I'm currently torn between a pixel 5 and an iPhone 12 mini. This is definitely nudging me towards the iPhone.
Safari ad blockers are severely crippled and you won't have any choice in browsers. Ublock origin is available on android with firefox which is something to consider if you browse on your phone often.
All of the core browser bits including adblocking are safari still in every iOS browser on the app store.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.
(i.e. ~safari webview)
I don't claim that it's broken, but the ability to switch browsers (finally!) doesn't seem terribly relevant given that they're all required to essentially be safari skins.
You’re mixing up Safari and WebKit. This gives a misleading impression. Safari is Apple’s web browser. WebKit is Apple’s rendering engine. There’s much more to a browser than its rendering engine. Apple requires browsers to use WebKit, not Safari. Everything else – add-ons, syncing, UI, homepage, etc. – can be completely custom.
I’d be pretty pissed off if I were a developer working on a browser for iOS and everybody treated all of my hard work as if it were nothing. Alternative browsers aren’t just reskinned Safari. They are entire applications of their own.
It's true that safari and webkit are not the same, this comment is imprecise. But switching browsers won't net you different adblocking capability due to the restriction to use apples webkit core.
Edit: that is "safari core" is a very lazy shorthand for the webkit framework here. The impact to the user is pretty much the same in this context.
That depends on what you mean by “different adblocking capability”. It’s absolutely possible for alternative browsers to block different things to Safari. I can think of three ways to do it off the top of my head: add a content rule list; inject JavaScript to remove elements from the DOM; inject CSS to hide elements.
In practice on iOS nothing seems better than safari + the content rules for adblocking, but I admittedly didn't try every app
Shipping your own content lists seems like a tricky way to differentiate since users could install similar lists without using your browser.
aside: It also appears to just inject CSS you have to inject it via javscript now which feels a bit gross but certainly doable.
Edit: most -> many
1. Not all apps will use the default browser.
2. You can't uninstall Safari
3. Safari's content blocking framework doesn't work for third-party browsers. This means no adblocker.
4. iOS has a great time-tracking feature that lets you block websites beyond certain usage. Once again, only works on Safari.
Not to mention that we still don't have extensions in Firefox.
It's really easy to do this on Android—Firefox with uBlock Origin is brilliant.
Pixel 5 has 2GB more ram, 50% more battery, wireless charging, 90hz display and waterproofing. Now that may or may not be features you need, both they're both great deals.
There were a few strange stand out benchmarks, though to me they seemed more like bugs than a pattern. I haven't had any performance issues in every day usage.
> I thought they cared about small size
That's fair, I assumed they were just avoiding premium prices. Still, some people really care about wireless charging and waterproofing and if so, I think P5 is a great option.
Is 50,000 rules enough to provide adequate ad blocking?
If not, it's a problem. If 50k rules is more than enough, it's not accurate to suggest that the limit is an issue we should care about.
This limitation prevent the model with traditional adblocker where extension and block lists are independently maintained by different parties (e.g. uBlock Origin/ABP + EasyList) so you're stuck with relying on extension maintainer to update their list or download another blocker app when the blocker become unmaintained (where in traditional model you could just subscribe to another list)
Plus a Pixel integrates a lot better with non-Apple operating systems, both MS Windows and GNU/Linux. MS's "Your Phone" and KDE Connect are both great.
The original iPhone SE and iPhone 6s are both on their sixth year of support.
The iPhone 5s got a security update a couple of days ago, after it's own six years of support had ended.