I’m going to ignore the security angle and post my big fear.
Chrome has dominance similar to IE at the height of its popularity.
Whatever you think of their decisions, Apple is the only thing stopping a 90%+ Chrome web. (Note: not why they’re doing it, just a side effect)
People keep arguing Apple is being anti-competitive. But no one seems to recon with the possible consequences of what they’re asking for. And I fear we may get a pyrrhic victory if these groups/governments keep pushing.
No, I don’t know a good solution. But I don’t think letting Chrome totally own the web is a good outcome.
On the other hand, this denies me from using an actual Mozilla Firefox web browser on iOS.
Imposing an artificial limit on iOS isn't how the web will move forward.
> Whatever you think of their decisions, Apple is the only thing stopping a 90%+ Chrome web.
I don't see Apple making any effort to diversify the browser ecosystem by making their browser available on other operating systems, so their inaction on other fronts isn't going to reverse the trend either.
> On the other hand, this denies me from using an actual Mozilla Firefox web browser on iOS.
It denies you from using Gecko. You can use an actual Mozilla Firefox web browser on iOS.
A semantic nitpick that is totally irrelevant. Most people on this website usually mean Gecko when they say they want to use Firefox.
Let's not pretend all of HN is a hive mind. I for one thought that Firefox the browser had chosen not to be on IOS because to they couldn't use Gecko. This is new information to me.
So no, using the proper names for things is not a semantic nitpick. The commentator didn't not try to invalidate the parent's point, just show the language issue.
Really? You mean people don't use Firefox because:
- it protects what's important
- you can "Personalize your experience with new colorways."
- has Facebook Container
- syncs across your devices
Mozilla knows the actual engine isn't the deciding factor when trying to get people to change browsers.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
You're on about regular Firefox, not iOS Firefox which is just a UI wrapped around a WebKit component.
All of those features are possible on iOS via webkit.
Regarding mobile browsers specifically, their advantage over Safari here is blocking cryptominer scripts and autoplay videos: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/mobile/compar...
But that's not the point-we want gecko and we want it to be good!
Adblocking only works* on vanilla Safari. I haven't gotten it to work on Firefox for iOS.
* For some degree of "works", ublock origin is way better
iOS as blocking isn't anywhere near as powerful as Firefox extensions, not what it will eventually need to be.
The colorways were an antifeature to me (seriously what's the point of introducing a feature when you're already planning to drop it 2 months later) and I'm still waiting for real containers on mobile (the fb one is useless to me as I don't use Facebook) but the other features yeah they're great
If you’re going to nitpick, you can run Gecko on iOS. I see two ways that, according to the letter of Apple’s rules, would be legal:
- don’t allow it to browse the web (https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines, section 2.5.6: “Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript”)
- compile Gecko to JavaScript and run it in Safari.
If you serve the compiled Gecko from a web server I don’t see them stopping you from doing the second, but of course, it would just be Gecko, not FireFox, and performance ‘might’ be somewhat subpar.
The Mozillians don't think actual Firefox is available on iOS and neither should you.
You can read Mozilla's submission about the #AppleBrowserBan here: https://www.regulations.gov/comment/NTIA-2022-0001-0131
"actual" Firefox absolutely means using their engine.
The average consumer doesn’t know the difference nor care. They want to open webpages and have them work.
There is a difference. Gecko might implement features that would allow sites to work and look better in Firefox (for example, smoother scrolling, better animations, new CSS/HTML/JS features and so on). But Apple doesn't allow other browser engines, and Firefox cannot use this as an advantage to compete with Safari.
Also, if Apple allowed other browser engines with better support for new features, then web developers might stop caring about supporting Safari. This might be another reason why Apple doesn't want other browsers on their devices.
Apple wants to make sure that all websites work on their phones out of the box the horror.
Like take the alternative world where the first thing you have to do after setting up your iPhone is installing Chrome because developers found it less effort to just target Chrome. Are we better off?
Plenty of webpages don't work in Safari because Safari doesn't ship the APIs that other browsers have been shipping for years.
Safari is my primary browser day in day out.
The only pages that don't work in it are developed by people who believe that Chrome-only APIs are standard.
Like web push. Supported in both chrome and firefox for ages. But apple not interested because it can replace apps with web pages.
https://developer.apple.com/wwdc22/10098
Yup. When you ask people "what exactly so horrible about Safari", WebPush is inevitably the number one thing, followed by a bunch of Chrome non-standards like hardware APIs.
Truly, truly a horrible browser that is impossible to use (even though I've been using it for over 10 years now)
web workers is an example of a standard api that only got implemented (partly) recently. they are more examples like ths
You mean Web Workers that were available in Safari since version 4?
Or Shared Web Workers that were originally implemented in Safari version 5? No idea why they got removed to re-appear later, and I honestly can't care: I prefer browsers to be careful with standards than just rush forward.
Why is it that these "examples" are never actual examples?
Right, so you can use a Firefox-themed safari, nothing "actual" about it. Coming from Firefox on Android to Firefox on iOS, I can assure you the experiences are in no way similar. The main reason I even use Firefox on iOS is for the sync integration. I honestly can't think of another thing that Firefox is able to do on iOS that makes it "Firefox" at all.
> On the other hand, this denies me from using an actual Mozilla Firefox web browser on iOS.
At the same time, most desktop computer users are able to use Firefox and we can see how often they choose to do so.
According to stats from GitHub, 12% of their traffic is from Firefox. 3x more than Safari.
https://github.blog/2022-06-10-how-we-think-about-browsers/
Of course this is just part of the story. In every country it's different. In some EU countries Firefox is up to 20%. In UK it's almost non-existent. Local markets shape the browser support. If a few major websites are too lazy to support a browser properly, users will leave, and then others can say "there are no users, so we can stop supporting!".
GitHub visitors are definitely not a representative sample of the web browsing public.
Absolutely. Including the 2% from Python scripts :P
Those are probably running headless chrome though
It's more traffic than Safari, but Firefox also runs on platforms like Windows or Linux and has disproportionately large mindshare among open source developers. Give how much higher that number was 10 years ago, I think this counts in support of the original point: Google has poured a ton of effort into promoting Chrome and “accidentally”[1] offering a worse experience for other browsers in their site and nobody other than Apple seems to have been successful at resisting this.
1. Whether this is an overt policy or simply choosing to skimp on testing, it's a choice.
Ran into a fun Google bug today: on the default macOS Safari install, Google Drive refused to download a folder once it had more than about a dozen files. It would go through the entire “zipping the files up” step and then mysteriously fail at the end, blaming cookies (?).
The workarounds are to use Chrome, download files in tiny batches (much fun with 500 photos in the folder), or work out through trial and error that Google wanted the Safari tracking prevention disabled before it would download a file.
> most desktop computer users are able to use Firefox
Desktop-using software engineers can write software for desktop users in a ton of different ways. There's so much freedom and there exist multiple mechanisms and platforms to deploy your code.
Desktop-using software engineers are not free to choose how to deploy software to mobile audiences. They've got to go through Apple to reach 50+% of the US market. Apple sets unreasonable rules.
Unfortunately, Americans spend most of their time computing with mobile devices now. We've been forced into this situation.
Both Apple and Google have made our industry worse and more locked down than Microsoft in the 90's and 00's, and they both deserve to the the target of smartphone and browser antitrust lawsuits.
> Apple sets unreasonable rules.
How? As a user I’m able to do the things I want with reasonable guarantees of privacy and security. Most developers that release iOS software seem to be doing ok with those “unreasonable” rules. And the user benefits. If I wanted Android, I would have bought Android. I bought Apple specifically because I see value as a user to those unreasonable rules.
>Most developers that release iOS software seem to be doing ok with those “unreasonable” rules.
Surely given survivorship bias that means very little though?
If you did a survey today of living people you'd discover a 0% death rate, clearly humans are immortal.
As a user the harms are invisible to you. If you'd like to find out how it harms consumers, businesses, developers and the web, please read our regulatory submission "Bringing Competition to Walled Gardens":
https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20Bringing%20Com...
Isn't the main argument is the user choice? if I as a user chose what the comment you are replying said, then what is the problem?
Yes users should be free to choose whatever browser they want and the gatekeeper shouldn't be allowed to interfere with that.
That is not my point. I mean the point is that many people who chose to own IOS did that because of privacy and security it provides as the current apple ecosystem. It is like choosing a private school with a restrict rules and code of conduct over another private school with more open rules (options) since you pay for your phone anyway.
or they could just be choosing the prettiest glass and metal rectangle
without data, we can't assume either of our justifications are what go through buyers minds
Sue user choice. But some times less choice is better. If every website prompts for push notifications my dad would end up throwing his phone out the window in anger if he started getting notifications because a website updated. My parents have no clue what they are doing on a phone. The less features the better.
But users don't have a lot of choice. There are two options, and I don't like either of them.
> As a user the harms are invisible to you.
Why would you post a document refuting your own point?
I explicitly do. not. want. my web browser to have access to the bluetooth and NFC APIs. Nor the screen orientation lock and full screen APIs. I absolutely do not want website notifications.
I don't know how to be more explicit. Those are things developers want. Those are not things users want. And no amount of gaslighting about invisible harms is going to convince us that what you want is what we want.
In the world you're describing, the future of technology is owned by Apple and Google forever. They got there first, and they'll forever be the victors.
They can tax it. They can starve the entire landscape of innovation capital and prevent other companies from ever growing large. They set the rules, and they have enough human and financial capital to keep the game going forever.
That's not good for capitalism, the free market, entrepreneurs, or innovation. In the ten years since smartphones came about, we've seen a contraction of other forms of computing. A contraction in the number of smartphone manufacturers, too! The world is worse for it.
This type of duopolistic advantage also creates a system where Apple and Google can grow close to governments and become a surveillance and control apparatus. That's scarier than anything a developer could do to slight you.
The status quo is great for Apple and Google shareholders, but bad for those trying to innovate and those wanting personal freedom and privacy.
Almost all of computing connects to these two companies now, and that's a fragility that benefits these two giants to the rest of our detriment.
> I explicitly do. not. want. my web browser to have access to the bluetooth and NFC APIs. Nor the screen orientation lock and full screen APIs. I absolutely do not want website notifications.
Easy enough to turn all of these things off. You're describing a setting.
> Easy enough to turn all of these things off. You're describing a setting.
Can you turn off all of these in Chrome?
I can turn it off on Android and MacOS. I would imagine iOS has a similar setting to MacOS for letting an app use Bluetooth.
> That's not good for capitalism, the free market, entrepreneurs, or innovation
Google Play puts $50 billion into devs’ pockets, and Apple App Store delivers another $85 billion. Mobile gaming puts another
“Overall independent app developers’ average monthly revenue is $1,500, medium-size company developers make $7,500 a month and large studios developers teams generate on average $44,000 monthly.”
Seems like capitalism is hale and healthy in this duopoly.
https://www.businessofapps.com/app-developers/research/ios-a...
> I absolutely do not want website notifications.
I don’t understand why everyone is like OMG apple is crippling iOS they don’t have push notifications on safari.
God the last feature I ever want on safari is push notifications. I want less notifications. Not more.
See, your link identifies you very uncharitably as a Google shill.
Both Firefox and Safari are against most hardware APIs for many reasons including technical ones. Only Chrome is reckless enough to enable them even though no consensus has been reached on them.
Those specs are nowhere near to being standard. They are "Draft community reports". And yet you list them there as if they were standards and as if Apple absolutely had to implement them for greater good (and not because the dominant browser implemented them)
Edit. I can't even begin with the laughable "Edge differentiates from Chrome" because it removed a few Google-specific things like Google Pay.
It’s hard to take comments from someone who doesn’t believe in the Web or Web Apps seriously. If you start from a position that Web Apps should not be able to compete on mobile devices, then our viewpoints are so diametrically opposed there’s really nothing to argue about.
OWA was formed to ensure that mobile Web Apps become viable, if you disagree with that as the premise, all the best.
> It’s hard to take comments from someone who doesn’t believe in the Web or Web Apps seriously.
Ad hominem is not as good as argument as you want it to be.
> If you start from a position that Web Apps should not be able to compete on mobile devices
If you start with ascribing thoughts and words to your opponent that your opponent never thought or said, you're not arguing in good faith.
> OWA was formed to ensure that mobile Web Apps become viable, if you disagree with that as the premise, all the best.
That is literally not what I said. However, you can't even see beyond Google's propaganda to understand what I wrote.
Our group was initially formed by a group of people who develop for iOS Safari on daily basis. We have an exceptionally detailed understanding of the bugs and functionality issues of the browser. The only reason google is in the conversation at all is their browser along with Firefox and Edge has vastly better functionality and stability.
We’re trying to fix real world problems caused by anti-competitive behavior. Any debate needs to start with the premise that web apps are not competitively viable on iOS and that Safari is in a poor state.
Then the next step is to discuss potential solutions.
> Our group was initially formed by a group of people who develop for iOS Safari on daily basis.
Yes, you keep copy-pasting that. As if that absolves you of factually incorrect statements.
> We have an exceptionally detailed understanding of the bugs and functionality issues of the browser.
And yet you fail to understand that hardware APIs are opposed by BOTH Safari AND Firefox. And yet you include them in your lists as if they were actual standards that Safari absolutely must implement. They are not. Same for a bunch of other Chrome non-standards.
In a recent discussion it turned out that you didn't even know what actual objections BOTH Safari AND Firefox have against them.
Same for pretending that Edge is different from Chrome because it removed Google-only services from it. It's not. It's a re-skin with very minor modifications.
You've listed over thirty things that Edge removed from Chrome to make a "different browser". Can you name 10 or 5 of them that are actually relevant to actual web?
Your entire OWA isn't arguing in good faith and is basically parroting Google's propaganda word for word.
> Any debate needs to start with the premise that web apps are not competitively viable on iOS and that Safari is in a poor state.
No. Any debate in good faith has to start with discussing the state of the open web and Chrome's utter dominance of it. As the top comment rightly said, "People keep arguing Apple is being anti-competitive. But no one seems to recon with the possible consequences of what they’re asking for." [1]
Should Safari be better? Yes. Should it be "better" by blindly implementing whatever Google throws over the wall and gullible developers eat up as if it was heavenly manna? No.
> Then the next step is to discuss potential solutions.
Breaking the web forward: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31895335
The issue is you are focusing on the specific APIs as a strawman argument which would require us to argue each and every API on its individual merits something neither of us has time for.
Instead let’s focus on the core issues: 1. Severe underfunding of Safari 2. Bugs 3. Install Prompts/Banners 4. Push API
1. Apple has no incentive to fund their browser while they are not at any risk of losing market share to the competition on their primary OS.
2. Because of the underfunding and the fact users/developers can’t shift to other browsers, bugs that are either impossible to work around (or require a very high level of skills) have not been fixed. Some which were reported 7 years ago.
3. Users do not know web apps exist. They have no way to install them.
4. Notifications arrived for native apps in 2009, in 2022 they still are not available for web apps even though they are essential for many different types of apps. Apple has promised them in 2023 likely as a result of our advocacy work.
Without a viable web ecosystem on iOS mobile web apps are dead and the entire ecosystem gets shifted to native apps and webkit applies no competitive pressure on chrome/edge or Firefox. The status quo is the worse case scenario.
The fix for this scenario is competition. With a 60% market share on MacOS (the on my comparable market where Safari is the default), as long as apple meets developer needs then I can’t see them losing a majority market share on iOS.
A highly funded Webkit be able to contribute to the web ecosystem instead of holding it back.
> The issue is you are focusing on the specific APIs as a strawman argument
I focused on some APIs I know about. There's nothing strawman about facts that you misrepresented in your diatribe. How can I be sure that you represented everything else correctly?
Oh. I can't. Because I also saw your section on "Edge differentiation".
Should I go through everyting else and discover same misrepresentation and falseness? I think I won't, these two are quite enough, thank you.
> Instead let’s focus on the core issues
You keep skipping from goal post to goal post, and each next argument you make isn't made in good faith.
> 1. 2.
I'm not even going to dignify this speculation with an answer
> 3. 4.
And again and again all comes down to literally one or two standards. That's it. That's all you really have.
Well, sometimes you have more, but then it's just a random dump of random standards that you are absolutely sure are actual standards (and not "Draft comunity reports" by Google) and that everyone must implement them now.
> Without a viable web ecosystem on iOS mobile
Please define a "viable web ecosystem". So far it looks like to you "a viable ecosystem" is "anything that Google implements, others be damned".
> web apps are dead
Yes, they are dead. For many reasons that have nothing to do with notifications.
> The fix for this scenario is competition. With a 60% market share on MacOS
Yes. Let's talk about competition. There is none, it's fully dominated by Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31905404
Oh wait. You don't really care about that.
> A highly funded Webkit be able to contribute to the web ecosystem instead of holding it back.
Webkit is contributing to the web ecosystem, and isn't holding it back. For the obvious reason that your definition of a viable web is taken straight out of Google propaganda, and has nothing to do with making the web viable.
Pointless discussing if you can’t agree on any of the basic factual points.
> if you can’t agree on any of the basic factual points.
Factual points I started with:
- Both Firefox and Safari are against most hardware APIs for many reasons including technical ones.
- The section "Edge differentiates from Chrome because it removed a few Google-specific things like Google Pay" is laughable
Your "response" is, "oh, you don't believe in web apps" and "Our group was initially formed by a group of people who develop for iOS Safari on daily basis".
These are not factual points. These are attempts to dodge a conversation. And when the conversation seemingly starts happening, it's "the facts you provided are not facts, they are strawmen".
Yes. It truly is pointless discussing this. There are many, many, many issues we can discuss about Safari. With people who have done their research and don't willingly assume the role of Google's propaganda amplifier. Thankfully, as the comments to the original link show, more and more people are starting have a more sober outlook on what's happening.
as an observer, most of your responses to valid, good faith points (e.g. "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response") seem to indicate that you are arguing to argue, rather than to come to clarity with the other person. Also, they are pretty rude (for reasons beyond the above one), and seem to me to be against the spirit of HN commenting.
tl;dr if you think your dignity is above responding to someone, don't.
Sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31907602
That one doesn't really have a substantive response either.
Just as an example: do you believe web apps are currently treated by apple in a lower tier than native apps?
if so, do you think they should be n-class citizens, where n is the same class as native ios apps?
if you do not, then I can see why you do not personally want the things that come with it, like your other conversation partner said
> Just as an example: do you believe web apps are currently treated by apple in a lower tier than native apps?
Does this have anything to do with anything I said in my thread? No. So, this question is not in good faith, so why should I engage with it?
> if so, do you think
Do you think that ascribing thoughts and words to your opponent that your opponent never thought or said is a good argument?
It doesn't matter what I think or what I don't think when my argument literally began with finding incorrect arguments made in actual bad faith with no research in the "paper" made by OWA. Both you and OP couldn't care less, and you both try to deflect with "do you believe blah blah blah".
I could go with a not-so-fine-comb through the document and point out every misrepresentation, incorrect assumption and outright lies. I picked two. What followed is now open for the world to see.
1. Safari is full of bugs
https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20Bringing%20Com... (Section 5.6 and 5.8)
2. Safari is missing core functionality and significantly lags behind Firefox and Chrome / Edge. Sections 5.3 5.4
If you want to focus on specific functionality, then the ability to install a web app (Section 5.4.3.1 and Section 5.4.5 go into that in detail).
For evidence that Safari is significantly behind Firefox and Chrome/Edge see 5.4.1.
>Does this have anything to do with anything I said in my thread? No. So, this question is not in good faith, so why should I engage with it?
You clearly don't understand what "good faith" is, and certainly are not an unbiased judge of it, being 1 of the 2 people involved in the accusation. It means asking because you are legitimately interested in the answer. It does not mean "I, as self-appointed judge of this discussion, unilaterally deem your question irrelevant". Indeed, if the question and answer are actually irrelevant, you can trust the smart posters here to be the judge of that, so you need not fear answering truthfully and candidly.
In any case, _I_ am legitimately interested in the answer, but even without my admission, you are supposed to assume good faith on this forum (HN), versus your current, combative, antagonistic, almost litigious (OBJECTION, RELEVANCE! SUSTAINED, I RULE IN MY OWN FAVOR!) attitude towards your fellow posters.
>Ad hominem is not as good as argument as you want it to be.
you are the one who called him a google shill.
Apple/iOS is not the only mobile platform.
A duopoly has 90% of the problems of a monopoly.
Apple and Google are 99% of the smartphone market. Together they set an unreasonable set of rules for mobile application development and distribution. They control search, advertising, and web technology, and there's little control individuals or other companies - even big ones - can exert against them.
They both need to be stripped of their extraordinary powers so that user freedom and proper capitalistic competition can be restored.
It's likely that any regulatory action taken against Apple and Google will force the companies to innovate more and become healthier themselves.
I detest many policies of both those companies, but neither company was created by the government. Are they not the result of "capitalistic competition?" Motorola and Blackberry shat the bed year after year, allowing the current situation to develop. Even while being called out on their incompetence by customers.
The companies who should be punished for anti-competitive behavior are the telecom companies. Not only do they restrict what devices can be activated on their networks, but they force Android users to wait months, years, or forever for them to dribble out a garbage-laden, proprietary version of the OS for every specific model of phone, one at a time.
And then there's the idiotic locking of phones; it's not just that it should be illegal, but it's also backward: U.S. phone companies lock the phones of people who are UNDER CONTRACT. Talk about stupid. These people are contractually obligated to keep paying, so who cares if they take their phones to another network? That's a net win for the phone company, since they're paying for NO service!
> Apple and Google are 99% of the smartphone market
Apple and Android are.
But Android is far more diverse than just Google's distribution.
I don't use FF on desktop partly because I don't use it on mobile and so can't sync open tabs, bookmarks, etc.
You can use Firefox on both desktop and mobile and sync it all. At least if your mobile is Android or Linux. And you can use ublock origin, too!
you can sync your bookmarks and tabs with the IOS version of firefox too, but no extensions.
Yes, but FF on iOS sucks precisely for the reason stated in the article.
I'm OK with extensions not syncing, I'm just thankful Firefox for Android exists and has extensions.
A competitor having a minority market share is not a justification for suppressing competition. The suppression (Apple preventing Mozilla from implementing features on Firefox for iOS that are available on Firefox for non-iOS platforms) is part of the reason Firefox has an even lower market share on iOS.
Also since Firefox for android removed one of its distinctive features a few years ago; once you could set it to ask how to open a link (send to another device, share, copy to clipboard, open normally) when an app tried to start a browser; now you can no longer do that.
I use different browsers for different things so I want to chose how to open external app links.
I would install a shim browser that does just that if I knew of one.
URL Checker is the shim browser you're looking for:
https://github.com/TrianguloY/UrlChecker
It also integrates ClearURLs functionality (https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls) to let you remove tracking from links before sending it to the browser or app. This feature is optional.
I'm not sure if it will do everything you need, but I've had great experiences with "Open Link With" on f-droid.
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.tasomaniac.openwith.floss/
"Open Link With" is indeed great for routing between different apps, but the problem remains that within Firefox you currently no longer have any choice of what to do with the link – it'll always open the full browser and open a new tab first.
Previously,
1. you had the choice of activating the "tab queue" system for links opened with Firefox, i.e. the URLs would then only be saved in a list in the background instead of launching the full browser.
2. when sharing an URL with Firefox, you had the aforementioned choice of "actually open the link", "bookmark it", or "use Firefox Sync to send the URL to some other Firefox instance in your Sync account". The latter two choices happened in the background, so you didn't have to wait for the full browser UI+engine to start first, the page to load, etc. etc.
Much more often than they choose to do so on iOS.
Apple owns their platform and not you. They aren't forcing you to choose it as a platform or telling you that you can't buy an Android phone in order to use Firefox.
In my opinion, the free market argument falls flat when we're speaking of a duopoly. The existence of one competitor whose policies are at least as bad or worse is not really choice.
Safari for Windows did exist (it was supremely terrible, IMHO). Apple says 5.1.7 was the last version of that; if versioning matches the Mac OS builds, that was from 10 years ago.
I love Safari. I tried to use it.
Garbage.
As far as I’ve ever been able to tell it only existed to help people test the fake “apps” and their sites without buying an iPhone.
As real apps were allowed and the iPhone became more popular (so devs had them for testing sites) that need went away. And so did Safari.
It’s wild to have such huge differences in experience, I bought my iPhone because I borrowed my friends and was shocked at how fast Safari was compared to mobile Chrome.
There were some limitations for third-party browsers on iOS that made them slower than Safari in the past, notably that they couldn't use the Nitro JavaScript Engine.
https://9to5mac.com/2014/06/03/ios-8-webkit-changes-finally-...
Safari on iOS (or MacOS) is a different beast than Safari for Windows.
Right. That’s what I meant. I use Safari on Mac/iOS because it’s so fast (among other things).
I’ve always assumed the Windows version ran on a port of all of Apple’s libraries on top of the Windows libraries, making it so much slower.
Much like how iTunes/QuickTime on Windows was way slower than iTunes/QuickTime on Mac.
No one is using Firefox on mobile so it’s good for you, but not web on the whole.
Also while an independent entity having a larger presence is better than Apple at least Apple having a large market share makes Google need to consider what happens in safari before they do something particularly shady with web standards
I use Firefox on Android, it works great.
Desktop-based extensions integrate pretty seamlessly, which I love
You are unfortunately part of the "no one" segment, that half a percent of mobile browser users internationally / across platforms - even less than Firefox's desktop share
You have to start somewhere
That's not where they're starting, that's where they've fallen to...
They've grown from 0.5% to 0.85% over three years[1]. I don't see how they're going to increase beyond that.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272664/market-share-held...
I know, but if you don't believe it's the start of new growth there's no point even trying :)
Today is the first day of the rest of your life :)
No, supporting Firefox is good for the whole...how do you not understand that?
If you do something that benefits Firefox, but has an outsized benefit for Firefox' competitors (or rather, anti-Firefox hegemony) and the net effect is overall worse for Firefox, then that thing that benefited Firefox was not good.
It's likely cost Firefox 100's of millions per year. That's net worse for firefox.
Also Mozilla is fighting this as well, they wouldn't unless they thought it was in their interest.
I do :) And I think it is good and you could also use addons (like uBo) which is great. More should use it on mobile.
I love Firefox for Android. It works great. It works even better than the desktop version :D
I'm the opposite. I hate it, but I use it because of ublock origin. I'm of the opinion that all mobile browsers are awful. Because of the lack either privacy, security, or UX. Can't have them all. If I could, I'd continue to use Firefox for Android 68. It had a much better UX including a tablet mode. Now the most recent version's UX is full of slow ui animations, lack of features, customization, etc. At least it has privacy and security.
> No one is using Firefox on mobile
I am No one, we are legion. Have been using FF on mobile since it became viable, many years ago. I just like my ads blocked and my data mine, that's why.
Right? Mobile web browsing is enough of a shitshow without ads cluttering everything; browsing on a phone without uBlock Origin sounds absolutely horrific.
Count me among the ones using FF Mobile. I can't imagine browsing the mobile web without an ad-blocker, and I'm happy to fight back against the browser duopoloy.
As the others, I use it too exclusively. It's a great mobile browser now.
In fact Apple doesn't even bother supporting Firefox on some sites. Case in point https://business.apple.com
That's honestly the first site I can remember visiting where Firefox mobile doesn't work.
It was blocked in Chrome too until I toggled desktop mode on.
What are they doing, blocking based on the user agent string? How mediocre. They're clearly not doing feature detection.
Yes the weird thing is that on mobile it actually mentions Firefox as a supported browser, it just says you must have the latest version. Which I do but it still won't work.
On desktop it doesn't even list Firefox as an option at all.. It's pretty annoying for me because I use that portal a lot for work and I use FF on everything. Safari is not an option for me because I use Mac, FreeBSD, Windows, Linux, Android all mixed and I need the sync.
And yeah I think they're just blocking the agent. I haven't tried bypassing it. I kinda was afraid something would go wrong (I don't want to wipe 10.000 iPhones from the portal instead of 1 - lol)
It’s funny how I’m on Safari on iOS and I’m also getting the “Your browser is not supported” error
>I don't see Apple making any effort to diversify the browser ecosystem by making their browser available on other operating systems...
What about Webkit?
Not sure average individual can take webkit source and turn it into a browser.
Forcing users to a prebuilt Webkit, that they cannot change is definitely not the same.
They used to have a port of Safari for Windows. It was as popular as you'd expect. Having said that, WebKit - the engine underpinning Safari - is open source with BSD and LGPL 2.1 compatible licensing (https://webkit.org/project/). In addition, they make the engine available for use on Linux (https://webkit.org/downloads/). Gnome Epiphany is a browser based on WebKit (https://github.com/GNOME/epiphany). According to their manifesto, they support Simplicity, Standards Compliance and Software Freedom. Specifically, "Epiphany opposes the dominance of the web by proprietary software web browsers. Today's chief offender is Google Chrome, a browser that purports to be open source, yet actually includes several proprietary components." https://github.com/GNOME/epiphany
> this denies me from using an actual Mozilla Firefox web browser on iOS.
If Chrome became as dominant as IE was then using Firefox on any platform might become impractical.
I don't think the IE comparison is apt.
IE shipped on (almost) every machine, had a ton of lock in features like ActiveX, etc. MS actively abused their monopoly position to make it so preventing default installation of Netscape by OEMs, incentivising ISVs to ensure web based enterprise products shipped with "Works best in Internet Explorer" etc. Netscape lost market share to IE not because it lost users but because while the userbase was massively expanding they were buying Wintel boxes that shipped with IE on them so they never learnt that Netscape existed.
Chrome is something users install because it's their preferred choice. We can argue as to why it's their preferred choice but the point remains that users actively download and install Chrome - usually as one of the first things they do when they purchase a new computer.
That to me puts things on an entirely different level. To compete reasonably with Chrome you need to compete for users directly. You could argue that Google abuses it's monopoly position to market Chrome and that would probably be a valid argument but again, it doesn't change the active decision users are making.
If anything Safari (especially on iOS) is more like IE. In that it serves Apple more than it serves users. Apple wants PWAs to remain gimped, by simply dragging their feet or refusing to implement certain web standards/proposals they effectively gimp PWAs. This forces apps to be written for their platform which in turn is where they generate the vast majority of their scalable growth/profit.
Chrome is installed by default in android. The choice won't be preferred choice if website starts to put message like "Works best with Google Chrome".
Websites already have to do that, because Safari still lacks a number of web technologies that get picked up faster on Chrome and Firefox.
But they can’t on mobile. Which is now a bigger part of the web.
They can on Android.
Sure they can.
"The Reddit experience isn't complete in your browser. Please download the official app to continue:"
No it isn't - that is a choice made by phone vendors to include it, but they are perfectly free to ship their phones with firefox, or opera, or no browser at all.
The android OS has no knowledge of chrome and it doesn't get any special handling or abilities like iOS/Safari.
The Android OS has no knowledge of Chrome, but AIUI the licencing for Play Services basically forces you into installing it
Samsung by default has their own chromium based browser as the default.
I am unable to uninstall Chrome from my Android phone. That seems pretty special.
Indeed. can you imagine if Microsoft had made it so that IE was the only browser you were allowed to install on Windows so you couldn't install Netscape even if you wanted to?
This would have been fine if Windows wasn't 95+% of desktop computer market share at the time. The regulatory argument was that Microsoft was abusing their desktop OS monopoly to give themselves an unfair advantage in another market (browsers).
By contrast iOS is ~50% of mobile OS market share (in the US, I think it's less elsewhere). Hardly a monopoly. If using a different mobile browser is important to you, there's a competing, popular mobile OS that can provide that.
People always say "oh you can just switch mobile OSes" as if that's as simple as walking into a Target instead of a Walmart.
Ecosystems exist. Throw away your phone and every piece of software you've ever bought for it just so you can install a particular app? Ridiculous.
> Hardly a monopoly
The specific term here would be duopoly.
And a duopoly still has a large ability to engage in anti-competitive practices that harm the market.
50% of a market is with the realm where you can cause significant harm to competition.
This logic doesn't work with just two competitors globally. What if choosing my browser isn't the only thing important to me?
If governments give corporations with such overwhelming market dominance completely free rein then developers are nothing more than sharecroppers and consumers are going to pay the price either financially, in terms of privacy or through limited choice.
Apple makes 100% of the OS options available to iDevices, and 100% of all devices that run iOS.
They also control 100% of the OSes that run iOS applications, and allow iOS purchases to be redeemed.
That sounds a lot like a monopoly to me.
Yeah, if you've chosen a contrived and extremely narrowly defined market as the one you base whether something is a monopoly, of course it's going to sound like a monopoly.
Your response fails to meaningfully address any of the points in the post it is responding to
you could have saved time and just said "I disagree but refuse to explain my disagreement"
Also: It was bad for Microsoft if browsers became too good as the Windows OS then could too easily be replaced by cheaper platforms. So Microsoft wanted to keep browsers back as much as possible.
It's good for Google when Chrome is good. So Google has a great incitament to improve Chrome. The only drawbacks would be proprietary functionality others can't use.
The other drawback is that Google is an advertising company that has an incentive to track users across the web. In a Chrome monopoly how easy would it be to avoid being tracked? Especially by Google. Recently, Chrome was the only major browser to adopt Google's FLoC[1]. If Chrome was even more dominant would it have mattered if Edge/Safari/Firefox didn't adopt this tracking technology?
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/724441/what-is-googles-floc-and-ho...
Google is an advertising company, but that's not the main reason for their privacy sandbox and it's ad-friendly features. Google needs the open web to survive as a search provider. If everything turns into a paywall or cookie/privacy wall then Google can't index that content. They already can't see the content on Facebook and Twitter.
Google makes most of their money from search ads -- I've heard upwards of 80% -- and search ads supposedly don't even use targeting information.
> The only drawbacks would be proprietary functionality others can't use.
And what proprietary functionality is that? Chromium exists and does all the same things.
Lets face it - IE always just sucked. A lot. Whereas Chrome does not. Here on HN we might rail on it mainly for ideological reasons but the user experience is pretty solid. This is coming from a Firefox user.
IE 4 and 6 were decent to good compared to competitors when released (although, IIRC, neither had ftp support?). What sucked was that they stagnated at that point in time while also becoming dominant. IE 5 for mac was well regarded, but I don't have personal memories.
None of the future IEs were very good though, IMHO.
That’s my memory. I remember IE being a great browser.
It’s only what MS let happen later that turned IE into the pariah it is today.
At the time you didn't need to ship ftp with IE. You could load up an FTP site by opening up an FTP address in explorer. You didn't get the familiar html-netscape-like interface but you could navigate an FTP site like it was just a network folder.
Do you remember the early 2000's? IE was your only choice for a decent browser. Netscape was bordering obsolescence (bad CSS support, generally unstable, slow rendering.) Even Apple was shipping it on the Mac! It wasn't until the 2.0 release of Firefox in 2006 that there was finally a decent alternative.
I started using Firefox in the 0. versions mainly because someone wrote an extension to have tabs with websites in one window. That was it for me and I use Firefox ever since. I managed to survive the memory bloat phase. I was super happy when the quantum version was released and Firefox was suddenly on par again with chrome. At least for a short moment. I‘m an iOS user because I try to keep google out of my live (need to get rid of YouTube though). I also use the Firefox app but only since iOS supports the feature to set a different default browser app. Before that it was useless to use a different browser app when any link from other apps always open Safari.
This is a pedantic and uncharitable take.
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive (or name-calling) comments to HN. If you want to say specifically what you think is correct or incorrect, that would of course be great.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you use firefox or safari, you routinely encounter sites that don't work without chrome.
I keep hearing people say this, but it's not my experience at all. I have no idea what kind of web sites they're visiting.
Pretending that just cause chrome doesn't come installed with the android open src project, means it isn't a "default" for android is silly; yes, google play services isn't required for android, but an overwhelming majority of android users will see chrome as the default for the OS. You claim they are making a choice, but for the average user it doesn't seem like much of a choice. It's easier for most android apps just to use chrome as an "in app browser", while the users have the option to use a different browser, most won't.
What? The "majority of Android users" are Samsung users, where Samsung Internet is the default. Sure, it's Chromium-based, but not Chrome.
> Chrome is something users install because it's their preferred choice.
Ah yes.
The preferred choice advertised by dominant web search.
The preferred choice that is forced by Google apps when clicking on links that actually conveniently forget about said choice.
The preferred choice when Google sabotages competition across its dominant platforms https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686
And so on
> Chrome is something users install because it's their preferred choice. We can argue as to why it's their preferred choice but the point remains that users actively download and install Chrome - usually as one of the first things they do when they purchase a new computer.
Chrome is getting bundled with a buttload of software. So many software that comes with an ‘installer’ has a hidden checkbox somewhere that if you don’t uncheck it, it will install Chrome on your windows machine.
Also Edge is now the default on Windows which is also Chromium. So a Chromium-only future doesn’t sound so distant anymore.
I think there is a big difference between engine monopoly vs browser monopoly, however that does depend on how well governance works for the Chromium project (I really don't know enough to assert anything concrete).
Namely an engine isn't a product and most value-add is in the porcelain of the browser, implementation of web standards -shouldn't- be a competitive advantage because doing leads the the sort of fragmentation that we don't want.
If all the major browsers shared and worked on a single engine collaboratively (similar to PostgreSQL and Linux) I think the web would be a -much- better place as a result for a number of reasons.
1. Aforementioned standards could be relied on by developers.
2. Browser vendors could spend less time duplicating efforts on low level standards implementation that aren't product differentiation.
3. Platform specific performance optimisation could be shared across browsers instead, i.e Safari like energy performance for everyone.
4. Plugin architecture could potentially be shared across all available browsers which would help plugin authors out significantly.
5. The engine could be linked as a dynamic library so that multiple browsers could be installed without duplicating the engine binaries if they are using the same version (probably only viable on Linux distributions but would be nice)
6. Fuzzing and security efforts wouldn't need to be duplicated across engines. This is important because of just how gnarly the sorts of code you see in browsers. Namely XML/SGML parsers, JS runtimes/isolation, etc. Also with every vendor chipping in this infrastructure could likely be greatly expanded.
This is a utopian view and most of this probably wouldn't come to pass because the world sucks at doing the "right" thing but the potential is there.
On the other hand the downsides mostly amount to Chromium governance could be bad and Google could abuse their position to make it hard to create new browsers based on Chromium/Blink. However they would be incentivised not to in order to prevent a return to the current fragmented situation.
Current theoretical way of web standards is: a standard can only become a standard if there are two independent implementations of it.
This somewhat prevents browsers from implementing fully proprietary tech that canät be replicated by anyone else. It does lead to problems like WebSQL being scrapped (the idea was to basically run sqlite in the browser, Mozilla said they donät want to reverse-engineer sqlite behaviour for an independent implementation, the idea was scrapped).
However, with Google dominance we see more and more things appearing in Chrome only and based on Chrome's own goals, and then advertised as standards.
There's an ideal state somewhere, but I don't know how we could reach it.
Yeah I think it's a difference in philosophy somewhat. PostgreSQL and Linux aren't standards, they are just shared infrastructure.
If Chromium was to become the same thing we could have just had WebSQL assuming maintainers agreed it was worth landing and maintaining.
It's not Apple's choice to make on whether or not Chrome becomes a browser monopoly - fighting anti-competitiveness with anti-competitiveness is not a solution. The chips will fall as they will and we will all be left to deal with the aftermath. That's the way it has to be.
> That's the way it has to be.
What? Why? I assure you that's not how Google thought of it when they were facing off against Firefox and IE. They were putting Chrome installers in every SourceForge download and telling you to install Chrome when you searched Google. Why should their competitors lie down and let Chrome roll over them?
For one, people still had the decision to download Chrome even if it was advertised heavily. Apple forces Safari on all their iOS users since all the browsers have to use WebKit.
> Apple forces Safari on all their iOS users…
Lots of people use non-Safari browsers on iOS (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, Brave, DuckDuckGo), and iOS lets you choose your default browser. I know you know Safari <> WebKit, but 99.99% of users don't know or care about the plumbing.
All the real browsers have been banned. Ask any browser vendor. The rest are basically Safari skins.
Again, users don’t really care about the plumbing.
Chrome went from WebKit to Blink.
Safari spiritually went from KHTML to WebKit.
IE went from Trident to EdgeHTML to Blink.
Opera went from Presto to Blink.
The identity of the browser is the chrome, ba dum tiss.
By your own definition Edge is different from Chrome because it reskinned Chrome. So, all browsers on iOS are different browsers for the same reason
Did the Chrome installers install themselves? Besides, if users were already using other browsers, installing Chrome wouldn't have affected their existing browser's functionality. It was their choice to try out the new browser, and they could always go back to their old browser if they so desired.
Yes Chrome installers install themselves. Chrome is bundled with installers for unrelated products, and you have to deliberately uncheck it to not install it. Example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antivirus/comments/on99mk/avg_antiv...
Apple was very similar in that regard as well. They were putting Safari installers in iTunes updates. People bought a new iPod and needed a new version of iTunes to sync with it? Magically they have now Safari installed.
And they were pushing it at a time when Safari for Windows was slower than Internet Explorer.
> The chips will fall as they will and we will all be left to deal with the aftermath
The aftermath could be the complete death of the open web. Unwinding that may be nearly impossible.
There needs to be a plan in place before Pandora’s box is opened.
The death of the open web as we currently know it could lead to an even better successor over time though. We just can't know if the current hill is worth dying on - it may be for future generations to solve.
Short term, it's decidedly not good, but long term? How can we know?
If the approach is so inherently flawed that this result is an inevitability, maybe it deserves to die and be replaced by something else.
> Short term, it's decidedly not good, but long term? How can we know?
History.
> If the approach is so inherently flawed that this result is an inevitability
Only an inevitability due to attitudes like yours. Please stop contributing/pushing for the end of the open web.
Man, I use Firefox for Christ sake. You don't have to be anti open web to know letting anti-competitive behaviour run rampant is even worse than having the open web that we have today.
Your perspective is as insane to me as mine is to you. Don't let a corporation make decisions about your computing freedom for you.
Anti-competitive behaviour from both sides is why we're in this situation (Apple/Safari/Chrome) to begin with.
Do you know why Safari and Chrome exist?
Safari was created so Apple wouldn’t be totally dependent on MS for a web browser. They’ve been in that situation many times before (and since). Apple is allergic to depending on someone else for something really important.
Why does Chrome exist? Same reason. Google didn’t want to depend on being at the whims of Microsoft. They wanted to ensure they would have a browser that would do what they needed.
Both existed to open the internet more from what was going on at the time.
Now people want to kill one to let the other become triumphant.
That’s what makes no sense to me.
What doesnt make sense to me are people thinking that Safari will die if Apple is forced to allow other browsers on iPhone.
Don't underestimate the inertia of defaults. Safari will still be the default browser.
A way more likely scenario is that Apple no longer will be able to drag their feet, holding the web back, but instead will actually have to keep Safari up to date and competetive with other browsers.
> If the approach is so inherently flawed that this result is an inevitability, maybe it deserves to die and be replaced by something else.
These are all systems and projects created and run by human minds. Nothing is "inevitable" and nothing "deserves" to die. These are just outcomes of choices by users, vendors, and regulators. I think many people here are advocating for choices that would keep some kind of competition to Chrome alive. You seem to be advocating for the opposite. That's not necessarily wrong or bad, but Chrome becoming a total monopoly is not "inevitable" either.
Anything COULD happen - I think it is pretty clear people here have an understanding of what would happen
Short term, the death of the open web will likely mean many real-world human deaths, because censorship by oppressive regimes becomes far simpler the fewer options people have (or are aware of) for methods to access the open web.
In my head the flowchart looks like this: Closed/censored web only -> People giving up hope/being caught trying to escape oppression -> increased human suffering and untimely death
I'll agree with what you're saying about long-term consequences, but you could argue the same thing about the death of nations/states, couldn't you? And how many times in history have nations collapsed without periods of wanton destruction and looting due to the power vacuum?
> The death of the open web as we currently know it could lead to an even better successor over time though.
I predict the App/Play Store duopoly will take over the web.
But letting the chips fall where they may is what led to the current situation, with a browser market heavily distorted and made anti-competitive by two tech giants. What people are asking for is a regulator that steps in and redresses the imbalances so a healthy browser market can arise.
If the regulator does not step in they are choosing the status quo which by itself also is a deliberate choice. Inaction is always also a form of action.
It's the regulators job. If they don't do their job, the users (not another anti-competitive company) will take matters into their own hands. There are alternative protocols that could be developed - the only reason they haven't taken off is because we are at stalemate.
> What people are asking for is a regulator that steps in and redresses the imbalances so a healthy browser market can arise.
That’s not what I see. I see people constantly calling for the ability to run other browsers (really Chrome) on iOS.
I almost never see people trying to get Google’s massive browser share reduced.
If you do one without the other I expect disaster.
That was the point of my comment. I want the “open web” people (in general, not just this org) to call for BOTH. But I don’t see that.
Open Web Advocacy does address anti-competitive practices from Google. See their submission to the Japanese regulator: https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20HDMC%20(Japan)...
Section 3.1.7 - No Chrome Preferencing and section 3.1.8 - Website Transparency Obligations.
Libertarianism as an absolutist ideology that proscribes courses of action for moral reasons and literally requires helplessness and passivity from everyone is not, I believe, the original flavor.
> The chips will fall as they will
This is how we end up with the death of uBlock origin (in a few months from now) on January 2023.
Firefox has resisted this thus far but I am pretty sure Google will eventually twist their arms enough to either kill it, or at the very least _severely_ handicap it.
Google is a threat to the open web, it needs to be heavily regulated and punished for all its despicable behaviors: from harvesting user data without consent to tracking our every move and selling it to anyone who wants it for pittance.
I am very well aware of the fact that many of the HNers are partaking in this and am not going to pretend that I wouldn't be tempted had I been in their shoes but I think it's time to for the smoke and mirrors to clear: Google is nothing more than a giant spyware and an adware company because their core business model _literally_ requires it. This is why they keep fighting against privacy regulations, lobby the governments, punish Adblock extensions and come up with clever ways to circumvent your privacy protections.
So no, I for one am glad that at least Apple exists to thwart this. They may not be doing this because of their "ethics" but given the choice, I'd rather side with Apple on this one.
Correct me if I'm wrong but Safari already does, and long has done, the thing that people are objecting to Chrome changing: not allowing extensions to just hook into and pre-block requests, instead only allowing limited patterns to be set and matched against. uBlock Origin hasn't been available on Safari since it made this change several years ago.
So I don't know that seeing Safari as a bulwark against Chrome really makes sense here.
People do not seem to understand how important it is to Google they they achieve full control of the browser end of the WWW.
The blog post at the top of this thread talks about CVEs and other measures of resistance to 3rd party bad actors. It does not engage with the concept of Google themselves as a bad actor.
With full control of the rendering engine on all platforms, Google can stop engaging with standards bodies. Web rendering standards will become simply what Google says they are, even if it is to their benefit. Imagine AMP but on steroids. When Safari stops rendering mobile sites correctly, there will be lots of helpful friends and family (and ads) telling folks to "just switch to Chrome, it's a better browser anyway."
Google could also ship their own root certificate list and take control of Web PKI. Imagine Symantec but entirely at Google's option. Play ball or get security warnings. This would allow an end run around the democratization afforded by Let's Encrypt, for example. Controlling 90% of the client end of TLS confers just as much power as controlling the CA end.
Google also has no incentive to make Chrome secure or performant on iOS devices; they run the competing mobile OS platform. If Chrome/Blink is forced into iOS, it won't be long before complaints crop up and we start seeing "Android runs Chrome better than iPhone" ads.
The fundamental fight is not about browsers, it is about defining the platform: "commoditizing your complement." Google wants Chrome to be the platform, and commoditize the computer. This will let Google centralize profits to itself. This is why Android is free (as long as you ship Google's services too).
They will spend as much as they must to achieve this. It is existential.
Lots of folks in this thread talking about Firefox. In this context, Firefox is a strategic front-end for Google. Google is essentially paying for Firefox to continue existing, so that people will use Firefox as an ideological cudgel against Apple.
Also seeing some comments about antitrust. So the plan is to get the government to step in to quash the competition that exists, wait for all the predictable bad things to happen, and then get the government to step in again to re-establish competition.
Does anyone actually think this is a good idea? Or is "antitrust" just a convenient way to dismiss legitimate fears and objections.
Yeah I have a really hard time believing https://open-web-advocacy.org/ is not actually google but it is certainly aiming towards Google's benefit and, ironically, the end of any chance of an "open" web
It’s a consortium of developers, and the customer is ad-tech.
You could say this is less about Apple vs Google, and more about users vs advertisers.
> The fundamental fight is not about browsers, it is about defining the platform
The fundamental fight is always about eyeballs. Apple is holding the better cards because control over hardware gives you control over software which gives you control over eyeballs.
Self-own to spite Google. Apple should protect users by competing, not by guarding their monopoly power. Everybody loves Apple now, wait until they inevitably miss earnings and you're locked in their prison. It's a turnkey malevolent dictatorship.
“The guy with the one tank should compete fairly with the entire military force of a continent. If they’re in the right they will win.”
False analogy.
Apple's market cap is ~$2,300,000,000,000 and it's not a war.
Clearly money isn’t relevant, because Microsoft failed and Mozilla (which had plenty of money) is circling the drain.
I was going by market share.
So, you are happy to have Apple provide no user choice, because you fear a future where there is no user choice?
No; my problem is when people are using the "open web" as a bludgeon to get Apple to allow Chrome on iOS. If you want Chrome on iOS, just say that. To pretend that there is open future of browser diversity once Chrome is allowed on iOS is underhanded.
I want Firefox on iOS.
I want Firefox on iOS, and I want Tor Browser on iOS, and I want Lynx on iOS, and I want wget on iOS, and I want youtube-dl on iOS, and I want to run whatever the hell I damn well please on iOS.
Underhanded? It's pretty clear that your stated goals don't align with your real goals here.
Edit: I have a hard time putting into words why your arguments seem so deceptive to me. It is like whataboutism: the arguments you are making are technically functional but they just completely fall apart with any reasonable weighing of the pros/cons because it betrays the "intrinsic" goals (choice, browser competition, functionality, security) for "extrinsic" goals (browser diversity, but mostly the success of safari). This makes me think that you're secretly misaligned and that you actually hold those "extrinsic" goals as your intrinsic goals.
Get FF or some other browser a healthy market share first and then talk about cracking open iOS.
Instead what happens is this internecine warfare where everyone shits all over FF for political reasons (most of which have no relevance to their day to day use of a web browser) and uptake of Tor/Brave is miniscule and most everyone sticks with Chrome.
"Get FF or some other browser a healthy market share first"
Why ? Open up the platform first.
One would say it would be disastrous to open a platform first and then take on Chrome because
1) Firefox cannot compete against Google endless resources m. Google will win, not a matter of it but will.
2) The time it takes to decouple chrome from google will be too long. It may just kill Firefox before any action can really be done.
Yeah I don't see why this math is so hard.
If you force Apple to open up iOS then Chrome just takes it over and Safari will take such a hit that Apple will probably have to kill it. Then Google will own 99% of the portal to the web.
I think I'm arguing with a bunch of Libertarians though who think that an unregulated market is some kind of magic sauce that will conjure up a Chrome competitor out of thin air, and not a recipe for monopolization.
Why are you so certain that Apple will have to kill Safari if Chrome and other browsers are allowed on iOS?
Because Chrome will instantly start to out compete it. And once Safari is pushed down below 25% share on iOS then sites will feel more and more free to avoid testing on Safari and push users towards just using Chrome. Not having two different engines to have to test against means that even more the web becomes something that works on Chromium by default and is totally broken on Gecko. That makes FF even worse, and Google will totally control Chromium and the engine that browsers like Edge and Brave work on top of and will be able to dictate (in the "dictator" sense of that word) what the engine does (and while they might be somewhat responsive to Microsoft, they won't be to Brave). And we already won the battle to keep Windows from tying the browser to the O/S on windows and watched while we lost the war and Google completely took the engine over. Cracking open iOS is going to let Google take over that platform as well, it isn't going to make life any better for Gecko or any other alternative engine.
How much cash does Apple have?
How much would it cost for them to fund firefox development to make it a stronger competitor?
Okay, Apple: do that. Also open up the walled gardens. You can make it a setting if you want to keep the beginner computer users safe.
Let Apple permit the use of OSS browsers with their native rendering engines - problem solved. Will they do this ? I guess not because it means their native app development is threatened.
As far as youtube-dl goes, you can run that on iOS via a Python interpreter such as Pythonista: https://gist.github.com/nneonneo/f6b2d659ba76542e7d27e13598a...
I can be clear and transparent here. My position is that if you actually care about browser choice the biggest elephant in the room is Chromium. The reality is Google has shown that it will leverage it's properties like Gmail and YouTube to get users to install Chrome; from nagware to just outright breaking sites on other browsers.
If you want to force Apple to allow different browsers without addressing this problem, then you are trading one company's monopoly on a single platform for another company's monopoly globally. And there is no reason to believe that Google will behave any better than Apple has. It's not like Google hasn't tried to skip the standards process before.
So when people argue that "it's for browser diversity" I have to consider them as 1.) naive, 2.) actually working for Google. 3.) just developers who are tired of being forced to target multiple platforms.
Do I think it's ethical that this is how this stalemate is handled? No; taking away user choice is limiting the freedoms of users.
Do I think Safari is amazing? No; I think Chrome on Android, today, is better than Safari on iOS. I may be harming users today by forcing them on Safari.
Would I fold if Apple only allowed Firefox/Lynx/Netscape? Yes; My problem is with Chrome, not with other browsers. But I think the number of people who genuinely want to Firefox is tiny in comparison to the number of people who would just install Chrome.
My worst fear is that once Chrome is allowed on iOS, then there is no reason for Google, or anyone else, to target anything other than Chrome; and that would ultimately be harder to fix. A year of Chrome dominance, where developers only target Chrome would fully entrench Chrome and make it difficult for anyone to build a browser that wasn't just a Chrome fork that emulated all of Chrome's bugs and unspecified behaviors. The alternate solution, where the Chrome problem is addressed first, then the fix is "just" passing legislation that opens up iOS. One fix involves just changing the behavior of one company. The other fix involves changing the behavior of thousands of companies.
he just pragmatic, if the results are worse than now, someone will not do the "right thing" on moral
OP here. That's actually incorrect.
We started OWA with a group of primarily Safari first developers, in that iOS Safari is our primary target platform. We've had over a decade of major issues from rendering bugs, to lack of functionality to our apps breaking for months at a time waiting for a patch. The severe underfunding of Safari/webkit coupled with a ban on competition meant that it was never going to be viable to ship Web Apps to iOS. So the question is, how do you convince the worlds richest company to invest a extra few hundred million/year into their own browser?
The answer is competition. Competition provides Apple a deep incentive to produce a capable, feature risk browser at risk of losing users to the other vendors. Each 1% of Safari users is worth 150m/year in google search revenue, a number so large it would make even Apple take notice.
As web developers we see the value in having browser engine competition, many of us lived through the IE6 era and know the risks of the monopolistic competitive behavior like we're seeing from Apple (Side-point: At no point did Microsoft ever ban the competition).
The status-quo where Safari/Webkit was both stifling the Web and Web Apps and providing no competitive pressure on Chrome/Edge/Firefox + the severe underinvestment from Apple meant that a regulatory solution was needed.
> The answer is competition
There is no competition. There is only Chrome.
This is what I was talking about. There will only be one result to opening iOS and it scares me.
FF/Opera are too small. Edge is small and really just Chrome anyway. If we had a healthy browser market I’d be fine. But we don’t.
Apple is, for the wrong reason, the only thing keeping us from total Chrome dominance.
I want one of these “just open iOS” calls to include the consequences of what they’re calling for and how they plan to deal with it.
Chrome is competition, and no, it's not alone: on the desktop market, where competition is not rigged as much as on mobile, Edge has 10% market share, and Firefox 7.5%. It's not insignificant.
> I want one of these “just open iOS” calls to include the consequences of what they’re calling for and how they plan to deal with it.
OWA has taken into account anti-competitive practices used by Google to gain browser market share, and made recommendation to mitigate or prevent them. In there submission to the japanese regulator [1], they include:
- 3.1.7: No Chrome Preferencing: > Google should not use their control over the operating system to provide unfair preference to their own browser, Chrome, either through the operating system or agreements with partners.
- 3.1.8: Website Transparency Obligations: > OWA suggests that where a Gatekeeper’s website does not support a browser which has above a 2% market share, they be compelled to publish a document containing detailed reasoning that prevents support of certain engines.
[1]: https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20HDMC%20(Japan)...
If you're taking the approach that iOS browsers are just re-skinned safari, then Edge doesn't count as it's own browser on desktop.
Yes it does, that's a totally different situation. Edge chose to use Chromium as its engine, Microsoft takes part in its development, they are free to remove or add any component from it, and if ever they wanted to they would be free to fork it and drop it for another engine at any time. None of that is true for WebKit skins on iOS.
Microsoft were were quite transparent about being forced to adopt Chromium because of the prevalence of Electron apps on Windows.
That wasn’t the reason.
Edge could just not compete with chrome, despite throwing hundreds of engineers at the problem. They tried, and tried, and tried.
In the end “edge doesn’t work” was just code for “edge is not chromium”
Electron was and is still a separate beast, Microsoft doesn’t even need to deal with that: third party developers do, they have to ship the binary.
Seems like you would certainly know! Thanks
Those recommendations are weak sauce. Websites are going to say stuff like “works best in Chrome!” and Google is going to encourage that. Nothing in those recommendations, assuming they’re even adopted, will solve that.
> This is what I was talking about. There will only be one result to opening iOS and it scares me.
Why? Does Apple not have the resources to build a competitive browser? Do they not have the motivation? Do they not have the engineering skills? Do they not have a large and extremely desirable user-base who prefer to stay as much as possible in Apple's ecosystem?
Given all the advantages Apple has, how could it possibly be true that they can only get users by literally banning all competition on their main platform?
Replace Apple with Microsoft and you get your answer. Since when did having a trillion dollars guarantee success? Replace Apple with any company; do you think Google lacked the motivation and engineering skills to build a social network?
Ignoring much of the fact how Google would leverage it's existing properties to make sure you couldn't open a single web page without being nagged about installing Chrome; it would take a large amount of effort for anyone to compete to where Chrome is today and the result is that people would just Chrome.
And fine, I understand that as developers you don't want the burden of testing multiple platforms or being beholden to one platform that doesn't move as fast as Chrome. But to pretend this is about the "browser diversity" is where I have the problem. Just say you want Chrome and don't buy Google's framing that this about "open standards" when Google doesn't even hold Chrome to that standard.
> Since when did having a trillion dollars guarantee success?
So then your answer is that Apple's browser is significantly worse than competitors, and that users wouldn't use this much worse product if it were not for Apples anti-competitive behavior?
> But to pretend this is about the "browser diversity
> Just say you want Chrome
I think most open web supporters would be a lot happier if Apple even simply allowed Firefox.
That would still be massively better than the status quo.
Are you saying that all someone would have to do is argue for allowing just Firefox, and you would no longer do this thing where you attack some alleged secret motivations?
Apple can’t reasonably allow Gecko (Firefox’s engine) without also allowing Blink (Chrome’s engine). And we know which one is the 800lb gorilla here.
I love and support Firefox, and I even use it on my iPhone (yes, it’s reskinned WebKit, but it syncs my stuff).
I mean why not? It would actually be a pretty cool move to make Firefox a 2nd party browser on iOS given special privilege.
>So then your answer is that Apple's browser is significantly worse than competitors, and that users wouldn't use this much worse product if it were not for Apples anti-competitive behavior?
Yes. I hope it's exceedingly clear that I don't think Safari is God's gift to mankind.
>Are you saying that all someone would have to do is argue for allowing just Firefox
Yes. In fact they could be upfront and just say "just allow Chrome because I like developing for Chrome." But that's not what happens; it's "Apple is stifling competition because I want to use Netscape Navigator", when in actuality it's just developers that want to target a single platform, or Google who wants protect itself from Apple's power.
Maybe OWA is the exception here, but what I've found is the people making the most visible noise about this are connected to Google in some way. Consider this HN post from a couple days ago [1], where the author in his six-part series about browser choice, neglects to ever mention Chrome's dominance. Unsurprising that he was also a platform strategist at Google. You're telling me the guy who's job it is to make sure Google is an entrenched as possible doesn't like Apple's position on Safari? What a surprise. Then he tells you "don't worry about Chrome, this is about open standards!" - sounds underhanded to me.
At the very least, the cohort of users on Safari who can't switch prevents Google from just outright breaking some sites like Gmail and YouTube on every browser except Chrome.
[1] https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-brow...
Exactly. Let’s be very very clear here: the death of the open web will be not only because of Google and it’s internet multi-market dominance , but because of developers wanting to make their life easier, users and the future be dammed.
> Does Apple not have the resources to build a competitive browser?…
They do. They did. It’s called Safari. That’s how we got here.
What they DON’T have is any care about Windows/Linux/Android users. Apple makes their browser to make their platform the way they like.
If you want Apple to provide the competitive alternate browser on other platforms you’re asking the wrong company.
> Given all the advantages Apple has, how could it possibly be true that they can only get users by literally banning all competition on their main platform?
Google pushes Chrome with the #1 OS in the world (Android). With the #1 site, google.com. And the #2, YouTube.com. And gmail. And Google Maps. Maybe Waze. Chrome OS. GSuite.
They have an INSANE amount of power to push people to Chrome and off other browsers.
I’m not arguing pro-Apple. I’m arguing anti-Google.
While I admire your stance on the internet being open I disagree.
Yes, opening browser engines would be good for the competition. But you missed one point: You assume all players will play fair in the competition. If all browser engines would be allowed over night, what would happen: Google will probably play really unfair. E.g. sadly the layout of Google will be messed up in Safari, youtube videos stutter/have lower resolution, everything is a lot slower, the performance will be sabotaged, but on Chrome everything will be working fine. There was even a precedent for something similar: [1]
This will probably come alongside with "Try it in Google Chrome", a lot of users would probably switch, thus the monopoly of Chromium would be unstoppable by pure market forces.
Yes, having only one browser engine is bad for the choice of the user, but it does have significant downsides.
Damned, if you do, damned if you don't
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...
> There was even a precedent for something similar: [1]
No there wasn't, unless you mean killing a 10 year old version of Internet explorer with a banner to a newer version of Internet explorer is somehow playing unfair.
Maybe precedent was an unfair word - I apologize - but it shows, how Google can/could use the power of having one of the most used websites in order to influence the choice of the browser.
Yes, there was. See this thread from Mozilla's former Vice President: https://archive.ph/2019.04.15-165942/https://twitter.com/joh... (or directly on Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686)
Anti-Competitive Behaviour from google should also be addressed by regulators.
Our suggestions were covered in sections: 3.1.7 No Chrome Prefrencing 3.1.8 Website Transparency Obligations
https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20HDMC%20(Japan)...
As parent stated, Google can simply neglect to make their apps work well in Safari. They’ve done so in the past; GMail on Firefox was nigh-unusable due to a raft of dumb bugs for a long time, and it still uses substantially more CPU and memory than literally any other tab I have open on my browser. Right now they have to make an effort to support WebKit (Safari); as soon as they can push Blink (Chrome) to users, that motivation will go away.
To be fair, it's not like Safari is free. Should site owners have to pay Apple to make sure that their website shows up well in Safari?
That seems like it creates perverse incentives for Apple to keep Safari "broken".
In a discussion about encouraging browser diversity, are you seriously arguing that it’s an unreasonable burden on web developers to ensure their websites work on more than one browser engine?
Why do I care if developing in Safari is hard for developers? If iOS opens up to chrome, it's game over for any kind of competition in the mobile browser war. Google will take over web standards and the death of the old republic will be complete. Android is your answer if you don't want Safari.
It’s disheartening - you have good intentions but almost everything you say is backwards.
Regulation on Apple only is the opposite of encouraging competition, it’s literally calling shots against the only fighter that’s pushing back on Chrome in a significant way - on market share, and maybe more importantly, on privacy and avoiding bloating web standards to further avoid total lock-in on V8.
Second, Apple has been accelerating greatly Safari development for years now and I worry your entire organization can’t admit it’s actually a great browser and has rapidly caught up in terms of correctness and features, and is now in fact leading in many ways. That it rejects some proposals isn’t inherently wrong, by the way, and the reasoning for many is just. I’m afraid if you admitted that, it’d pop a bubble in one of your core tenets, and given you made this mission driven thing with a single purpose, you’re sort of now forced into an intellectually dishonest place.
Because as a long time web develop myself who went from IE to Firefox to Chrome to Safari as my main browsers over the years, there’s simply *no doubt* that Safari as of a year or two ago started whooping Chromes ass. Like not even close, it feels like a different type of thing. It’s insanely fast, across so many dimensions, lighter, and I don’t get incompatibility almost ever anymore.
Your mission would achieve the opposite of what it wants - Apples platform isn’t a monopoly, Google's are. Google has a monopoly on Search, Browsers, and influence on the web. This would only strengthen the worse/stronger fighter. And it's all premised on a fundamentally unsound critique of Safari.
Lots of people want to explain why the government should force Apple to let native Chrome onto iOS.
I don't see anyone explaining what will force Google to continue supporting Safari once they have Chrome on iOS.
The reality is that they probably won't. Safari will break for Google services and pixels, and the only answer will be "switch to Chrome, things don't break there." Bye bye competition.
Open Web Advocacy has been very clear that they want competition on iOS, not Chrome specifically. The reason being that the absence of competition is currently allowing Apple to deteriorate the web experience on iOS, preventing the web and web apps from competing with native apps. Their objective is to lift these artificial limitations imposed by Apple and free the web.
OWA members have actually been actively reporting WebKit bugs and interacting with the Safari team to help prioritise features and bug fixes on Twitter and elsewhere, showing the goal is to improve the overall web experience on iOS, not allow Chrome to become dominant. Here is one of their detailed bug report: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84.
Competition on iOS without real competition on the desktop already existing could quickly mean unbreakable Chrome hegemony.
That’s why I originally commented. If you focus on just one of those I believe there will be terrible unintentional consequences.
This whole chrome fetish thing you've got is actually the issue. Everyone thinks "there is only Chrome" so in a sense we all deceive ourselves. I don't know a single person anymore who uses Chrome. Maybe you do but that's not really the point. If you don't want a Chrome hegemony then don't fool yourself into thinking there is one and don't proliferate that ideology. Tell your product people that NO, you're not going to just ship the Chrome version and support Safari and Firefox later. Put in the work to make software work on other browsers. That's how you break the status quo. The amount of times I've seen some software company tell users "our product only works on Chrome" is disgusting. No wonder it's popular... people don't have a choice because of shitty software.
>I don't know a single person anymore who uses Chrome.
I find this very hard to believe. Everyone you know uses Firefox?
And Safari and Brave and Edge (so some use Blink).
So Safari and Chromium and Chromium. I'm not sure who the one here is deceiving themselves.
Chromium != Chrome. We're talking about some world where Google Chrome takes over everything not where Chromium derivatives compete with Google Chrome for browser market share based on features and merits. That latter outcome defeats the "chrome hegemony" which is what the person I initially responded to is complaining about.
Chromium dominance is effectively Google dominance when it comes to the open web. That is a world where Google no longer has to follow any sort of standards body because it is the standard. Another commenter, snowwrestler[1], put it best:
>With full control of the rendering engine on all platforms, Google can stop engaging with standards bodies. Web rendering standards will become simply what Google says they are, even if it is to their benefit. Imagine AMP but on steroids. When Safari stops rendering mobile sites correctly, there will be lots of helpful friends and family (and ads) telling folks to "just switch to Chrome, it's a better browser anyway."
>Google could also ship their own root certificate list and take control of Web PKI. Imagine Symantec but entirely at Google's option. Play ball or get security warnings. This would allow an end run around the democratization afforded by Let's Encrypt, for example. Controlling 99% of the client end of TLS confers just as much power as controlling the CA end.
All of these items are built into how Chromium renders the web. The other Chromium derivatives will be forced to swallow these changes because what are they going to do? Fork and maintain their own browser engine? Bisect patches from upstream forever? How many of these Chromium forks will have the resources to maintain their own fork of something as complex as Chromium?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31898439
A 95% chromium world is the same as a 95% chrome world in many regards.
Following Chromium upstream is an extremely hard effort if you have done any kind of non trivial changes to it. There are constant refactors and changes. This means that your chromium using browser can't be anything more than just a reskin of Chrome, which means that you don't have the agency to support some feature that Chrome chose to not support, and the features you do support are likely going to be implemented 100% the same due to using the same code, including the bugs. This leads to the same "code assuming the bug" issues that if everyone used Chrome.
Furthermore, Google has a monopoly on Chromium developers, with only few people contributing from the outside. Your Chrome reskin team will likely be very skilled in maintaining a Chrome reskin but if Google ever decided to stop the Chromium project in favour of a closed source Chrome, there would be nobody who knows how to properly maintain the fork going forward, neither at your company, or available for hire.
You are 100% at the mercy of Google if you do a Chrome reskin.
Through this logic, iOS already allows firefox etc to run on its platform, if Firefox != Gecko.
except the issue here is the rendering engine and who controls in at the top level.
I don’t wanna live in the world we’re 90% of the Internet only supports chromium, yet everything from Edge to Opera use it now. Firefox and Safari the last holdouts keeping google from dominating all web standards.
> Open Web Advocacy has been very clear that they want competition on iOS
And it is being pointed out, repeatedly, that the only actual real competition is Chrome. When Chrome becomes an option then websites will abandon any pretense of adhering to standards and just code to Chrome. You can't pretend the mobile browser landscape won't just end up mirroring that of the desktop.
The total browser share of iOS shifting to Chrome, even if Chrome only got 50% of iOS users, would put the total browser share of Chrome over 90%. There would be no impetus for any website to write for anything but Chrome.
If Safari hadn't been lagging so far behind for years, I'm sure the sentiment to allow Chrome on iOS would be very different.
On the other end, the competition (namely Firefox) can't flourish either if all it can do is to be a skin with some sync features on top of Safari.
All Apple achieve with this is to slow down the inevitable, especially if the smaller players can't catch up because of it.
Actually, yes. With Apple not having user choice, those of use who want a choice can choose Android. Lack of diversity in one ecosystem supports diversity in a broader context.
It's like prohibitions against importing some aggressive plant or animal species. It's a way of protecting local diversity.
This leaves the user who want actual choice crying in the corner.
Android is only the bare OS, and actual devices come either with Google bindings everywhere (mostly from direct contract with each phone maker in exchange to let them have the Play Store), or no Play Store at all (which usually means no commercial license for stuff like Felica as well, same situation as when wiping clean a phone basically).
To me it feels a lot like in the 90s when 'viable' alternatives to Windows were either overpriced and obsoleting Macs, or "every year is year of linux on the desktop" linux boxes. And getting shouted from every camp when complaining the situation really sucks.
Yes, I am happy with the Apple ecosystem in this regard. If I wanted to run a different browser engine, I could do so by buying an Android phone. I purchased an iOS phone specifically because I think the overall phone experience is better when certain aspects do not have a choice.
If android did not exist and Apple controlled the market it would be a different story, but that is far from the case.
Safari still has around 60% on MacoS and all the normal users believe that there is browser competition now. At best it's speculation, but we can compare that to the very real harms of Apple's browser ban.
We've written about the harms in detail here: https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20Bringing%20Com...
It may be 60% on MacOS but that’s a very tiny market. Overall Chrome is quite dominant.
Numbers I found say on desktop Chrome is at 70%. Include the 7.75% for Edge (because it’s basically Chrome) and that’s almost 80%. FF at least exists and is similar to Safari.
On mobile it’s at 65%. Safari is the only other browser above 5%.
Chrome is dangerously close to total monopoly.
MacOS is the only market Safari actually competes in and has the same advantage by being the default.
I would actually expect the most likely outcome is Apple would fight hard to build a better browser to stem any losses to other browsers. They'll have at least 2 years to do it, so they can catch up in that time with enough investment.
They definitely have the capital to make it happen. Every time I boot up Safari after a MacOS update, I'm consistently wowed by how little of their revenue actually goes in to making a comfortable, feature-complete browser. It's almost like you're using a different, nerfed internet with Safari, but maybe that's just me being angry that uBlock Origin doesn't work anymore.
There are plenty of ad blockers for Safari, not sure what nerfed experience you're referring to.
This has been debated to death, but there are no ad blockers on Safari that will work as well as uBlock Origin, because Safari doesn't have all of the APIs/hooks exposed that would be necessary to implement uBlock Origin's more advanced features.
It's the same problem that developers were talking about with Chrome's Manifest V3 -- to the point where popular adblockers for Safari like Adguard actually run outside of the browser so that they're not quite as limited as they otherwise would be by Safari's apis.
The nerfed experience of addons only specifying a significantly limited list of blocking rules, giving up being able to autonomously allow or deny each request with arbitrary parameters, surrogate scripts (replacing the original, tracking ones with privacy-friendly reimplementations) and cosmetically alter the webpage (e.g. fixing the layout with missing ads).
Partial source: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158
And which of those ad blockers are Open Source?
AdGuard
> There are plenty of ad blockers for Safari
And none of them work as well as uBlock Origin on Chrome.
Trust me, I tried. I even paid money to try a few extensions out on Safari in the hopes I would get a better experience, but even that doesn't work.
(As a safari user) I've found running a pihole to be a good solution
Also been trying out this webkit based browser for macos: https://browser.kagi.com (supports ublock origin)
Recall how Google gimped Windows Phone support on the web, presumably to advantage their own platform and web services. My fear is that they'd do the same to Safari on iOS. They could break support on iOS, to force users to Chrome, where they can better track and monetize their users.
Maybe Safari mobile would have to make a better UI with more competition, and could then keep more users.
The size of macOS market is not relevant for the point being made here. What matters is that macOS is very similar to iOS in that it is owned by Apple, Safari is available on it, and comes pre-installed. The only difference is that on macOS browser competition is not banned by Apple. Yet, Safari still has around 60% market share on macOS.
So there is a good chance that even if competition where allowed on iOS, Safari, which currently has more than 90% market share, would at the very least not fall down below 60%, preventing Chrome from becoming dominant. It is even more likely because most users on iOS actually believe they can install the real Chrome, so nothing will change in their eyes.
> The size of macOS market is not relevant for the point being made here.
I disagree. There are already plenty of sites that are broken on macOS Safari because it's a niche platform. The only saving grace is that websites still have to support iOS Safari. If vendors were able to say "we only support Chrome" on iOS as well, I think that 60% macOS Safari marketshare would drop rapidly due to necessity.
If you want website to not be broken on Safari, the solution is to give developer without a Mac the ability to test on Safari. I wouldn't be able to fix my site if it's broken on Mac Safari if I don't have a Mac.
That's a good point and probably a major strategic error on Apple's part.
However in the IE era, even though Netscape/Firefox was free for everyone to test on, many large companies made their sites for "IE Only" because it's easier and cheaper. What I worry about is that, even if Safari kept up with web standards and was mostly compatible in terms of the basics, sites would start requiring APIs that only Chrome wants to support (e.g. FLoC). This would give Google a lot of leverage to push its own technologies on users (Amp also comes to mind).
Can't upvote this enough.
I support an Open web, I test my websites on Firefox and Chrome, I even occasionally do Edge testing, and I develop my websites often primarily in Firefox. But I'm not buying an iPhone or a laptop just to test websites, so I don't test in Safari.
Every other browser has a way to emulate in Linux, I can even download free VMs from Microsoft to test IE11 in Windows (and Edge now runs in Linux). If Apple isn't willing to make its operating system available to me to test on then I don't see why I should feel obligated to test on it.
And given that there is some Mac-specific behavior for Safari/Firefox that I've run into (differences in how blur works), and I generally can't assume that all of my stuff is going to work perfectly, I'm either going to fall back on progressive enhancement or (in the case of a complicated webapp) I'm going to tell users that Safari is unsupported and they're continuing at their own risk.
I'd love to support Safari. All Apple has to do is give me a way to.
Do you test in Epiphany? That’s what the WebKit project recommends you do.
I test in Epiphany, and have resolved some Safari bugs that way.
Unfortunately that's not enough, for two reasons:
1. Safari is the only browser that is still tied to OS release versions, the WebKit version used by Epiphany is rarely the same, so results will likely differ
2. Epiphany has no mobile emulation mode. (E.g., I had to work around around an annoying input zoom bug in Safari/iOS by blindly applying the least stupid solution I found searching the net)
Apple provides Linux builds of WebKit.
=> https://WebKit.org/downloads
Using that logic of Edge being counted as Chrome, why dont we consider 100% of the iOS browser market to be Safari?
Chrome was forked from WebKit but had been it’s own engine for a very long time at this point. They share ancestry but are pretty different.
Edge is literally built off a relatively recent version of Chromium. It’s not a separate engine.
Every iOS browser today runs on Apple Webkit. No exceptions. Thats an apple rule.
Sorry. I didn’t notice you were talking about iOS only.
I would hope mobile browser share numbers already take this into account, though I don’t know.
I think they pretty clearly dont since iOS is definitely more than 5% of the mobile market.
> Safari still has around 60% on MacoS
It's preinstalled on MacOS and you can't uninstall it, just choose not to use it.
Actually that’s how the system is supposed to work: Let Chrome become a monopoly so that we can finally regulate it. The same thing happened with IE and we crossed that bridge when the time came.
Apple needs to open up their ecosystem to other browsers. This is not a suitable excuse.
I would argue Chrome is already a de facto monopoly.
So why do we need to make things worse to make them better?
Let’s make them better (fix the Chrome issue) and then make them better again (the Safari issue) instead of the other way around.
On the other hand, actual browser choice for iOS will force Apple into improving Safari at a faster rate. This is good competition.
If quality of competition truly mattered, then IE wouldn't have had to be stopped with legislation
IE wasn’t stopped with legislation. It continued to be bundled with Windows. It was eventually dethroned by Chrome.
One could argue the successful legal action against IE bundling stopped Microsoft from further entrenching it in Windows. With Edge in Windows 10/11 you can see the kind of nudges that Microsoft probably wanted to add all along.
And now this topic is full of people defending this exact entrenchment by dictat from Apple.
It's not the same, because Safari is already a minority in the market compared to the Chrome behemoth.
Seriously, I kind of wonder whether or not grass roots anti-Safari sentiment is dominated by web developers who resent having to test their sites in more than one web browser.
I don't like Safari because I can't get uBO or Tree Tabs for it, and because it's often the odd-one-out between the Chrome/Firefox/Safari triopoly in terms of feature support. The battery efficiency is nice though.
Fair, though I would suggest that Safari's feature support really is excellent (especially in recent months) and I would further say that I don't think the web needs to — or should — advance at the pace being set by Google. I actually like the fact that Safari is a bit slower. I think it's healthy for the web.
On desktop I personally use Firefox because I find it to be a good blend of performance and resource efficiency, plus it has excellent support of content blocking add-ons.
[To clarify, I had intended to refer to Safari on iOS specifically, vis a vis complaints about the lack of engine choice on iOS. But I recognise that my post didn't say what I had intended.]
> IE wasn’t stopped with legislation
Yes it was. You're ignoring all the other things proprietary about IE and only considering the OS bundle one. JScript, VBScript, and ActiveX were the real problem. There we so many proprietary extensions to IE that were not even remotely supported elsewhere. Hell, C# even came out of the hell that was Microsoft's JVM, J++, and J# thanks to those trials
Why does Apple get to choose how its competitor gets to compete?
We give microsoft plenty of flak for anti-competitive behavior. It deserves it too. Its not hard to see why.
But so does Apple.
Now why can't I install my silly joke app? Oh that's right Apple won't let me install my joke app on my devices or friends for more than a week or so for reasons. Even though it can be easily tracked to me, its signed etc.
Why is that? Control.
Why can't I have a linux vm chugging away on ipados? Apple says no. Why? Control.
If Apple wants to exert this much control then it really needs to accept liability. So those security defects? Where's the service level agreement to time limit those glaring holes?
Its therefore unacceptable for Apple to be slow to fix an issue when its competitor could have already fixed it. Oh wait, there are no competitors on ios since no one is allowed to compete. You must use webkit. How is that not anti-competitive?
No one is forced to use Apple products at all. Choosing an Apple product over non-apple products is a choice. There is extensive competition with Apple products. Choosing to buy an iPad, and being upset that they can't install linux on it, failed to do any product research before buying the product.
Many people, myself included, choose to use Apple products in part BECAUSE of how those products work and function, today. I don't want to install additional browsers, app stores, or other crap on my phone, I just want it to work well, out of the box with reasonably high security. For my needs Apple products provide that today.
If Apple's products don't fit your needs, the solution is trivial - don't buy Apple products.
> Apple's products don't fit your needs, the solution is trivial - don't buy Apple products.
If you don't want to install alternative app stores or browsers, then you should simply choose to not install them.
With the new digital markets act being passed in the EU, everyone will be able to install whatever app store or browser that they want.
And you can't complain because you should listen to your own advice by not installing those other app stores or browsers.
Does this digital markets act apply to game consoles and smart TV platforms? What about in-dash car systems?
The digital markets act only applies to certain companies, called "gatekeepers" that are large enough, have a certain very large amount of users, and have enough market power.
Generally speaking, the purpose of anti-trust law is not to effect small players, who do not control any markets.
Instead, the purpose of anti-trust law is to prevent multi-trillion dollar companies who control half of a duopoly, from doing anti-competitive actions.
So, for the examples that you gave, if those markets became multi-trillion dollar markets, in 2 company duopolies, then there would be laws created that would apply to them.
But before that happens, there is no need.
But sure, instead of having phone manufacturers compete with open competition in an open marketplace, let's have governments decide how my phone works. That sounds like a great idea. (Note: that is sarcasm.)
I wonder, is the EU promising to replace Apple's effective private regulatory environment around privacy control with something its equal or better? Given that "open markets" in software isn't a concept that respects national borders, I don't see how they could. Or are they just going to crack the nut open at the behest of lobbying efforts by other (mostly foreign) multi-billion dollar companies who stand to gain?
The point being, that in a situation where there is a 2 company duopoly, with multi trillion dollar companies, then there is going to be laws that regulate these multi trillion dollar companies that have significant market power.
> compete with open competition
They can compete all they want. They simply can't use their market power to anti competitively prevent users from installing other app stores or browsers, of their own choice.
A user is free to not install other app stores or browsers, if they don't want.
> let's have governments decide how my phone works
It is actually the user who will now be free to decide which app stores or browsers run on their own phone. Feel free to not install them, if you don't like those options.
Anyways this conversation doesn't much matter because the laws are about to be passed. I look forward to people crying about being unable to prevent other people from doing what they want with their own phone in the future.
Because there is nothing you or apple can do now, to prevent people from installing other app stores or browsers, on their own phone, pretty soon.
The app store/browser war is over. Apple lost. And users will soon be able to actually do what they want with their own phone, and Apple will no longer be able to force users, against their will, from install other app stores or browsers.
> It is actually the user who will now be free to decide
The user will be free to decide? Really? The user, most of whom are understandably ignorant to and/or disinterested in the nuances of privacy and tracking, won't remain captive to decisions implemented by programmers, hidden in code, concealed behind encryption and not exposed as a choice?
Free to decide. I can't fathom that anyone actually might seriously believe this overly simplistic fairytale. This kind of freedom doesn't exist and the kind of rules the EU plans to implement don't change that. All they do is shuffle around influence from one set of global billion-dollar companies to another set of global billion-dollar companies.
Or are you telling me that the EU will require mobile operating systems, app stores on those operating systems and all third party apps running on those operating systems to give users absolute freedom to control all aspects of how their privacy is handled?
At least now we have Apple in a position to (and motivated to) enforce privacy standards on behalf of its ecosystem. It's not often that capitalistic forces are so squarely focused at the consumer interest; dismiss it at our collective peril.
> The user will be free to decide? Really?
Yes, they can choose to not install whatever app store or browser that they want.
> or disinterested in the nuances of privacy and tracking
It sounds like you just don't like the user's choice. You could have just said that you disagree with what the user will do, and want to take away their choice to install whatever browser or app store that they want.
Don't pretend like you care about user choice, if you are then going to pivot and say that you disagree with the choice of the user, because you think the user is dumb, or would choose different than your personal preference.
Thats the problem. Just own your position. If you hate competition, and hate giving power to the user to choose whatever they want, and think that there needs to be a monopoly that anti-competitively controls everything that the user does, against their will, then just say that.
Just take your mask off, and say that you think that you know better than everyone else, about their own property, and want to force everyone else to do what you want, and you want to take away their ability to choose for themselves.
Don't dress it up like you were doing previously, like pretending like you care about markets. Just say that you hate the user's opinion, and you want to take away their freedoms to choose what they want to do with their own device, and stop hiding behind fake arguments that you don't believe in.
> to give users absolute freedom to control all aspects of how their privacy is handled?
Users will be given the choice to install whatever browser or app store that they want.
If a user prefers whatever it is that you are talking about, then they are free to not install those app stores or browsers, and continue to use the Apple recommended choice.
But once again, I look forward to people crying more about this soon. Because there is nothing you or Apple can do to stop users from installing alternative app stores and browser in the future, as the laws are about to be passed.
Apple lost. You can't change that.
It is doubtful whether there's any point in me replying as little of what you've said has anything to do with anything I said. It appears you read my post and entirely misunderstood it. I will nonetheless offer a response to what you have written.
Your first misunderstanding is this assumption that competition and user choice hinges on the axis of "browsers and app stores". This isn't an objective fact, it's an opinion. A different and (at minimum) equally valid opinion is that user choice can hinge on the axis of phone ecosystems. Yet another axis could hinge on apps themselves — perhaps none of us are "free" until Facebook, Instagram, etc are all required by the EU to allow anyone to write fully featured native front-ends. Perhaps the freest of all is a marketplace with a diversity of axes, which is precisely what laws tend to demolish.
Your second misunderstanding is your continued smuggling in of the concept of "user choice" in a marketplace where users do not and cannot have anything remotely resembling real freedom of choice, no matter how many browser engines or app stores are available. Open source ecosystems aside, >99% of "choices" are made by the software developer exclusively. Choosing to acquire the same corporate-capitalist closed source spyware from vendor A or vendor B is an illusion of choice.
Your third misunderstanding is this absurd and self-evidently false claim that people who like the status quo will be able to simply ignore the new alternative app stores and browsers. If loading alternative app stores really does become seamless, companies like Facebook and Google will have absolutely no incentive to list their apps in Apple's store. In fact given that Apple's pro-privacy policies (like App Tracking Transparency) are causing these companies to lose enormous amounts of revenue, they have a MASSIVE commercial incentive to abandon the Apple App Store.
You say these laws are about to be passed. I haven't seen how any of these EU laws get around the reality of Apple's ownership of its own intellectual property. I can't imagine how the EU could force Apple to supply its intellectual property to app developers under different terms. So even if the EU does force open iOS to alternative stores, I'm really not sure how developers are going to legally build apps to put in those stores.
As for your continued barbs implying that I oppose user choice, I'm wearing a "mask", that I hate markets, that I hate opinions, that I'm taking away freedoms, that I am offering "fake arguments" which I "don't believe" and will be "crying" about EU laws. All I can say is that rejecting the possibility that someone can sincerely hold a different opinion to you is disappointing — and represents a barrier to intellectual curiosity.
> . I haven't seen how any of these EU laws get around the reality of Apple's ownership of its own intellectual property. I can't imagine how the EU could force Apple to supply its intellectual property to app developers under different terms
It is pretty simple. Companies that want to operate in the EU have to follow certain laws, or pay a huge fine.
Technically speaking, these are requirements to operate in the market. So I guess if Apple wants to pull out of international markets, and never sell an iPhone again in the EU, that would also be an option. But, my guess is that they don't want to lose those billions of dollars.
> I'm really not sure how developers are going to legally build apps to put in those stores.
Its simple. Either Apple follows the law and gives app developers the ability to build apps, pays a huge fine, or leaves the entire EU market. Those are Apple's only 3 choices. And if they try a clever way to get around the law by using some sort of intellectual property strategy that you are hinting at, then they pay the huge fine, which is calculated based on a large percentage of global revenue.
Enjoy thoses laws that you cannot stop! They will likely come into effect in less than a year. They can't be stopped. Apple should have addressed its own anti-competitive behavior before it got to the point where this was necessary. Its way too late now though.
Your lack of response to any of the substantive points is noted. But you are right, we’re all going to see. It will be interesting to see how it does play out. Nobody knows for sure how the chips will fall, but I’d wager that it won’t be nearly as simplistic as you’re imagining. Especially since your version of future events doesn’t even align with mainstream analysis of the DMA.
> Nobody knows for sure how the chips will fall
We pretty much do know how things will work out, actually. That's why people made these laws.
The laws were made to force Apple, and similar, to open up their app stores.
And if Apple doesn't follow the law, then they will be fined billions of dollars. Because that's why they made these laws in the first place.
You saying that people don't know, is cope on your part, because you can't handled that Apple lost, and cannot win against governments.
Cope? Seriously? I’m trying to have a considered conversation, I’m not interested in engaging you in an irrelevant battle of Twitter-derived smack talk.
I’ll say again, your version of future events doesn’t even align with mainstream analysis of the DMA.
Yes basically it is cope. Law makers created these laws, specifically for the purpose of opening up these app stores, among other things. And then you are saying that actually the law won't do what it is directly intending on doing.
The point of all of these laws are to open up these app stores. That is the direct goal. And clever attempts to get around them, will result in billions of dollars in fines to Apple.
I am happy to come back to your posts, months later when the laws are in effect, and make fun of you for being wrong on that though.
Really, I am more of a "I told you so" kind of person, though.
Because when I come back, and say "I told you so", you won't be able to make any cope/reaching/bad counterarguments. You'll know, definitively, that you were wrong, and you won't be able to hide from that.
These are falsifiable claims about how things will turn out. And since they are falsifiable, I can make fun of someone, when the statements are falsified, and the laws are in effect.
And there will be no hiding from how bad your predictions were, when I can show it to your face, when it happens.
When someone writes a law saying that Apple is required to give their intellectual property away for free and forcefully open the floodgates of third party app stores, and this law passes, and this law survives challenge in the relevant court, then you'll be entitled to be that "I told you so" kind of person.
Happy to wait.
In the meantime it seems you're operating under a misapprehension that any of that has occurred when in fact none of that has. Even the most optimistic reading of DMA doesn't support your fan fiction.
This attitude is exactly why Apple should be compelled to allow different browsers.
You've shown me the door. Guess what? We took it. We've opened a new door right through the wall. Hello there!
Lightning cables from Apple are equally bad. Guess what? Competitor cables are more resilient in real world use. But yes, bring on usb.
>I don't want to install additional browsers, app stores, or other crap on my phone, I just want it to work well, out of the box with reasonably high security.
I don't see these as mutually exclusive.
Why would they hit 90%? I assume the way this would play out is that most people would stick with the stock browser because they don't even know/care about alternatives. The people that do care would likely install the same browser they use on desktop. I don't think Chrome owns 90% of desktop market share.
You don’t think Google will push Chrome to iOS users with banners when they search, use YouTube, Gmail, etc?
That’s what they did on desktop.
They already do this in their Apps, e.g. gmail at least at one piont prompted you to install chrome whenever you tried to open a link in a browser.
YouTube also. Clicking links in the comments and descriptions prompts me to choose between "default browser" and installing Chrome. Every time.
Yes, but again why would that suddenly mean 90% of people use it vs the reality of desktop today where they don't own 90% of the market? Why are 9 out of 10 people suddenly jumping ship because Google pushed chrome on their phone vs on their desktop PC?
You are ignoring that Chrome (+ Edge) already effectively controls > 85% of the the browser market, ignoring iOS. They only need a 25% uptake on iOS to push them over 90% globally
In terms of web traffic iOS is a large enough percentage that sites have to cater to iOS/Safari. Since Safari doesn't support all of Google's latest fingerprint/tracking friendly web APIs most sites won't hate their content behind them. As soon as a "just install Chrome" banner is viable on mobile there's no reason websites won't be flooded with Chrome-only features.
A Chrome-only web will edge out not just up to date competing browsers but any older iOS and Android devices that can't run top of tree Chrome.
Especially since Google is forcing some users on iOS to install the Youtube app as the default 2FA method instead of offering SMS.
SMS 2FA is broken.
You have a bunch of other options including security keys, TOTP, and existing device verification flow.
I completely agree, I'm just saying that using the Youtube app makes it convenient for Google were they to try and push iOS users towards Chrome (e.g. by showing a banner every time you open the app).
I doubt most users are using a dedicated third-party authenticator.
The issue is that even for users with third party Authenticator, they force you many extra clicks to use your own. You can’t set your own 2FA as default even after using it a 100 times. They make you jump through hoops to avoid YouTube or gmail for 2FA. Clearly it’s on purpose.
I don’t have sms. I have proper TOTP 2FA. And still, google keeps asking me to get my 2fa code in gmail or YouTube on iOS. It’s 3 extra annoying clicks to get it to accept my own 2FA.
It’s clearly on purpose to force me on their apps.
GMail on iOS already asks you to install Chrome on every link you click. It’s not even a hypothetical lol
According to this site [0], Chromium-based browsers' market share on desktop is ~79% today (Chrome, Edge, and Opera), with ~9% for Safari and 7% for FF.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
Well, if chrome did have 90%+ market share maybe we would finally see some antitrust regulation against Google's monopoly (ideally splitting chrome off from Google). Although there is no guarantee that would happen.
This. If Chrome reaches certifiable monopoly levels, it becomes easier to use anti-monopolistic instruments to force them to unbundle browser-making from other activities - which is really how things should be.
That moves too slow. They could do a ton of damage in the time it takes for anti-trust measures to be placed on them.
That’s kind of the point I was trying to make.
You need to do that stuff before, or at the same time as, opening iOS. Otherwise we’ll just have a disaster.
I think this won’t work because Chrome doesn’t have independent business model. Also, if Chrome is removed from Google they could create another alternative based on Chromium since it’s open source.
> Chrome doesn’t have independent business model.
Wut? Independent browsers existed before Google, and still do.
The browser is such a key element of the web experience that the possibilities for commercial exploitation are fundamentally endless; the number of players in the space is kept low only by the amount of resources required to really compete with the biggest IT companies on the planet. If you could forbid such players from being in the market, you'd see a plethora of new entrants.
> if Chrome is removed from Google they could create another alternative based on Chromium
The point is not to remove Chrome, the point is to forbid web-giants like Google from being in the browser market, because it enables monopolistic practices towards their web properties. So they would obviously be forbidden from restarting the project as "ReChrome" or whatever.
- You're assuming that there's the political will to do so. In the US, the Department of Justice would prosecute an antitrust case, and cases in the past (most notably Microsoft's antitrust case) have been dropped as political winds have shifted.
- Antitrust proceedings are slow. The Microsoft case (which was a much more cut-and-dry antitrust case) was filed in May 1998 and settled in November 2001 -- three and a half years. Given that Google today moves faster than Microsoft in the late 90s, 3.5 years is enough time to drive a critical mass of users away from other browsers, which effectively kills any market.
- What antitrust behaviors could be forced that would restore a competitive browser market? I could see Google being forced to spin off Chrome into its own company or donate the code to a third-party, open-source organization, but these only shift the problem around, they don't get at the root issue of there not being a competitive browser market.
> I’m going to ignore the security angle
That's the whole purpose of this post. Instead you want to fear monger and deflect from a sore subject for Apple.
Their argument (which others have pointed out flaws with) is Safari is a security issue so Apple needs to open up.
I’m saying even if they’re right about security (which I doubt) the fallout will be so much worse we shouldn’t do it.
This is not something you can look at in a vacuum. There are serious ramifications to their suggestion and they need to be realized.
I completely sympathize with this worry, but are we certain that allowing multiple browsers on iOS would mean Chrome dominance?
Part of the reason Chrome dominates on Android is because it's the default browser. How many people on iPhone are we expecting will change their default browser? As far as I know, most users don't change their messenger clients on iOS.
The one number I can find is that 25% of iOS users already use Chrome on iOS. So that’s 5% of all surfing.
You know that would immediately become real Chrome.
Once it’s possible to have real Chrome my fear is Google would start breaking things on Safari (or just refusing to fix things) to drive people to it.
It's a somewhat legit concern given that people have alleged they basically did that already with Firefox.
And the stats make me curious -- given that Chrome on iOS is just a wrapper around Safari, are people just switching because Google Docs tells them to, and that's enough? I'm having a hard time of thinking of a functionality reason to switch to Chrome in iOS (maybe browser/bookmark sync, I guess). I'm surprised to see a number that high.
I have always highly suspected that normal people don’t know/care about how Chrome on iOS works. It’s only the developer community that is so outspoken about it.
Of course I have no way to prove that at all.
> are we certain that allowing multiple browsers on iOS would mean Chrome dominance?
Yes. From Google's apps already asking you to open links in Chrome to Google actively sabotaging competition https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686
Apple could be asked to provide a single alternative browser, like allowing a real Gecko-powered Firefox to solve both issues?
Apple could also tackle Chrome's dominance in a different direction. Just invest much more aggressively in Safari and web apps, 10~20x OpEx. Release Safari on Android and all other major platforms. Make most of it fully open source. Make all of its first party apps available on the web.
Obviously this means that they need to give up on their iron grip on app developers so they didn't do that even if that was the exact path Steve envisioned. But that's not a good excuse either.
Chrome runs on all 3 major platforms. Safari does not. I think I'll side with Chrome and its dominance, because I don't want to be stuck on Mac.
I've seen this claim a lot lately that Chrome is the new IE. I don't think it holds water.
First, IE was bundled onto virtually every computer at the time and Microsoft went out of their way to stop you from replacing it (eg system actions would use IE).
Second, Microsoft's anticompetitive IE behaviour was aimed at protecting its Window monopoly. Microsoft was worried that the Web would become a device-indepndent platform and that would obviate the need for Windows at all.
Third, is Chrome actually bundled to any large degree? There's enterprise bundling but how significant is it? There are Chromebooks but I feel like they're not a huge factor. I guess there's Android. Chrome's desktop share seems to be 68% [1]. That's impressive for an action people have to take to change the default.
Fourth, Google doesn't have the same motivations as Microsoft (in regards to protecting another platform). There are other much more real issues (eg favoring their other properties like Youtube) but crippling Chrome doesn't seem to be something that aligns with any of their interests. It seems way more likely that Youtube (etc) will work better in Chrome. While that's bad for other browsers, it doesn't have the same negative effects as what Microsoft tried.
Fifth, the core of Chrome (ie Webkit but also V8) is both open source and the core of other browsers (notably Safari and Edge) so it's less likely Web developers will end up in a situation where they effectively have to implement something twice, once for Chrome and once for the rest. That was pretty much the situation with IE.
Will it be a big deal in the future? Maybe. I don't really see this being a big problem anytime soon however.
[1]: https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share
It reminds me of what Apple did with iBooks: they weren't trying to do the right thing, they did it the wrong way, but if they had been successful, it would have been better for the market as a whole. The DoJ correctly went after Apple and eventually won, but they also should have looked at Amazon for using what were basically dumping-level prices to secure the market for themselves.
Apple is in the wrong to tie Safari to iOS and block the installation of other browsers. They're wrong to do it for the sake of keeping control of the OS. They're right to do it, because that's the only thing that's keeping Chrome from a near-monopoly of the browser space.
> It reminds me of what Apple did with iBooks: they weren't trying to do the right thing, they did it the wrong way, but if they had been successful, it would have been better for the market as a whole... Amazon for using what were basically dumping-level prices
Apple was successful in that regard though; the contracts they made with Big 5 remained intact and Apple didn't have to compete with Amazon on price. Apple's strategy was not better for the market as a whole because Apple never cared about the market as a whole. Due to Apple's anti-competitive behaviour we are still stuck with a Publishing industry decades behind on digital
The difference between Chrome and IE is that IE sucked, but Chrome is currently the best user experience. What's the problem? If you have privacy concerns there are enough alternatives. Opera, Brave, Tor browser, etc. perform pretty well.
IE gained market share most when it was a great user experience. IE 4 was frickin amazing compared to other browsers at the time. 5 and 6, _when they were released_, were also excellent browsers.
It wasn't until after they had dominance that IE really withered.
On the other hand, if Apple's anti-competitive practices end and Chrome finally hits 90%+ market share, it would make it much harder for regulators to ignore Chrome's dominance and might lead to some actual change for once.
Let me see if I have this straight. Apple has a tiny slice of the overall market, but you are terribly, terribly offended, and so your proposed solution is for Chrome to get more than 90% market share, because that would be a better situation? And "change" would result? How? You don't say. What change? You don't even hint.
This just isn't a serious stance, I'm sorry.
Lol @ the seething fanboyism in this comment.
You did apologize though, so I forgive you.
Love that I can't use chromecast on any other browser. And how they make youtube ads much much tougher to get away from when you do use it
It isn't in Chrome's interest to dominate 90%+ anyways. It already is being treated as the default browser when devs create frontends. It will almost certainly see regulation, at least in the EU to have some sort of standards compliance else Google is fined.
> It isn't in Chrome's interest to dominate 90%+ anyways.
Why is that? I’ve never heard anyone argue that point before so I’m curious what you think the downsides would be to Google.
Because anti-trust. Companies answer to countries who don't like anti-competitive companies that aren't controlled by the state. People won't care but politicians will take notice of any company controlling almost all of their market which effectively gives them political leverage and dissatisfied voters. They also make for a great punching bag when politicians want to act like they are for the people because 100 million fine against Google means relatively little to google but a lot for getting voters to vote for you.
This is the absolute reality of what Open Web Advocacy is pushing for. A complete Chrome monopoly. It's really frustrating a couple lazy web devs with really incorrect understanding of the space keep getting so much attention.
"we can't have competition be because apple will lose"
Often times idealic and well-intentioned measure have negative consequences. Just look at how the EU's cookie banners have eroded the UX of the open web as an example.
It's not the "EU's cookie banners", it is the advertisers' cookie banners. The EU doesn't mandate cookie banners at all. It's the website's choice whether to pester users about having them accept targetting cookies.
The most natural implementation of the EU directive would be to have a place in User Settings where users can go and enable targeted advertising if they want it.
>The most natural implementation of the EU directive would be to have a place in User Settings where users can go and enable targeted advertising if they want it.
And why would we assume that these companies would follow the "most natural implementation"?
The very predictable response of the industry to the EU directive was to make the cookie banners as annoying as invasive as possible, such that users would consent to tracking out of apathy. No, it's not what the EU intended to happen, but it was a consequence. Which brings me back to my original point: often times idealic and well-intentioned measure have negative consequences.
In hindsight, perhaps the EU should've legislated that the UX for the tracking content cannot be unreasonably annoying. I don't know how I'd go about codifying that into law though.
> I don't know how I'd go about codifying that into law though.
Simply make the DNT-Header a legally binding thing. If the user sends it, it means that only technically necessary cookies can be used.
This would require no UX from the side of the website, thus defeating all dark patterns at once
Yup, that would work.
I wish the EU had gone with this solution rather than the current regulations. However I can’t help but feel that the “loopholes” in the current regulations were intentional. Politicians have a history of rolling out regulations that have giant loopholes for their corporate friends to exploit.
"only technically necessary cookies" That doesn't really help preserve privacy. There are so many techniques for tracking, detectable and undetectable.
I formulated it a bit to informal, I meant, that the website should just don't collect data from me unless it is really needed. (E.g. Tracking identifiers are not needed or collecting fingerprints from WebCanvas and so on)
The cookie banners are still a net good: they make bad sites harder to read, turning people away from some of the worst examples.
They at least give you some measure of control, or legal standing, or at least visibility into how bad the web actually is.
I don't know how to convey to you that people just accept worse UX until a better alternative is shown to them. Boiled frogs.
The opt-out action has be to be equally easy and discoverable as the opt-in, which is never implemented this way and only just started to get enforced.
> It's not the "EU's cookie banners", it is the advertisers' cookie banners
It's the EU's cookie banners. Despite the EU's best intentions, the end result is worse. It was a naive move and we're all suffering for it. One of the biggest pieces of evidence that you can't just naively mandate something without also thinking through edge cases and "malicious compliance."
"Whatever you think of their decisions, Apple is the only thing stopping a 90%+ Chrome web."
Sorry what ? Can you point me to the place where I can download Safari for Linux and Windows and Android ? If they actually had those builds, I would believe what you say.
But no - All they are doing is protecting their turf by hitting every other browser with sticks so folks prefer native apps over web apps.
I think you misunderstand.
Yes, Safari is only on Apple platforms.
I’m saying Chrome is already dominant on Windows, Linux, Android, and Chromebook.
The only one where it’s not is iOS (Mac is kinda close, but small in terms of users).
If real Chrome can go on iOS my supposition is Chrome will become dominant there too.
Leaving no platform not dominated by Chrome.
> No, I don’t know a good solution.
I know one: Anti-trust enforcement.
I also think that Apple is doing a good thing here. Since I don't use any Apple devices, I also don't have any trouble with it personally :) (I'm doing my part by using Firefox.)
Same. As another Firefox user and Apple non-user, I'm grateful to Safari for keeping web devs in check so that their shit runs on Firefox.
My computer, my choice.
Meh, at best Safari is the New IE it doesnt support many feature in purpise to serve Apple priorties and hinder the web.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/23/opinion_column/