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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

You can't uninstall Safari from iOS. In fact you can't even browse the web without it as Apple prohibits any other browsing engine (Chrome, FF, etc, are using WKWebView).

I don't know the numbers but I imagine there are more iOS devices now than there were Windows PCs back in the 90s.

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Fair point but that’s largely due to security not Apple’s desire to lockout other browsers.

That is a large benefit of the doubt...

>Fair point but that’s largely due to security not Apple’s desire to lockout other browsers

Lol, if I remember correctly Microsoft also used the "security" angle to defend their monopolistic behavior too.

I seriously doubt it but I guess we'll never know.

Justify "largely", please.

I don't think Apple has demonstrated more commitment to "building secure devices" than to "building a tightly walled garden to maximize leverage over developers and users".

Edit: grammar

I don't know of any consumer company that has taken privacy and security more seriously than Apple.

They led the way on iOS with Sandboxing, Secure Enclave, forcing HTTPS, on-device ML, on-use permissions model, fingerprinting prevention. And TouchID/FaceID both were popularised on iOS and made simple and reliable enough to be used by tens of millions.

> I don't know of any consumer company that has taken privacy and security more seriously than Apple.

True, but that doesn't negate other intentions.

And yet iOS exploits are cheaper than Android exploits, because iOS exploits are so plentiful in comparison.

Apple does NOT prevent other browsing engines.

It prevents you from dynamically compiling code at runtime which is a needed rule because otherwise apps would just run around the curation process.

By disallowing dynamic code execution, Apple does disallow other browsing engines. It does not matter what language Apple uses to disallow other browsing engines, since the effect is the same.

It prevents JIT compilation for Javascript code.

You can create browser engines without this feature.

The App Store Review Guidelines explicitly forbid this:

> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

Yes they do, quite explicitly in fact:

> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

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