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Comment by neodymiumphish | Hacker News Reader

> Safari is still the best mobile browser available...

This is nonsense. Safari is the only mobile browser available on iOS, so if you're sorting by mobile available per platform, then of course it's the "best [of one]". If Chrome and Firefox had the opportunity to bring their platform fully to market on iOS, there would be some real competition there... They could still do what Android does with displaying any in-app web rendering like Android System WebView, while allowing users the option to use the same browser and experience they're used to on their desktops.

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I can't imagine the marketing shitshow that would happen if Apple were to allow this. Google already spams Chrome in popup banners on google.com, in popover divs on gmail, inside security alerts...

Basically Google would immediately use all of their properties and muscle to wrest control of iOS. And then why even bother to have more than one platform.

What does "use all of their properties and muscle to wrest control of iOS" even mean? Apple would still control the OS and how it works. They would just allow for a real web browser that can run web code as well as you can on Windows. That's not hurting Apple at all.

Apple should stick to making top notch hardware and software for their phones. Just allow users to run a real web browser as well.

And Google will have full control over the web. As soon as they have majority browser on all platforms, they will ramp up their “innovations” of web platform and leave competition in the dust. And then nobody will be able to stop “standards” that help Google, like substituting URLs on AMP pages for instance.

That's a problem specific to Chrome. Firefox and Brave do their own thing and lots of people choose to use those browsers instead. The fact is that people don't have that choice when using iOS.

Lots of people as in about 10% (brave probably less than 1%). As soon as Google is allowed to ship it's own browser engine on iOS, open web is doomed. Google will simply start to ship new “standards”, and web developers will use those standards, because who uses not-chrome anymore?

People like you for example? People who are and have been so deep in the Apple box that you probably won't even consider a different browser because Safari is the best.

On the other hand: Chrome only became so popular because of their shady propagating of the software. Through freeware installers etc. Something you can prevent very easy on a Apple phone.

Also: the market is not so big. Even if they'd "take over" iPhone, it wouldn't make a big difference on the control they already have.

Are you sure? I have Chrome on my iPad.

They run Safari/Webkit underneath. The core engine is not Chrome code. What you use is the value-added trinkets like bookmark sync, different UI design. The important bits are still controlled and locked down.

If Safari for iOS could just add "Find in Page" like exists in Chrome for iOS, I would switch today. Chrome shows it's possible. Why can't my mobile browser have Find in Page? It's far more valuable in mobile, because you can see so much less of the screen.

It does. Type into the address bar, scroll to the bottom of results.

It does offer Find in Page, you tap the address bar to bring up the keyboard, type the word you’re searching for, then scroll down to the bottom of the search results to see if the word was found. Tapping that line gives you a way to navigate through all found results.

Well hot damn, it sure does. Thank you.

You have an app wrapping an iOS web view widget with some customized networking code. Apple's App Store policies prohibit Google from shipping a full browser engine.

No you can’t actually customize the networking anymore. On iOS Apple controls the whole web stack. Content, networking, JavaScript.

You are free to use the POSIX networking APIs in lieu of CFNetwork (or Network).

Yes of course. But you cannot replace the networking that WKWebView uses.

Any other non-Safari browsers on iOS/iPad are forced to use the same underlying WebView rendering technology for actual display of web pages. So Chrome on iOS is really just a wrapper around a WebView that adds things like Google login integration.

They are forced to use JavaScriptCore, in the sense that you can't execute JIT-compiled code except for within that one blessed, sandboxed framework.

I don't believe they have ever been limited in porting, but have decided the performance hit for using their own javascript engines (or compatibility issues in leveraging Apple's) aren't worth the effort.

Even more, the WebView on iOS is not Safari. It's dumbed-down Safari that does not support certain features that Safari supports (service workers and all PWA-related stuff). So it's not equal competition at all.

I'm pretty sure it's exactly the same code base just with some minor feature flags.

Not that minor, there are indeed 2 different engines.

One for Safari and one for the rest.

Right, but that comes out of the exact same code with some minor feature flags.

You're parroting old news. The different engine is for UIWebView which is now deprecated in favour of WKWebView which uses Safari's Nitro engine.

Websites saved to the home screen use UIWebView's engine — but that's not the discussion, the discussion is about browser apps which can and do use WKWebView.

Besides technical limitations: the iOS App Store rules are clear: it is simply not permitted.

That is a chrome skin over safari

Safari on iOS is faster than Chrome on Android and given how crappy Google apps on iOS are I have no reason to believe they could do a better job than Apple.

Chrome on Android is actually pretty fast.

For crappy aid, I only remember iTunes on Windows.

What the... Was that...

Chrome on Google’s flagship Pixel 4 is not as fast as Safari on a 3 year old iPhone 7: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15068/the-google-pixel-4-xl-r... (See the Speedometer, Jetstream and WebXPRT benchmarks. Admittedly these might not be representative of your browsing habits but the trend is clear)

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