Comment by NightlyDev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NightlyDev | Hacker News Reader

"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well"

Well, clearly this person doesn't have much experience with web development... The webengine in iOS is the biggest pile of crap I've ever worked with since IE6.

"Oh? You want to click this? OK, let's wait for 300 ms just in case you want to double tap to scroll!"

"We finally fixed it, no more delay on clicks! Yo Apple, the delay is still there if it runs as standalone, good job..!"

"OK, you've added the page to the home screen, now, if you click another URL on the same domain you definitely want it opened in the browser, right? Good guess Apple, that's why I added it.."

"Wait, are you saying that if you switch to another app and back again to the standalone site you don't want us to reload the URL that's added to the home screen? You would prefer us to let you continue where you left off, what!?!?"

"Oh, so you think momentum scrolling is a good idea? Too bad, we don't support it on elements that overflow, but we do have it elsewhere, have fun! PS we do have an experimental flag to enable it, but then I sure hope you're not using animations with gpu acceleration, cause then we have som nice race condition bugs in store for you, so who knows if scroll will work or not.."

Seriously, iOS is the worst of them. Sure Firefox and Chrome often has experimental features with bugs, but both of them are much more "solid" when it comes to features you'll actually use in production.

Safari on iOS is the IE6 of today.

Given this it's really a shame that Apple does not allow other browser engines on iOS. Would be a prime opportunity for competition to raise the overall quality level.

Looks like a case for anti trust, just like microsoft had with IE.

Why? iOS has by most measures less than 50% of the market.

Even with a low market share Apple could still theoretically be engaging in practices that are anti-consumer, such as disallowing the use of other browser engines.

Though, afaik, Apple does not stoop to the levels of Amazon, who removed the Twitch app from Roku platform for absolutely no reason other than to line their pockets with more cash.

Before they purchased it?

Nah, after - to make it a "Fire TV Exclusive" app

http://www.cordcuttersnews.com/amazon-pulls-twitch-channel-r...

Aren’t anticompetitive and anti-consumer two completely separate things?

Yes, but I would say that anti-competitive behavior is inherently anti-consumer, as the consumer does not benefit from it - and Apple preventing other browser engines is both

Anti-trust is there for cases where society thinks

1) the free market doesn’t work because it is too hard for competition to enter an existing market or for existing competition to dethrone a market leader.

_and_

2) the big player(s) take (too much) advantage of their position by engaging in ‘anti-consumer’ practices.

Given the existence of Android, Apple isn’t in position 1. So, do you think (2) alone is sufficient for taking legal action? The common thinking is that the market will take care of it by by bankrupting the company doing it.

Android doesn't run iOS apps.

Apple has a monopoly on OSes that run iOS apps, OSes that run on iPhones, phones that run iOS and on App Stores that can install iOS apps.

They abuse all of them (e.g. the Webkit-only issue for iOS, monopoly pricing on iPhones, censorship in App Store).

Conversely e.g. Google has none of these monopolies except for the monopoly in running perfectly apps that require Google Play Services.

> Apple has a monopoly on OSes that run iOS apps, OSes that run on iPhones, phones that run iOS and on App Stores that can install iOS apps.

You could also say that Samsung has a monopoly of smartphones with "SAMSUNG" printed on them.

1) iOS is not a monopoly.

2) Apple has legitimate technical reasons for not allowing other browser engines (well specifically the JS part). Intent matters.

> Apple has legitimate technical reasons for not allowing other browser engines (well specifically the JS part). Intent matters.

Oh please... source?

1) JavaScript allows for arbitrary code execution

2) Apple’s App Store policies disallow the user from executing arbitrary code

I think you can figure this out yourself.

These are excuses, not valid technical reasons.

Remote execution of code is a very popular attack vector.

Apple can negate this almost entirely by controlling JavascriptCore and WebKit and ensuring that their security models e.g. sandbox are tight and well tested. Leaving that up to third parties who may not be so vigilant compromises the security of the entire device.

Efficient javascript needs to be JIT'ed, but that means your app needs to be granted API access to map writeable memory as executable, which is a security risk they are not willing to grant third party developers. So a third party browser/js engine will likely be quite slow. I guess this would give users of a bad impression of iOS perfomance as a whole then, if other browser engines were allowed and became popular?

If other browser engines became very popular it says something about how bad/limited the default offering is. It usually takes a lot of work before people switch away from defaults. People continued to use IE for years for example

Chrome as the sole advertisement on the most valuable piece of web real estate in the universe might have been a factor too.

Restricting the JS engine but allowing other browser engines to tie into it so you could leverage different browser's rendering and CSS features would be a step up and would sidestep much of the problem.

It's not a security risk (assuming a properly engineered OS).

All OSes have bugs, and the XNU kernel certainly has had its share, so removing the ability to execute arbitrary code definitively makes exploitation of buffer overflows etc in 3rd party apps much harder.

I think this thread is full of people who want Apple be considered a monopoly more than care about whether they actually are.

Thinking what the law should be, doesn't change what it actually is.

Ding ding ding!

Looks like a case for anti trust, just like microsoft had with IE.

You must be new around here. ;-)

Microsoft used their natural monopoly in operating systems (Windows has 95% marketshare) to force OEMs (HP, Compaq, etc.) to bundle IE with their machines and not Netscape Navigator. Microsoft threaten to cancel their Windows licenses.

And later, it decided, against its decent decree with the US government, to bundle IE with Windows, claiming Windows wouldn't function without IE, which was a lie.

Perhaps you're not aware that natural monopolies are themselves not illegal; it's using that monopoly to force the market to do things it ordinarily wouldn't in some other area.

So… no, there are no antitrust issues regarding web engines on iOS. And of course, Google, Mozilla and others have browsers on the App Store that use WebKit anyway, so it would be hard to make the case they're being harmed…

Given this it's really a shame that Apple does not allow other browser engines on iOS. Would be a prime opportunity for competition to raise the overall quality level.

WebKit is a core part of iOS; lots of APIs use it for lots of things. You just can't swap it out for something else without breaking things.

Lets not forget the security and power usage issues as well; the last thing iPhone users would want is a rendering engine that wasn't optimized for the hardware and software draining their batteries.

Didn't MS also say that IE is a core part of Windows?

Microsoft lied and said that Windows wouldn’t work without IE, to justify bundling it with Windows after they signed a decent decree with the US government forbidding them from using their natural monopoly in operating systems as leverage in other markets.

WebKit is used by several Apple apps—Mail, iTunes, App Store, Calendar, etc—and thousands of 3rd party apps.

That was during windows XP wasn't it? I'm sure things have changed since those times.

But the problem is not to stop them from shipping webkit with ios, but to allow other browsers to use their own engines. Do you imagine what would happened if every browser on Windows had to use trident for rendering?

Microsoft ended up with 'n' version of xp, which had all shortcuts to IE hidden, and a prompt asking you which browser you want to install and use after installation.

You don't have to remove the buggy web engine. The problem is that Apple doesn't allow anyone to create another web engine for iOS. Apple locks users to a really bad browser with no possibility for users to change it.

To be honest, I'm starting to think that Apple is doing this on purpose to earn more money.

They are forcing many developers to create native apps instead by locking down iOS and not allowing any decent web engines. Why? Then all payments would have to go through Apple so they can take a cut. Developers must also purchase hardware from Apple to create and test it.

Apple is a real asshole! "We have users, and if you want to make an app for our users then you have to purchase a MacBook, an iPhone, license to publish and allow us to take x% of all income."

And those who does this helps apple sell more hardware and make the problem bigger.

Sure, this might not be the reason even though it adds a lot of income to Apple.

The only other possible reason is that the people working on the web engine for iOS are useless people compared to all other teams working on browsers.

Long ago we had messages to those who used IE6. What we need now are messages that tell people to throw their iPhone in the thrash, cause it's not like they can use a proper browser...

Here here. The author clearly hasn't worked with Apple's implementation of Audio Context either. Granted the bar is pretty low compared to Chrome, but wow! What a mess. Safari consistently has latency and bit rate issues when playing even the smallest files.

Actually it’s “hear hear”. This comment has been up for 3 hours already, I’m surprised I’m the first word nazi to correct it :)

If we're being pedantic, there ought to be a comma between those "hears". :)

"Hear, hear" on a comment about Audio Context? ;-)

I disagree. The IE6 of today is IE11, not Safari. Just look caniuse.come for practically any modern feature. It either requires you to pollute your code base with polyfills or doesn't work at all. Every day bring another fun barrier. Today it was Promises (https://caniuse.com/#search=promise), tomorrow, I am sure, it'll be something else.

Except IE11 is 4 years old and no longer has any feature development. Use Edge.

Nearly all IE11 visits to my sites are from Windows 7 and 8.

What really sucks is that Apple has TENS OF BILLIONS of dollars in cash, and yet can't be bothered to throw a billion at fixing iOS, iOS safari and MacOS bugs.

Its quality really went downhill. I really loved the "it just works" stuff of Apple Past. And I loved the intuitive, skeumorphic interfaces.

Now it's all crap and HIDDEN MODES - something Apple always spoke against in its UX manuals. It's sad day that Google and Microsoft have better design than Apple now, and Apple copied them.

Steve Jobs would have never let this happen. He would have a whole department funded with several billion dollars just to make Apple products the most user friendly on the planet. And he would have Siri be a Star-Trek-like voice platform by now.

What reduction in bug rate should we expect for each, day, $100M invested?

Back in time, Microsoft invested heavily in program analysis to fix those hideous BSODs due to broken third-party drivers. It was very successful.

Apple's problem is simpler as they own the code, and bugs are likely to come from understaffed engineering.

Apple's self-contained platform, huge sums of money, and massive upgrade adoption rates would make it very easy for them to ship modern software. They for some reason choose not to

iOS and OSX isn't modern software ?

I am curious about the qualities an operating system needs to be deemed "modern".

I personally love iOS and macOS and use them both daily. Though there are facets of both that I think could easily be improved given Apple's position.

Off the top of my head -

A. Slow development cycles on Safari (they're getting better, but still) while simultaneously blocking competitors on iOS

B. A number of embarrassing security failures on macOS recently

C. A lack of focus on macOS (Probably the cause of B)

I can't tell you how many more meters per second you will get if you push harder on the gas... But I can tell you that pushing harder on the gas is likely to get you where you're going quicker.

Do we really need to discuss exact m/s before you're willing to push harder on the frickin gas?

"Measure twice, cut once."

Agreed. Equally frustrating is how inconsistent the UX is in iOS. Editing an alarm is strange and there's no "Delete All" option unless you ask Siri, force touch works on some buttons and objects but with no indication of it, redundant notification settings, sloppily organized Settings menu, etc.

And the worst: Endless "back" button/swiping on the News app.

I discovered that having an onScroll event handler on a div with overflow and -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch resulted into weird visual artifacts under certain conditions. And no, I don't want to override native scroll (which is often a bad idea), I want to react to the scroll.

Most of your complaints are related to how iOS handles web apps that you've saved to the home screen, which is a feature that is completely orthogonal to Apple's rendering engine.

I agree that iOS home screen apps are in a pretty bad state, but Google is also discontinuing Chrome Apps and that doesn't make Chrome a worse HTML renderer.

Oh so you want a large canvas on an iPad? No, F you. That might impact performance so we restrict it.

Some of the iPads have a very limited amount of memory e.g. 1GB.

I think users would be expecting Apple to curtail your ability to crash or hang the browser.

I can crash the mobile safari just fine all is needed is lot of overflowing images in a transformed div

What I really hate is that when safari shits itself the message to the user is “there was a problem with the web page so it was reloaded” so we get old iphone users complaining to us when their lame browser crashed.

That and iframes getting resized to full height ignoring css directives completely... we have a lot of our codebase that are workaround just for ios

Exactly. I find Safari extremely unpleasant to use in many cases. Firefox Beta on Android at least makes me feel much better.

Based on this you either never had to work with IE6 compatibility, or you have a really bad memory.

Not least most of what you mention (other than the 300ms delay) is OS level anyhow.

I worked with IE6 both as it became the defacto standard browser everywhere, and for the years it took Mozilla Phoenix^wFirebird^wFirefox to take hold as the defining force, and then Chrome coming to dominate.

When IE6 came out it was kind of a breath of fresh air... it allowed for a lot of things, and the v4 browsers finally fell off the map. IE 5.0.0 had some hideous bugs on stamped CDs (Office 2000, Windows 2000) that I had to work around for a couple years. IE6 corrected many of them.

Now as things progressed, IE6 became a boat anchor for a long time.. and IE7/8/9 though relatively current at release fell behind very quickly. IE10-11 were also rans in my opinion, and I'm glad most people get to ignore them now.

Nothing compares to dealing with IE4 + NN4 issues... it was truly painful and I'll take what we have today over either. Most people aren't dealing with most of the newer browser features... but for those that are, it can be bad. Safari is the worst actor in the bunch, and they are emphatically not rock solid on that front.

People do forget that IE was legitimately a good browser for quite a while - starting around IE3 it really did quite well. Plus I'll take IE4 + NN4 issues vs IE6/7/8 issues in 20-freaking-14 (or beyond, argh). IE9 at least fixed a lot.

At least the early IE vs NN stuff was fast to change and interesting. IE6 issues were the exact opposite :(

The real explorer issue was that xp refused to die for the longest time. When those browser came out they were kinda fine in context, they got lot of hate a decade later when the world moved onto new standard but you still had 10%+ users living in the past

Well that and they refused to update it for 5 years AND refused to EoL it for 7.

It was entirely due to MS’s negligence, not just XP.

This also shows that the architecture of the web is wrong, i.e. to have the browser vendor in control rather than the developers.

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