I want every app on my mac to look and behave like any other, consistent with the rest of the OS.
I’d say it’s even more important on mobile than it is on desktop. Third parties re-implementing things like the keyboard and IMEs are unlikely to do those anywhere near as well as the OS does, not to mention how custom implementations would break password manager integration, user-selected third party keyboards, etc.
Don't expect Apple to just open the gates and say anything goes as far as the browser is concerned. Instead, look for an Apple build of Firefox and maybe an Apple build of Chrome that you will be able to install.
Culturally, the Japanese aren't likely to care. Take a look at Linux usage in Japan to get what I mean. You will have a small but very dedicated group of users who won't change for anything, and then the masses who just use what is convenient. They don't like tweaking.
is Linux usage significant enough in any country to really make judgements about culture from?
Weird argument. Linux mostly operates in a completely different space (enterprise) from where iOS/Chrome (consumer electronics and technology) lives
I wonder if it would make more sense and be easier for Firefox to switch to Blink, working together with Google making an alternate browser engine for iOS.
It'd probably be easier but not good, diversity in engines is good here. We don't want something like the IE monopoly again.
The issue that you bringing up was more of an issue of Microsoft thinking they were finished with the web and the lack of automatic updates. It was not due to lack of diversity of engines, but of market share of a single product. This is very different from having the dominant browser engine invested in the success of the web with automatic updates to ensure that the web platform is able to advance and not stagnate.
As a counterpoint, this does make it so that one group has disproportionate power over what features make it into that engine, or how they are implemented. What if their incentives change over time and are no longer aligned with what we might consider the success of the web?
Then it can be forked because it's open source.
The problem with forking Blink/Chromium is that in order to be able to counter Google, the organization maintaining the fork is going to need dev manpower on the order of Google’s to be able to keep up with upstream patches, which is prohibitively expensive for all but a handful of orgs (not to mention, skilled talent capable of working on web engines doesn’t grow on trees). Without that any fork that differs substantially from mainline is eventually doomed as the divergence grows and overwhelms the team.
It does not take the same order of engineers for only integration. That is false as you can see by the existing integration teams for forks that exist. And I'm sure Mozilla is able to find talent capable of working on web engines.
There are no Blink forks with appreciably large differences yet, though. In the aftermath of Google turning “evil” and working against the better interests of the web in multiple ways, you’re looking at a fork with divergences as large or larger than those that prompted Google to fork Blink from WebKit, making integration of patches from mainline Blink a full time non-trivial job.
Personally I’d rather see Mozilla working on Gecko or maybe consider switching to Servo or something instead.
The software is very modular. I don't see what could make it so hard to remove "evil" modules.
Monopolies are bad regardless. It’s similar to dictators — even if you have a “good” one that works in the interest of the people, that can all come crashing down and turn to despotism in an instant.
In the case of the web, it’s also bad for any single company to have as much influence as Google has on web standards development. There’s simply too much conflict of interest at play. As a web engine developer they should have some amount of sway but if any party is to have disproportionate power it’d be better if it were an org like Mozilla that’s more likely to give issues like privacy and potential for abuse greater consideration.
Hahaha - as a European there is already a monopoly, a US based monopoly. But that's really due to the compliancy of europeans tech industry.
Is it even worth investing in? It would require massive capital spend and the ongoing costs to stay afloat would be similarly high. There is little to no certainty to believe you could acquire users or a revenue model either. None of the chromium derivatives have managed to gain traction other than edge. It seems wiser to invest in the next platform rather than ones with big players already in the space.
Not really, that boat has sailed.
It was just funny reading an American suggesting that a monopoly in the browser space would be bad ;)
Also, as a European, I can also say that a monopoly in the social media space would be bad but there is always TikTok or are they French?!? /s
Today I was asked to give permission to transmit my personal data to Google Maps to view my train route. I wondered why they didn't use Open Street Maps. Systems exist, but the people with the money don't care to use them.
My new phone is full of many more libre apps than my old phone.
> to switch to Blink, working together with Google making an alternate browser engine for iOS.
How is switching to Blink, a Google-controlled engine, supposed to help creating an "alternative engine"?
Because Blink is an alternate engine to Webkit.
Fully controlled and developed by Google.
So what would Firefox (or anyone) gain by Firefox ditching their engine and helping Google?
I was suggesting Mozilla could help with the development. Firefox gains an engine that has a lot of other engineering hours being invested into it that can fulfill their needs.
Mozilla already has an engine with a lot of engineering hours invested in it and that fulfills their need.
How does helping Google maintain their dominance help Mozilla?
Gecko doesn't support ios, so it wouldn't fulfill their needs here. Since Blink is known for being easier to embed then Gecko I think it would be easier for Firefox to move from Webkit to Blink than to Gecko.
Google's dominance is due to Chrome's market share. Using their browser engine doesn't affect their dominance.
> Gecko doesn't support ios, so it wouldn't fulfill their needs here.
Chrome doesn't support iOS either
> Google's dominance is due to Chrome's market share. Using their browser engine doesn't affect their dominance.
"Using a competitor's browser engine and thereby further cementing that browser's dominance doesn't affect dominance"
AFAIK the main reason is that only the EU+UK cared about these rules and their market share is too small for companies like Google or Mozilla to invest into.
Because of the way the App Store works, browser engines segregated by region need to be two different apps. That means maintaining two source trees (EU+UK+JP vs worldwide) and two releases with two reviews.
I expect niche browsers to have a go at porting to iOS at some point (I'd love to see a project like Ladybird be the first non-Safari browser on the app store!) but for the major companies it seems like too much of a hassle at the moment.
Yeah that's why the bigger the market they can reach with a version using their own engine, the more likely they are to invest into doing it.
Now the question is what's the threshold for this market to be big enough? Maybe Japan's joining in pushes it past that point.
> the determination is made based on the degree of likelihood that [it will prevent alternative browser engines]
If you interpret that very liberally, doing a region-locked "you can release alternate browser engines but only regionlocked to japanese apple accounts" could be seen as intentionally preventing alternative browsers from existing.
Why would mozilla port firefox when it can only target a tiny fraction of its users?
I know it's not super realistic, but maybe there's a path to global browser choice in there.
> oing a region-locked "you can release alternate browser engines but only regionlocked to japanese apple accounts" could be seen as intentionally preventing alternative browsers from existing.
That's one of the things Apple has been doing with EU
Partly because the EU law's phrasing wasn't as "I'll know it when I see it", and partly because apple seems to not care about the spirit of the law and just want to exploit its users.
The japanese law's phrasing is apparently better, but I kinda expect apple to still ignore it and then drag whatever comes through court as long as possible
My understanding is that Gecko has already been ported to iOS.
It's still a huge amount of work to support two ios builds for such a small audience. Also, the prototype they had no has jit because apple makes targeting ios a moving target (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1904546), and it has never been polished enough for end users.
Not having JIT is a showstopper on the modern web where most sites take more javascript than all of windows 3.1 and word perfect combined.
To increase their already tiny fraction of marketshare by another tiny fraction?
To be fair a tiny fraction of marketshare can represent a very attractive level of revenue depending on the market
We thought the same when the Slovenian government passed a law requiring Apple (among others) to translate their operating systems to Slovene. Apple was the outlier here, as Android, Windows, even various Linux distros had all been translated years ago. To the surprise of many, they complied, releasing a full translation of decent quality in a stunningly short time.
The market they'd otherwise lose access to would be roughly 2 million people. The Japanese population is over 60 times that. I don't think they want to risk losing that.
> I don't think they want to risk losing that.
It depends on the cost.
Translating the OS to Slovene really just costs whatever a translation service costs, plus review & a bit of ongoing maintenance. Even on the high end, I doubt it would push 8 figures up front, and probably 6 in yearly maintenance.
If compliance with the Japanese law means every iOS build in every region must support alternate browser engines, what's the cost to Apple? They clearly must believe it's high (otherwise they would have done so already). Brand risk? Maybe, and hard to price that, but at Apple's valuations and revenues that could be 9+ figures depending on severity. Loss of revenue from Google (if they still pay to be the default search engine in Safari)? That could be a large number too.
It all comes down to the numbers. How much will Apple lose by pulling out of Japan (possibly betting on such a move being temporary, hoping Japan changes their mind, and also hoping that their reputation worldwide doesn't suffer) vs allowing alternate browser engines worldwide?
> Why would mozilla port firefox when it can only target a tiny fraction of its users?
Mozilla is used to only a tiny fraction of users anyway. Why would this be any different? It could also be a chance to release a version for QA by the users before the rest of the market opens up.
Comparing all "tiny fractions" as if they're identical is nonsense.
"Why wouldn't apple make an iphone mini even though it only targets a tiny fraction of people? They already only target a tiny fraction of the living animals on earth because they don't make iphones for fish"
The reality is that japan is less than 5% of iphones, and mozilla has to focus it's limited resources.
Also, if mozilla's, mostly US based, developers can't run firefox on ios, they can't even build it in the first place
But this would be a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.
Is this a good thing? Doesn't this just expand the marketshare of Chromium?
Safari is not a good browser, by design, because it's in Apple's interest to cripple the Web as a platform. If they want their browser to be actually competitive instead of forcing people to use it, they should make a good browser. That is markets working as they are supposed to.
Counterpoint: Safari is by far the best mainstream browser, because it's got the only engine that gives half a shit about battery life, and because they push back on shitty features Google wants to make "standard" so they can trash my UX and the computing ecosystem even more.
Counterpoint: Your whole narrative is just Apple PR talk in disguise.
If Safari were even remotely close to being "the best mainstream browser" as you claimed, it would manifest itself in Safari capturing a dominant market share i.e. people would naturally gravitate towards Safari without Apple forcing it upon users. Apple would also invest much more into Web technology, but they don't have any interest in doing that since it would threaten their App Store business model.
"Pushing back on features" translates directly to "preventing web apps from becoming a viable threat" and none of this is about UX, which is just one of the convenient pretexts to make Apple's devious and self-serving behavior more palatable. No matter how often Apple shills try to rephrase and euphemize it, anyone who has recognized Apple's conflict of interest in this regard will see through it.
FWIW, Mozilla seems to share the same sentiments about many of the standards that Google has been pushing for. They may have different incentives, but Apple does not sit alone on every one of their views.
Mozilla doesn't have a multi-billion dollar App Store creating a direct conflict of interest. Their motives aren't comparable. A few overlapping concerns don't refute the primary evidence of Apple's self-serving behavior. The key decisions that hobble web apps and protect the App Store moat are specific to Apple's conflict of interest.
Of course there's conflict of interest. I'd prefer we address all the things their actions motivated by that conflict of interest are shielding me from before we smack them down, though. After that, yeah, I'll take up a pitchfork, too.
For now, they're my AnCap-approved optional private enforcement regime against a bunch of the antisocial and market-capturing behavior of the rest of tech, since public regulators are asleep at the wheel. I'd much prefer real, very aggressive (by modern standards, if not historical) enforcement of meaningful consumer protection, standards mandates, and trust-busting across the board, but this is the only option I've got (aside from "just use less tech, and far less-usefully")
All hurting them now does is hand more control of the tech ecosystem to Google.
Meanwhile: yes they in fact have the best mainstream browser, and it's not even close.
My initial suspicion of you being a bad faith actor who is just regurgitating "Apple PR talk" has been proven true.
1) Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813704 you regurgitate the classic Apple propaganda of "web apps are akshually not 'real' apps" - what makes apps 'real' for Apple propagandists is clearly when everybody is forced to pay Apple 30% tax.
2) The hallmark of the irrational Apple shill is also how increasingly bizarre and contradictory the apologia in defense of the trillion dollar company's anti-competitive business practices becomes, as you've just proven: "private enforcement regime against a bunch of the antisocial and market-capturing behavior of the rest of tech" - what kind of absurd logic is that?
Apple should be allowed to break the law according to you, so they can pretend to oppose something they are also guilty of themselves!? Then you disingenuously claim that "I'd much prefer real, very aggressive enforcement of meaningful consumer protection, standards mandates, and trust-busting across the board, but this is the only option I've got", but that's clearly not the "only option you've got" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... ) since you are literally opposing the other option by fighting regulators through spreading of disingenuous talking points in defense of Apple's unlawful business practices.
You've got some serious biases sending you some weird places in evaluating my posts.
> 1) Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813704 you regurgitate the classic Apple propaganda of "web apps are akshually not 'real' apps" - what makes apps 'real' for Apple propagandists is clearly when everybody is forced to pay Apple 30% tax.
Yeah, that's my opinion on every platform, including back when I used Android. It's my opinion on Void Linux. It's my opinion everywhere, whether or not Apple's getting a cut (why would I possibly care that they make more money? Hell I'd love for them to have actual competition in their specific niches, to put downward pressure on their profitability, as far as their actual products they sell go). I've come to it through extensive engagement with the Web and various native ecosystems over decades, as both a user and developer. Webtech is a steaming pile of ass. It's so bad it makes the prior standard-setters for "steaming pile of ass" in its field look good. If I were somehow made Dictator of Technology for the World by a wish-granting genie, I would ban web apps, flat out (and do a lot of other things that would make market-distorting massive tech companies, including Apple, very sad)
> Then you disingenuously claim
Frankly, fuck off. You're being a dick for absolutely no reason. That's the flat-out truth. I could wrap that in HN-friendly passive-aggression, but screw that, you need to chill the fuck out, to be blunt.
Accounts like these have me wondering if Apple marketing has some guerrilla marketing branch to spam the internet.
>You've got some serious biases sending you some weird places in evaluating my posts.
You are talking about a "serious bias" after spamming the same debunked Apple propaganda, with a 5 days old account? lol.
>> 1) Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813704 you regurgitate the classic Apple propaganda of "web apps are akshually not 'real' apps" - what makes apps 'real' for Apple propagandists is clearly when everybody is forced to pay Apple 30% tax.
>Yeah, that's my opinion on every platform, including back when I used Android. It's my opinion on Void Linux. It's my opinion everywhere, whether or not Apple's getting a cut (why would I possibly care that they make more money? Hell I'd love for them to have actual competition in their specific niches, to put downward pressure on their profitability, as far as their actual products they sell go). I've come to it through extensive engagement with the Web and various native ecosystems over decades, as both a user and developer. Webtech is a steaming pile of ass. It's so bad it makes the prior standard-setters for "steaming pile of ass" in its field look good.
Well your opinion is biased nonsense and conveniently regurgitates propaganda designed to defend anti-competitive business practices. Web Apps do an excellent job despite being actively sabotaged and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about since your rhetoric is drenched in misinformation.
>Frankly, fuck off. You're being a dick for absolutely no reason. That's the flat-out truth. I could wrap that in HN-friendly passive-aggression, but screw that, you need to chill the fuck out, to be blunt.
I get that you're not used to getting called out on your dishonest and manipulative rhetoric, but you should have anticipated that before spamming the same debunked Apple propaganda for the 1000th time with a fresh account, because you know that it's bullshit propaganda.
Oh stop this fake incredulity. You're shilling for Apple and did such a bad job of it that you were found out while your account is still green. Take it on the chin instead of lashing out. Better luck with your next shill account.
>Meanwhile: yes they in fact have the best mainstream browser, and it's not even close.
You have lost all credibility. I mean, you had very little to begin with using a 5-day old Apple-shill account, but now you have zero.
Safari is the absolute worst browser, by far, approaching Internet Explorer levels of wtf. On iOS it implements touch gestures completely differently than other browsers, because Apple does what Apple wants - forcing developers to buy a real iPhone just to debug their shitty browser. Their lack of webAPIs is absolutely to push developers to their App store - and I know this first hand because I have a web app that works on every other browser but Safari due to its lack of APIs. So if I want to support apple, I have to pay them for the privilege to develop said app, as well as pay them to buy their hardware to develop and test the app. Fuck all of that. I don't have to do that for any other browser or platform.
Humans aren’t perfectly logical. The free market and the best options rising to the top is made up liberal hegemony propaganda.
There's a grain of truth to it — Apple has learned from Microsoft's history that making the whole browser shitty is too obvious and annoys users. Apple was smart enough to keep user-visible parts of the browser in a good shape, while also dragging their feet on all the Web platform features that could endanger the App Store cash cow.
I don't want web apps on my phone (or, in an ideal world, anywhere else) so that's also a good thing. If they're not viable, it forces developers to make real apps or else just make a web page instead of whatever awful-UX nonsense they were planning.
90% of real apps are 95% web views. Let go ahead and be for real. Even on desktop most apps are Electron these days.
>I don't want web apps on my phone (or, in an ideal world, anywhere else) so that's also a good thing. If they're not viable, it forces developers to make real apps or else just make a web page instead of whatever awful-UX nonsense they were planning.
Well what you personally want is irrelevant to the law and what regulators judge to be unlawful, so that's the real good thing.
>If they're not viable, it forces developers to make real apps or else just make a web page instead of whatever awful-UX nonsense they were planning.
They are perfectly viable and it has nothing to do with UX, but you have already exposed your bias and made clear that you are arguing in bad faith by spreading misinformation in your other comments.
I remember there was a time years back when there were "light" variants of apps, usually intended for underpowered or older Android phones, but that also came in handy if you were in a situation where you had shitty cell service, or if you needed to preserve your battery. You could run the Opera Mini browser on a trash phone and it was blazing fast without wrecking your battery. Maybe 5% of sites would have a rendering issue, but you could always switch back to your main browser if you needed to use it.
Nowadays, I think the trend is more toward putting a battery-saver or data-saver mode inside an existing app, rather than creating an entirely new app, and I don't see any reason why Apple couldn't do something like this in Safari if they wanted to.
Counterpoint: Safari uses more battery than Chrome while providing less functionality: https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...
What is your argument that Safari is not a good browser?
Using market forces to encourage more consolidation into a single engine is *bad*.
> What is your argument that Safari is not a good browser?
https://ios404.com/
Safari is missing many performance and device-related features that would allow you to create a compelling web application and bypass the App store.
I tried once, you run into the most unexpected roadblocks and come to the conclusion "I have to release this as an App." Well... guess why.
About a quarter of that list is stuff I don't want a browser futzing with... volume control, autofocus, background sync (assuming this has huge battery implications), WebUSB, WebNotifications, and a few others.
That said, about half the list appears to be stuff I don't care about one way or the other. At least not without spending way more time researching those CSS elements than I care to invest.
And I'd be totally fine with an "Allow Alternate Browser Features: Y/N" setting or similar, as long as it defaulted to the current behavior (locked down Safari only).
> About a quarter of that list is stuff I don't want a browser futzing with... volume control, autofocus, background sync (assuming this has huge battery implications), WebUSB, WebNotifications, and a few others.
Yeah, looks like a nice checklist of things to turn off to me…
About half that list is marketing for why I use Safari instead of something else on my laptop.
Half those are genuine missing features; the other half are the things I'm glad Apple doesn't implement because websites would use them (or I'd be spammed with permissions dialogs).
Several of the 'missing' features listed on that site are contentious e.g. WebUSB
> What is your argument that Safari is not a good browser?
Safari is often the hold-out on implementing features[1] that would be useful to users - presumably because it would make web apps viable on iOS, and compete with App store apps where Apple takes a 30% cut
> Using market forces to encourage more consolidation into a single engine is bad.
Competition on a level playing-field is not bad, even if you dislike the superior product (as determined by the free hand of the market.)
1. If memory serves: various APIs useful for PWAs were delayed or kneecapped on Safari
> What is your argument that Safari is not a good browser?
It doesn't support Ublock Origin.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44795825 ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44796762
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44804921
Safari is often regarded as the "new Internet Explorer" by front-end developers because of how much is unsupported or has to be worked-around...
> markets working as they are supposed to.
Where Apple is doing everything they can to make that “market” work in their interests instead of as it is supposed to from a user perspective. And when you don't have a choice, it's not really a market either.
It's funny, I prefer to use Safari on iOS instead of native apps because I have more control over shaping my experience (through user scripts and custom css) and Apple's focus on user privacy which may be all lip service, but at least it's part of their talking points; something I don't see with Chrome.
I'm sure Safari sucks to support for web developers and is missing a lot of cool apis, but I'm willing to take those tradeoffs for the increased privacy I get as a result.
That being said, I do think Apple should allow third party browser engines.
It does indeed. Safari on iOS is the one thing keeping the web from just being "All Chrome Everywhere".
Haven’t you heard? The web is dead. It’s now called the Chrome Platform. The standard is defined as whatever Google implements.
> Chrome Platform.
The West's Internet is just Cloudflare's proxy.
The government can solve that, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...
Yup. That's the downside of it. I am personally quite torn on the issue.
On the one hand Apple must be made to open up iOS more.
On the other hand it just leads to Chrome monopoly.
Then attack Chrome. There isn’t a moral conundrum here.
Yes exactly. As much as Apple needs to open iOS, Google needs to be forced to stop pushing Chrome through every avenue it can. No more cross-promotion, no more bundling Chrome into random Windows program installers, no more use of APIs that favor Blink browsers, etc. Google has sucked all the air out of the web engine room through these things.
I look forward to the Open Web Alliance being as critical of Chrome and it's many tracking capabilities as they are of Safari…
They won't. OWA are unapologetic Chrome shills, going as far as calling many of Chrome-only non-standards "essential" and saying that Edge is a completely different browser than Chrome
I attack Chrome often. Even in this discussion to the post
>On the other hand it just leads to Chrome monopoly.
If a browser engine continues to exist not on its merits but because its users are locked in, there is zero value in it. If 100% of people switch to chromium based browsers (an open source project) while they have free choice that's how it is. There's nothing inherently wrong with this.
We don't need browser engine DEI. Even the term monopoly is spurious in the world of open source software. Say if in 30 years we have 100% linux market share because open source won, do we need to protect Microsoft so they can lock people into Windows, like some sort of endangered animal program for proprietary software?
There's an inherent contradiction to apply the competitive logic of proprietary platforms to fundamental OSS infrastructure. They'll tend to be natural "monopolies" just by virtue of how resource intensive they are and the desire to standardize.
> contradiction to apply the competitive logic of proprietary platforms to fundamental OSS infrastructure.
Chromium is controlled and developed by Google. And it's dangerous to have fundamental infrastructure in the hands of one company. Here's a reminder what they did with Android: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-...
They can do nothing to Android because as the article points out Samsung or the entirety of China and the billions of other people in the world will just work on a fork and that will become consensus. If you have one company acting as the dominant player in an open source project, the fact that everyone else can walk away puts an implicit limit on what they can do.
To literally take Chromium as an example. Look at Google's manifest v3 changes. Brave and all the other chromium based browsers just put their own ad blocking shim on top and they're fine.
> billions of other people in the world will just work on a fork and that will become consensus.
Yes, yes, billions of people will work on the fork.
> To literally take Chromium as an example. Look at Google's manifest v3 changes.
That literally changed nothing in Chrome dominance.
> Brave and all the other chromium based browsers just put their own ad blocking shim on top and they're fine.
You mean: they literally just slap a skin on top of a Google-developed project, do no actual browser development of their own (do they even participate in web standards?), have vanishingly few users and are likely hemorrhaging money?
You'd be able to use proper Firefox there. And it is a good thing, it weakens Apple's malicious control over Web standards (sabotage of using SPIR-V for WebGPU is Apple's fault).
You've missed the point. Once the restriction on which browsers can be used is lifted, people won't be switching to Firefox in vast numbers. They will be switching to Chrome. Just because someone is able to use Firefox does not mean they will use Firefox.
May be not, but currently they can't switch to anything at all. So it can't be worse than it is already. Let users decide what they want to use instead of deciding for them. Just the fact that you could use alternatives will already put more pressure on Apple to behave.
Basically it's not an argument at all against forcing Apple to remove that ban.
If Safari can only survive because Apple has a monopoly on browsers on iOS then it's a shit browser.
Firefox is overall a fine browser. Still has 2% marketshare.
There's also the fact that websites themselves need to be mindful of multiple browser engines existing because of Safari. Once users are able to install Chrome on iPhones, developers will just abandon every other engine wholesale.
Google has been bombarding Firefox users with "Upgrade to Chrome" notices on their properties. Google kept having "oopses" that blocked browsers based on User-Agent strings, rather than capabilities.
Google also plays "fire and motion" with Web standards. They have a tendency to use non-standard(-yet) features on their websites. This gives them a perfect excuse to make other browsers look technically inferior (when the features are missing or the browser is blocked) or slow (when the features are implemented using inefficient polyfills). The unfairness is the one-sided choice of using whatever cutting-edge or Google-specific feature Chrome has, while they'd never do this in other direction. If Firefox implemented a new feature first, Google would never tell Chrome users that Chrome sucks and they need to upgrade to Firefox.
> Once users are able to install Chrome on iPhones, developers will just abandon every other engine wholesale.
This is the thing that is most concerning. We’ve seen this happen before. We ended up with an Internet Explorer monoculture that paralysed front-end development for over a decade. Huge numbers of developers were happily writing Internet Explorer-only websites and didn’t care about any other browser at all. There’s a real danger that this ends the open web and turns it into a Chrome platform controlled by Google.
IE was bad because development stopped for years and nobody could use modern web standards without supporting IE.
> Firefox is overall a fine browser. Still has 2% marketshare
Firefox used to have a 25-30% share before Mozilla shat the bed by neglecting it while treating Firefox like a money-piñata to fund a series of dead-end, copy-cat projects in their big-tech cosplay era.
Blaming Chrome for Firefox and Safari being shit (as reflected by the percentage of users who voluntarily use the respective browsers) removes their culpability. Chrome had to grow their share from 0%.
Chrome did that three ways: 1) performing better and crashing less than mainstream alternatives (just IE and Firefox, then) on non-Mac platforms (so, most desktop computers) for a good long while; 2) aggressive advertising to trick people who don't actually give a shit what browser they're running (or even know) into downloading it because "google said it would make my gmail work better" or "I dunno, google just told me to download this so I did"; and, later in the race, by 3) being the default on most Android installations.
One of three major factors involved actually being good, and I'd bet the other two factors overwhelm that one.
Many people have memory-holed Chrome's malware-grade tactics like including an installer in unrelated sourceforge downloads and now think that Chrome won strictly on its merits.
People have similar misconceptions about Google search.
The reality is that both had significant advantages over their competition when launched, but the company also used anticompetitive tactics to ensure dominance once those gaps closed.
I forgot how often individual webpages could take down your entire browser! On Chrome, it'd just crash the perpetrator tab. Chrome was also fast - really, really fast. Even if one was "tricked" into using it, you wouldn't want to go back to using other browsers - they put in the work.
> One of three major factors involved actually being good, and I'd bet the other two factors overwhelm that one
Counterpoint: Microsoft Edge on Windows has the same 2 factors going for it, but failing to replicate Chrome's ascendancy. Edge and Windows pleading with you to not install Chrome is kinda sad.
Edge (and basically every other browser besides Safari and Firefox) is a chromium fork though, so even though it only has like a 5% market share, it's still bumping up the engine's overall market share.
My point was that Chrome didn't win on marketing alone (as disproved by Edge dismal numbers). That said: browser marketshare metrics breakout the "brand" and not just the engine: for a long time, Chrome's rendering engine was downstream of Safari's WebKit before being forked outright as Blink.
That Microsoft abandoned Trident for a Chromium fork speaks volumes on the amount of innovation and engineering effort Google poured into Chrome/Chromium - I don't understand how it can be controversial to suggest that Chromium wins on its merits. The gaggle of browsers opted to fork Chromium rather than WebKit or Gecko because Chromium is best-in-class.
I agree that Chrome won mostly on merit, but I think it stays winning on inertia and marketing. There's just not that big of a difference now to the end user when using Safari or Firefox vs Chrome based browsers in my opinion. Safari's performance is fine. Let's not forget that Google retired their public benchmark suite because V8 wasn't beating JSC.
I can't say the same about the Trident based Edge though, it just wasn't as nice to use.
> The gaggle of browsers opted to fork Chromium rather than WebKit or Gecko because Chromium is best-in-class.
If I was making the decision to make browser, and finances were on the line, I'd pick Chromium just because other people have already done it. If I was doing it for fun, I'd rather just contribute to Ladybird.
I can't believe you unironically believe that popularity and quality are correlated.
Being mindful of alternate browsers means nothing. If that were true, more people would not be using Chrome on Android or on desktop.
I have no idea what you're trying to say
Even if Safari was perfect, people would still switch to Chrome because that's what they think they need.
The only reason why Safari is "shit" is because web developers are too lazy to develop for the web and instead develop for Chrome. The point of the web is that it's an open standard. Expecting everyone to use the bleeding edge version of the most aggressively feature-laden browser isn't just unreasonable, it's counter to the spirit of the platform.
Microsoft got into trouble for pushing Netscape users over to Internet Explorer, but what they did isn't half as evil as the dark patterns Google is using to get Chrome and other Google apps onto the few devices left which don't have them.
It's IE6 all over again. But worse.
> The only reason why Safari is "shit" is because web developers are too lazy to develop for the web and instead develop for Chrome.
Safari is only available on Apple devices, Chrome is available everywhere. Let's not pretend that laziness is the only reason why Chrome has the largest marketshare.
> The point of the web is that it's an open standard. Expecting everyone to use the bleeding edge version of the most aggressively feature-laden browser isn't just unreasonable, it's counter to the spirit of the platform.
I don't expect Safari to be the bleeding edge. I just expect the features to work. Lets take for example: IndexedDB
- IndexedDB was first brought up in two propsals in 2009/2010 - IndexedDB was available for pubilc testing in early 2012 by Firefox and Chrome and was released for both browsers unprefixed in late 2012. - IndexedDB was "released" for Safari in late 2014. However:
1. The released version was so bad and buggy that it basically didn't work at all.
2. It essentially broke all the websites/web-apps that were using it, and there was no easy alternative to use. The affected websites/webapps had to essentially be rearchitected and remade or just plain shut down.
3. Apple had no interest in fixing it which essentially poisoned the feature for all developers. It was so egregious it was actually used in the lawsuits against Apple their monopolistic app store practices, which eventually led to the EU to create their new sweeping anti-trust regulation changes for app stores and browsers.
- IndexedDB didn't have a working release on Safari until mid-2016 and didn't have the industry standard "last two major version" support until late 2017.
That means we had developers affected by IndexedDB's poisoning for about 5 years.
---
So by my earlier request of "I don't expect Safari to be the bleeding edge. I just expect the features to work.", Safari completely and utterly shit the bed. They shit the bed so bad it helped lead the EU to create new anti-trust regulations.
And that was just Apple trying to meet a standard feature.
And if you thought the IndexedDB debacle was over, they broke it again. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27509206
---
Let's not even get into Safari breaking other features. I'd rather not type all this out: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
Safari being Apple-only only has the appearance of a problem when the only alternative is one browser that happens to be almost everywhere. Again, the point of the web is to be an open platform, not the placing at a single corporation.
Chrome has plenty of problems but nobody cares because when Chrome doesn’t support something properly, no one uses it.
I agree that Safari is not perfect either. But let’s assume for a moment that nothing is going to make Apple invest more into WebKit than they are already. Which of the following worlds would I prefer?
1. WebKit remains the exclusive browser on iOS devices. The bleeding edge of the web doesn’t advance quite as quickly. A tiny number of developers who don’t already have access to an Apple device have to spend literally tens of dollars buying or inheriting 5+ year-old devices in order to test on a diversity of platforms.
2. Blink becomes available on iOS and Google continues use dark patterns to trick users into installing their browser. A small but non-trivial number of developers start assuming that everyone uses Blink/Chromium, and end users no longer have a choice of browser.
I’m sorry, I forget, isn’t the whole point about giving people a choice of browser? Because some people on Hacker News have some fairly dystopian blinders on and don’t actually care about user choice, they’re just lazy arseholes who don’t want to deal with an open web and resent having to test in more than one web browser.
Between these two alternative futures, I’ll pick number one every time, no hesitation. The open web is far more important to me than developer convenience.
> Chrome has plenty of problems but nobody cares because when Chrome doesn’t support something properly, no one uses it.
The difference between Chrome and Safari not supporting features is that Safari is developed by one company (Apple) whereas Chrome is developed by two (Directly by Google and indirectly by Microsoft). So Apple can have an incentive not to add a feature and end up harming the entire industry. But if Google has an incentive not to add something, Microsoft can still add that thing anyway (and vice versa), we only need one actor to act good for their not to be harm caused.
> 1. [...] A tiny number of developers who don’t already have access to an Apple device have to spend literally tens of dollars buying or inheriting 5+ year-old devices in order to test on a diversity of platforms.
This is flat out wrong.
One Safari is not equal to another.
You need to buy one of each device because Safari will change how it works across different devices.
Example 1: Safari adds depth touch to some devices which adds weird box overlays around parts of the website while the user is trying to use it, which blocks the content and interferes with which elements are supposed to be interactable unless you add special webkit-prefixed rules (e.g. -webkit-touch-callout, -webkit-tap-highlight-color, etc...) to different parts of your pages.
Example 2: Safari adds different buffer areas around their browser which you need to test with (using the env() css function) on each device with a different screen to make sure content isn't flowing off the screen or elements are being cut off at incorrect spots when they're supposed to flow past the edge.
And so on...
Apple keeps adding device specific ways of breaking websites.
Furthermore, each device can only run one version of Safari. Every time a new version comes out, you need to upgrade your OS to get the new version of Safari. And you also can't downgrade your OS to get the older version. And because some users can't upgrade and others won't, you need multiple of each device running each one on a different version of the OS to test correctly.
We have to spend 1000s of dollars each year on new devices just because Apple keeps inventing new ways of breaking things.
-----
Side question: But what about just buying a mac and running the iOS Simulator to test different versions of Safari on different devices?
It's no good, the iOS Simulator is a simulator, not an emulator. So the bugs that are on the device are not the same as the ones in the simulator.
-----
So out of your two options, what will happen is:
Some users will switch to Blink/Chromium and find that things start working better. That will start to build up a reputation of Chrome/Edge/etc... working better than Safari.
Meaning Apple will need to invest more money and effort into improving Safari.
Meaning Safari will be improved.
So either users start migrating to a better browser, or Safari improves to the point that it isn't a problem anymore.
I'm going to set aside your rather mid-tier developer criticisms of Safari, and I'll refrain from vomiting out verbiage of similar problems developing for Chrome, which nobody cares about because Chrome is what web developers think the web is. Chrome is seen as the standard whereas lazy minds desperately try to dismiss Safari as an inconvenience.
Your analysis is flawed at the core because you persist in making the same logical error which mid-tier web developers always make. Only web developers choose/change browsers because another one is "better". Ninety-nine percent of everyone else doesn't choose/change browsers, or if they do, it's because they were unwittingly exposed to an external influence, e.g.
1. Dark patterns (e.g. as employed by Microsoft in the 1990s, or Google in the 2020s);
2. Herd mentality ("my Son told me to use Chrome instead");
3. Because a website is broken (because the developer stubbornly refuses to believe that any web browser exists other than the bleeding edge release of Chromium)
And sorry but I just laughed when you said you need to spend "1000s of dollars each year on new devices". The only people who might need to do that are large corporations which already spend 1,000,000s of USD each year on developer salaries. A one-man team needs, at most, one desktop Mac made in the past 8 years ($200–1000 every 3–6 years) and one iOS device made in the past 5 years ($100–500 every 2–4 years). And that's assuming they don't already have either or both of these. And that's assuming that you're trying to do very complicated things. Most web developers shouldn't be doing anything that would break on a 10-year-old version of any major web browser (with the exception of TLS root certificates).
As an independent web developer with a Mac and iPhone, I begrudgingly buy and maintain a Windows computer and an Android phone, but you don't see me bitching and moaning about that, even though it's exactly the same thing.
No, it's not different because you're "forced" to acquire a new or used Apple product. As a developer, you are "forced" to acquire a reasonable spectrum of products based on what your audience is using. You are "forced" to test in Chrome. You are "forced" to pay taxes on income. You can wish the world was different, but wishes don't change practical realities.
Japan has a funny relationship with Apple. For example, the Felica ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa ) based ticket system is built into every iPhone globally, making life in Japan significantly easier for foreign iOS users. More surprisingly actually using the tickets does not require any app at all - you just use Apple Pay.
This is all narrowing the scope of what advantages native apps have (they do still have advantages), but it's hard to argue they simply aren't moving gatekeeping to other areas.
FeliCa Networks support is the direct result of the fact that mobile transit and mobile payments use in Japan predates the iPhone. Mobile Suica and Osaifu-Keitai already existed, and Apple needed to compete. It started with Japanese SKU iPhones but expanded globally.
Even now in Japan, mobile payments are anything but a monopoly. When Apple is forced to compete, they do things like add Suica with Express Transit. PayPay, a made-in-Japan QR code payments app is more prevalent than credit card payments here.
Android phones don't support it globally so saying that Apple is "forced" to compete where Android doesn't proves the point that they're doing more than needed.
Just because you can provision Felica cards outside of Japan doesn't mean that you can actually use them. It's not really global support if you can add Suica in the US and then not use it. More likely is that Felica Networks agreed with this logic and Apple is only paying the license fee for JP devices, or has some side deal about not delineating between regions. If Apple didn't support Felica, it would just move more users in Japan onto physical cards or Android.
Felica cards work worldwide on iPhone, there is no limitation that the phone is in Japan to use them.
On recent US SKU iPhones — don’t know how recent —- you can add a Suica card directly to Apple Wallet annd use it anywhere the physical card is accepted. No weird regional deals.
It is only accepted in Japan.
Which isn't Apple's problem to solve...? I'm not sure what your point is.
If a Suica reader existed in the US it would work.
Which btw is a shame. JRE would make a bank if they enabled it for Tap to Pay on iPhone worldwide.
Other transit cards are available in Apple Wallet!
iPhone just wasn't going to exit the curious gadget status and become a first class citizen in the Japanese phone market without it. Same for emoji support and flick inputs and lots of those little things.
They were never forced to compete in the sense that no one is forced to be first class citizen anywhere. Apple just wanted to be by its own free will. That's technically correct.
Android have those features in Japan but not worldwide. iPhone has them worldwide.
But that part is on Apple. They could have made it Japan SKU exclusive. It isn't solely because it's their policy that an iPhone is universally an iPhone and there will never ever be Verizon backplates or brown box CostCo specials with plastic backplates. No one else cares, so everyone else make FeliCa enabled versions as Japan specials.
FeliCa is simply a patent issue. Apple got some sort of sweetheart deal somewhere.
Every Google Pixel has FeliCa its just turned off on non-Japan phones due to said licensing, though people have rooted the phone to turn it on.
Apple having such a dominant hold of market share in the smartphone space gave a lot of leverage when negotiating royalties with Sony who makes the felica stuff. From what I heard it was basically just gifted to them, because if Apple says no we wont support it, then you lose a huge amount of users. Whereas with other manufacturers they pay on a per device basis tracked by the underlying osaifu-keitai stuff. If you are rooted though it is usually just 1 flag or something you need to change. Been using my US Pixel 6 for years daily on my commutes.
https://github.com/jjyao88/unlock-felica-pixel
Japan has higher iOS market share (64%) than the US (59%) or the UK (47%) or Europe (34%).
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/japan
* in Japan. Apple has made it clear that they are willing and able to only allow consumer choice if they are in the jurisdiction where they are required to. I live in Norway, so I’m not able to sideload apps, because Norway, despite usually being lumped in with “the EU” is not actually part of the EU, and thus not covered by the EU ruling.
(Narrator) In one year Chrome market share hit 100% in Japan, and became the only browser websites are designed for.
You're completely ignoring the staying power of defaults. Most users do not change anything about their system defaults.
Small percent of sites will start breaking down in Safari, making small percent of users switch to Chrome. Process will start slow but will only go in one direction, and accelerate.
Apart from ChromeOS, most desktop operating systems default to other browsers. Yet Chrome is estimated to have ~70% of desktop browser market share. So defaults can't be much of a defense against browser advertising, especially on Google-owned properties.
I found the power of "It can be done" amazing. One country does it, everyone else thinks "It can be done, we don't want to be left behind" after 20 years of this being impossible.
We've got to assume that Google have internally been developing "real" Chrome for iOS for a long time, so that it'll be ready to go immediately, right?
Google has been porting Blink to iOS and making steady progress. Here's the tracking bug on Chromium's bugtracker: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40254930
Presumably they would have invested more resources into it and been done by now, if there was a viable path to release, which there isn't yet due to Apple's EU geofencing, and because there were a number of bugs and limitations in Apple's BrowserEngineKit which browsers are forced to use.
February 2023: "Google begins effort to run Chrome’s Blink engine on iOS in place of Apple’s WebKit"
https://9to5google.com/2023/02/06/google-chrome-blink-ios-we...
(Blink is the Chrome web rendering engine)
> Checking out and building Chromium for iOS
> Building Blink for iOS
> The iOS build supports compiling the blink web platform. To compile blink set a gn arg in your .setup-gn file. Note the blink web platform is experimental code and should only be used for analysis.
> [gn_args] > use_blink = true > ios_content_shell_bundle_identifier="REPLACE_YOUR_BUNDLE_IDENTIFIER_HERE" > ios_chromium_bundle_id="REPLACE_YOUR_BUNDLE_IDENTIFIER_HERE"
> Note that only certain targets support blink. content_shell and chrome being the most useful.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/i...
For reference, here's Apple's requirements for browser engines in EU: https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
I think this is a net good in the long term. Even if you completely exclude obvious benefits, like being able to support more APIs than Safari, it forces Apple to actually compete with other browsers and implement things if they start getting real market share.
Not that you really should, but Safari has a limit of 500 tabs. Why? It's arbitrary. Safari doesn't support WebRequest in blocking mode, so you can't have real adblockers (just MV3 style content blockers, like uBOL). There are all sorts of edge cases too, like if you want cross-browser sync and extensions. Sure, you can totally run Safari with extension support, but extensions in e.g., Orion are shaky at best.
The biggest claim that Apple made about this whole thing was that web browsers offered an attack surface increase as a result of giving JIT to other browsers, and they could be owned. Frankly, though, I would take a browser without JIT if I had a real adblocker.
Yes it's arbitrary. But it's not a limit of 500 tabs, it's 500 per tab group.
Hopefully EU can make the same requirements, and hopefully Firefox can port its engine to iOS
The EU did make these requirements, Apple ignored them, the EU made Apple pay a big fine, and Apple put out some token process for browser engine approval that's not actually possible to pass but looks to bureaucrats like it meets the requirements.
Not being able to run firefox is the only reason I don't use an iPhone.
What does Firefox give you, I mean what are the benefits? Some extensions that only work in Firefox, I guess? This is the only annoyance I'm aware of but it's real.
ublock origin is a necessity for browsing the web. Not having it is more than an annoyance for me.
There's a lot of nonsense buried in safari and webkit. For example, loading certain URLs will deep link to on-device apps. If you surf to amazon urls in the browser, the amazon app will be notified. I'm pretty sure this is unblockable snooping people don't realize is going on.
So I think this is great news, maybe we get rid of nonsense like that.
However, I'll bet apple will make this japan specific just like eu laws don't affect their behavior in the US.
For example, a japanese iphone will always make a sound when you take a picture. If you leave the country, that will go away, unless you're in airplane mode and then it will start making sounds for every picture again. country-specific behavior.
I don't see why apple wouldn't do the same thing -- firefox works in japan, but not outside japan.
How about smart TVs?
Oh, finally someone treats this issue right.
Big victory for poor little Google with its 70% browser marketshare.
Hope you guys like Chromium!
Im not sure the Japanese government will survive to December so this could change
This is good news, the US should join in aswell in stopping this despicable behaviour by Apple. Apple handicaps browsers because web apps are the only viable alternative to Native Apps which generate huge commission for Apple.
It's a factor in the DOJ antitrust case that's going to trial soon -
> 43. Developers cannot avoid Apple’s control of app distribution and app creation by making web apps—apps created using standard programming languages for web-based content and available over the internet—as an alternative to native apps. Many iPhone users do not look for or know how to find web apps, causing web apps to constitute only a small fraction of app usage. Apple recognizes that web apps are not a good alternative to native apps for developers. As one Apple executive acknowledged, “[d]evelopers can’t make much money on the web.” Regardless, Apple can still control the functionality of web apps because Apple requires all web browsers on the iPhone to use WebKit, Apple’s browser engine—the key software components that third-party browsers use to display web content.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544... (p22)
More likely because otherwise companies would have no reason to support Safari, they'd tell everyone to download chrome like they do on desktop - then google would have no incentive to optimize chrome for iOS because what would you use otherwise?
Finally, Japanese will experience popups, location requests, notifications and constant tracking along with battery drain and zero days as glorious first party android users. IOS don’t need more spyware in form of chrome or firefox. If you need it, get spydroid with ios theme.
to anyone who believes this is good news: enjoy your chrome monoculture in a few years when apple stops developing safari
If we get there maybe it'll lead to a culture of something beyond "people on iOS don't truly use Chrome so I guess it's not really a problem worth doing anything about yet".
Ideally, the next step is for the US FTC to break up Google. This will probably have to wait until 2028, but it could happen earlier — it doesn't seem to be hard to get on this administration's bad side.
If I was worried about a chrome monoculture I would want Safari to face competition. Apple has more then enough resources to invest in it.
if chrome ever ends up with a majority browser share on ios/ipados, apple won't have any way to keep up. at this point, google already almost 100% controls web standards, and they can push new features (no matter how privacy-hostile or overreaching) without even allowing apple the chance to keep up. at that point, the incentives for apple to keep developing safari would slowly dwindle away.
(oh, and gecko is a joke, especially on mobile - no need to even bring it up)
> (oh, and gecko is a joke, especially on mobile - no need to even bring it up)
What is the issue with gecko? I am using it every day on my smartphone.
Gecko works just fine.
Apparently the IE lesson was lost on newer generations.
ugh... so much pain and time trying to get pages to look nice on that decaying pile of bits. I was overjoyed when those sneaky veternan engineers at YouTube put up their banner: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
Apple's Safari is unfortunately not keeping away the Web from being a Chrome monoculture.
It's the only reason you don't see a lot more broken websites on Firefox, which would drive its market share even lower.
Lots and lots of Web development projects target Chrome, then make sure it works on Safari. In that second step, they accidentally fix a lot of bugs that'd show up on Firefox, too.
Not a lot of them are bothering to check Firefox directly these days. Hell, a decade ago it wasn't making the test list in tons of cases.
Yeah, Firefox is on life support.
Apple is the only thing keeping web standards in place. Many vendors we work with only support Chrome, including Chrome... on iOS. Which means because on iOS that's just Safari, the website has to meet web standards. So we know thanks to Apple, it'll work on Firefox!
Soon as this happens, Chrome is the web. The OWA knows this, it's their goal, it's an astroturf outfit.
Yes, I see your point. Apple and the Safari lock-in might be a bad thing, but doing that away will only result in Chrome everywhere.
Can you please elaborate on what your point is here? Previously you've made comments in support of opening up the Apple ecosystem, but now it seems that you're no longer in support of the idea after a sudden realization that opening up the platform to everyone means that it's also opened up to Google?
Very specifically: Safari is a critical lynchpin for Google's control of the web and we need to be extremely careful how we address it. A more open Apple ecosystem would be wonderful, I'm strongly in favor of sideloading and third party app stores. Both companies need to be heavily regulated, but the "Open Web Advocacy" idiots are just trying to push a Chrome monoculture, and it's important we do not accidentally make one monopoly worse while addressing another.
Ideally, Google will be broken up and forced to divest Chrome (this is in progress, but at the speed of the US federal government, so could be a decade if it succeeds), and then we can require Apple to remove their browser ban. Doing this out of order will destroy the web as we know it.
What? Safari is the IE of today. It is the browser that holds the web back the most.
Chrome is the IE of today: It's the single platform developers are developing for instead of web standards. The fact developers have to support Safari, a least common denominator, is the only thing protecting the web.
Safari being the least common denominator is promoting the monoculture of Chrome.
If Safari were more competitive, more people would use it.
I disagree. Safari is safer to use than Chrome, because Chrome implements antifeatures at a breakneck pace which introduce tracking and security vulnerabilities. Choosing not to implement a feature is as important or more than implementing one.
I'm not a Mac user, but I wish I had Safari on desktop as an option today.
> I'm not a Mac user, but I wish I had Safari on desktop as an option today.
Webkit browsers do exist on other platforms. They're far and away the best-performing sorts of actually-usable (in terms of supported Web features and ability to render real pages in the wild—sure, lynx works, but...) browsers on low-end machines, should you have to use one, to the point that they may be viable on a machine that's otherwise basically incapable of using the modern Web at all (which confirms for me that there's some fundamental, deep-down plumbing reasons behind why Safari's so much better on battery life than Firefox or Chrome-based browsers)
None of them are Safari and I can't vouch for how they are as daily drivers long-term, but it's nice to have one semi-up-to-date engine around that still kinda works on bad hardware (and by "bad" I mean still several times stronger than my workhorse many-tabs-browsing multi-tasking machine circa 2003—you'd be amazed how strong a machine has to be these days before trying to use the Web at-all normally in Chrome or Firefox is anything but terribly painful).
Chrome-only non-standards are not "web progress". And refusing to implement those non-standards doesn't hold back the web.
You underestimate the power of the default setting
Normally, I'd agree with you -- defaults are a very, _very_ powerful thing.
But if you're using Google's web tools, they make it (too) easy to download their apps and push you in that direction in a million little ways. For example, GMail's native iOS app will either open a link in a WKWebView or Chrome (if it's not installed, it'll prompt you to install it), but you have to jump through some hoops if you want to open a link in the system's default browser. Similarly, if you're searching for something via google.com, they'll put up a prompt to download their search app, with the default "Continue" option taking you to the store rather than continuing with your current task (and then click-jack the back button).
the default windows browser has somewhere between a 5% and 13% market share. i think you're the one overestimating the power of defaults here.
The only real chrome alternative is Gecko.
if you hate privacy, want more ai in your browser asap and don't care about battery life and performance, yeah, sure!
This doesn't make sense. How is firefox bad for privacy? It's the only browser that supports proper adblock. No idea what you mean by more ai.
Less battery life is something I'm willing to live with if it means I can run a browser that does what I want.
Lol Apple is too prideful to do that.
Prideful? Possibly.
But what's for-sure is that Apple is hugely profitable. And that browser control is a relatively important part of that profitability. Plain old greed will give Apple ample motive to keep Safari going.
Personifying corporations of thousands (or nations of millions) as if they had driving emotions such as a single person would have is almost always a grave logical error.
I use Brave. Just fork it.
The way Google handles the Chromium source (one big Git monorepo that's undergoing near-constant refactoring) means anything that doesn't want to hard fork is limited to bolting on a new UI and features around the core rendering engine -- but anything inside that core rendering engine won't be long-lasting.
So Brave, Arc, Dia, Edge, et al., all add their own sauce on top of Chromium, but none of them can make changes like back-porting Manifest V2 back into their Chromium.
Brave is also contributing to the Chrome monoculture, same as how the Android forks are contributing to the Android culture. The base projects are so large that no team will do a proper job updating it if, or when, the source project stops being open source. They are entirely beholden to the original developers, and they will also merge whatever change the original developers do, as the cost of maintaining a fork is big enough as it is, without breaking changes.
I do appreciate these being open-source. But there must not be an illusion that these large projects being open source means that "just forking" works. A culture is much more than a repository.
Hope they don't do suspicious stuff again again again then.
good for you. you're still supporting google by using a chromium-based browser
Anyone can contribute to chromium. It's an open source project so improvements and popularity benefits everyone, not just Google.
The main issue with Chromium is not that it's not that it benefits Google.
The main issue is that it's so mainstream, it strongarms standardization bodies making them ineffective.
Chromium is so mainstream that developers think developing for other browsers is irrelevant, even putting notices of deprecation for Safari and Firefox.
W3C is on the brink of irrelevancy, because if it works on Chromium, why bother with the others? if W3C cannot enforce the standard.
EDIT: Typo
> Chromium is so mainstream that developers think developing for other browsers is irrelevant, even putting notices of deprecation for Safari and Firefox.
Hugging Face's spaces does this, throwing banners saying it only supports Chrome. Makes me throw up a little bit every time I have to switch over.
i kind of agree - although all of this does end up indirectly benefitting google. while the project is open source, they're the ones maintaining the project, and believing that they won't do anything they think they can get away with to grow their power and influence is extremely naive.
if safari dies, firefox won't be far behind, and by then there's no way a fork of chromium will be able to "keep up" when google starts pushing chrome-only features, killing ad-blockers etc etc etc
(not sure if any of this matters, though. will there even be any real people left on the web in a 5 years?)
How has chrome abused there'd position? Generally from what I've seen most of their standards are sane and improve the web.
I was told they were breaking adblockers, using ublock lite which complies with the changes I don't notice a difference. And even this change I could have switched browsers it didn't break the web.
There's some pwa features only they support, and that's a feature I think could actually benefit me.
Chromium is in such position that their implementation of new elements and APIs set the de-facto standard for the Web and Safari and Firefox have to follow suit.
This overpowers the governing body (W3C), where they have to accept it and pretend they remain relevant.
A bit of history: When Internet Explorer was the dominant browser of the Internet, other browsers existed and their usage was in healthy proportion, among each other. People could choose whatever browser they wanted and be sure its browser engine was independent.
When Chromium/Chrome came in 2008, it changed the game to what we have today: 85% Chromium-based browsers, 8%-10% Safari/WebKit and 2%-3% Gecko-based browsers (Firefox)
Whatever Chromium does, others have to follow suit. The bulk of the userbase is there (unfortunately). No real choice exists for a governing body to effectively apply standards.
The ability to contribute and the rights granted by the license are two separate issues. Google isn't obligated to accept and is more than likely to reject patches that don't align with its incentives (reversal of recent anti-adblock changes, removal of telemetry/spyware, etc.)
I think you mean ChromeOS Platform.
> This results in no effective browser competition on iOS, and web apps being deprived of the APIs and performance they need to compete with native apps.
To my eyes, the regulators hit the nail on the head here. It's not about other browsers, it's about keeping the iPhone browser crummy so the app store and the 30% Apple Tax stays humming along.
good. DISMANTLE APPLE
You clearly do not understand the product if you buy an iPhone and then complain about its walled garden.
Sweet, WebBLE and WebUSB on iOS let's go.
Of all the things that iOS could do, why browser engine is so important? Is there anything to them other than UI nowadays, especially on small form factor?