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Comment by enos_feedler | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand what enabling multiple browsers, from an engine standpoint, would achieve. Is it competition? Don't all browsers just implement the same set of standards? What is the lack of competition holding back?

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Apple ties Webkit versions to iOS versions. Once they stop supporting your iOS device every browser on it becomes obsolete.

They don’t all implement the same set of standards equally. The one that comes immediately to mind is one that comes up frequently as “hey do you know your website is broken on iOS” on HN is when someone is demoing some really interesting web-tech that requires SharedArrayBuffer (since it enables thread-like behavior in JavaScript and is super useful also for performant interaction with the GPU).

Browsers can of course be non-conformant on other interesting issues. Imagine if a browser came out that allowed the Unity Web Player to work. Instantly, people wouldn’t need to use the App Store to purchase games. Instead, they could just use the browser.

For the first point, that sounds like a standards problem and an ecosystem challenge. The association/consortium or whatever it is needs to protect and fight for this.

For the 2nd, it sounds like there needs to be a way for the web platform to evolve for things that require engine modification. I wonder if the web will break down into smaller standard components and new browsers can be built from those.

It's not useful to cast this in terms of standards. If your users use a non-standards compliant browser, you fix your website, not the browser.

With regard to your second paragraph, I believe you have made a category error between "the App Store" and "the browser." The browser is not a store.

The browser contains stores, and the browser can contain fully working applications. The point wasn’t that the browser is a store, but rather that allowing certain features to work on the web would destroy the walled garden of the App Store by enabling certain kinds of stores that circumvent the App Store.

A bit of an aside, but SharedArrayBuffer is likely not the best example It was disabled by default in Chrome and Firefox until recently due to Spectre. Chrome is still working on improving their security around this feature, and does not yet enable the feature for Chrome on Android.

True PWA's, for example, including push notifications.

This is false. Google has the ability to create true PWAs on chromebooks with ChromeOS. Why did they include the play store + app model instead of embracing a true PWA experience? Google has enough influence that if they could build a showcase PWA experience on the chromeOS/chromebook platform, they could get web ecosystem adoption. They were able to do this with AMP for instance.

Is your claim simply that “true” PWA’s don’t exist? I don’t care what you want to call it, I still can’t do web push notifications on my iPhone.

> Why did they include the play store + app model instead of embracing a true PWA experience?

I can think of a few possible reasons:

1. Chrome (as in the browser) came out after the first iPhone was released (2007), and around the same time of Android's first release (2008). Chrome OS didn't come out until 2011. Android's app ecosystem started developing before Google had all that much influence on web standards, and likely before they realized that it would be a good idea to have that influence, or even knew that Chrome (the browser) would become as popular as it ended up being. I'll also note that Chrome OS wasn't anywhere near as successful as Google hoped it would be; while that doesn't invalidate Chrome OS's app model, it doesn't validate it either.

2. Android has done a decent amount of copying of iOS features (I say this without judgment or malice; I've been a generally happy Android user continuously since 2010 and have no axe to grind). Not having native app development on Android could have been seen as a possible market disadvantage when compared against Apple.

3. Google may have actually desired more Apple-like control over what runs on Android, or at least wanted to allow for the possibility that they'd want it in the future. That's harder when you base your app platform on web standards.

"Enabling multiple browsers" is a red herring. Android enables multiple browser engines, but non-Blink browsers are a rounding error; it's bought nothing in terms of browser diversity.

Really it's just code for "let me, a web developer, target Chrome only, so I can just tell Safari users to install Chrome."

Exactly. Run into this problem all the time on Mac with things like Youtube TV and Stadia.

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