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Comment by adrianh | Hacker News Reader

The author was testing these browsers on an iPhone — but neglected to note that Apple actually prevents other browser engines on iOS.

So if you use Firefox or Brave on an iPhone, you’re simply using Safari with a different “skin.” This skin can clearly do some content blocking, and it can provide a different browser UI — but it cannot change the fundamental web technologies that are available in the browser.

As such, Safari is basically the new IE6 — it lags all other modern browsers and prevents websites from taking advantage of nice new features. (Yes, some of these features are available with polyfills but others are not polyfillable.)

I wish the author had noted this, given the high visibility of the NYT. More people need to know about Apple’s neutering of browsers on iOS. It’s crippling the growth of the web.

One specific example: Safari still doesn’t support AudioWorklet, which means iOS users get lower-quality slowdown in my product Soundslice (a feature we rolled out last week: https://www.soundslice.com/blog/199/introducing-enhanced-slo...). If more iOS users knew about this, perhaps they’d lobby Apple for better web support.

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>As such, Safari is basically the new IE6 — it lags all other modern browsers and prevents websites from taking advantage of nice new features.

I strongly disagree with you. The new IE6 is Chrome: overwhelming dominance of the web to the extent that Google can dictate "standards" themselves and users begin to lose the ability to use other browsers because "site works best(only) in Chrome", and I think that having my data forcefully harvested and active opposition from the developer to ad-blocking is a LOT worse than "stagnation". I like Firefox a lot on the desktop, but I have no illusions it'd stand in the way of total Chrome domination on its own. The only thing that really throws a wrench in Google's plans is iOS.

>More people need to know about Apple’s neutering of browsers on iOS. It’s crippling the growth of the web.

Good. I don't want everything shoved into websites or web views thank you very much, the web eating the world is something I actively oppose. And I don't care if it makes your life (or my life, with a dev hat on) harder. I don't mind if you simply chose not to serve iOS/Mac/Firefox users at all, though of course most would then take their business elsewhere. And you offering worse quality is also perfectly within the market and I don't fault you for it either. I'd pick a competitor with a native app and high quality, but that's not free to develop, so how that all shakes out may vary. But while it has downsides, Apple serving as a concentrator for user buying power has upsides too so long as they stay as a small though significant part of the market, which is very likely given their business strategy.

>If more iOS users knew about this, perhaps they’d lobby Apple for better web support.

I'm wish the App Store supported upgrade pricing, and I would like laws requiring Apple to offer a purchase-time option for root signing key access, even if it's for money or reduces support or something. But I'm perfectly happy to see a bit of favor towards native experiences over the web and I hope they continue to push that.

> I don't mind if you simply chose not to serve iOS/Mac/Firefox users at all, though of course most would then take their business elsewhere.

I use FF as my daily driver, but as much as I hate to admit it, whatever service I am using is almost always a stronger draw than FF, so I just open it up Chrominium or Brave. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the market for strictly native/browser-agnostic services is large enough to support most uses.

>Unfortunately, I'm not sure the market for strictly native/browser-agnostic services is large enough to support most uses.

I guess "strictly" is debatable, but the point here is that the market for at least somewhat browser agnostic services includes, well, the entirety of iOS at the least. Precisely because there is no "choice", which means big services/developers can't force a choice on us either. If I browse somewhere on my iPhone, I won't be told "go install Chrome" because a I can't (or rather, it'd make no difference because an iOS browser is still the same engine so like "iOS Firefox", "iOS Chrome" is mainly a skin). Sometimes I may see a "better in the app" which I don't mind if it's dismissible because if it's somewhere I actually like, well, maybe I really will try their app. And while iOS users aren't remotely the majority of the global market by user count, they tend to punch above their weight in spending; they aren't a random sample of the population. It's a not insignificant market to entirely forego.

Different people will have different services they depend on and different views of the web in turn, so YMMV, but at least for me that seems to have been enough. I completely uninstalled both Chrome and Chromium, and between Safari and Firefox on Mac and FF on FreeBSD or Ubuntu I haven't encountered anything critical that was non-functional. Apple has effective collectivized the buying power of a picky subset of people. That's definitely not always good, but nor is it always bad. I think at this point a lot of us are making a conscious choice to join that ecosystem, and those of us unhappy with some of it handle it by keeping our main computing environment mixed up.

> and users begin to lose the ability to use other browsers

Begin? No. This has been happening for years. This is what killed Opera browser rendering engine.

For me the primary characteristic of IE6 was not that it had a large market share like Chrome, but that it didn't update for over 5 years. Chrome is nothing like IE6 in that regard.

The web would be better off if iOS users could benefit from the full Chrome codebase.

Yeah: Chrome is the new IE4, pushing ridiculous new technologies simply because they can.

'Ridiculous' is unfair. Google has enough technical chops and market heft to set new internet standards and not look as silly as Redmond did in the 90s in the process.

I think you’re equally being unfair to who Microsoft was and employed in the 90s.

Very possibly so, especially on an individual basis.

Yet the echos of a bazillion BSODs that have seemed less prevalent with Chrome are there.

To your point, comparing an OS to a browser is lame.

I'm not sure how you expected MS to prevent BSOD, which often derived from behavior of programs or drivers. The worst BSOD timeframe seemed to predate computer resources being so vast that common OS protections were viable. And when programs were more hard-crash prone in general.

It's interesting to look back at the difference technologies/tags that survived and which were forgotten: XMLHttpRequest, VML, marquee, etc.

Chrome's dominance wasn't enough to get something useful like WebSQL to stick.

That might be, as you point out, the primary thing for _you_. At the same time, Safari updates plenty of times, just because they don't shout about it doesn't mean it's not happening. Same goes for the backing engines (including Blink and V8 in Chromium and derivatives like CEF and node; but also WebKit and the likes).

The web would be better if it wasn't dominated by a very small set of platforms. Adding 'a few more browsers' on a single operating system hardly helps.

Right now, the 'web' isn't much more aside from Google, Facebook and a few commercial offerings like the various eCommerce websites, and they are all accessed on 2, maybe 3 operating system foundations, with perhaps 1 or 2 relevant browser engines. Adding Gecko or Chrome on iOS changes nothing.

> That might be, as you point out, the primary thing for _you_.

I'd be willing to bet that most people would consider that the primary characteristic of Safari that reminds them of IE. The market share was important to the IE hate but it wasn't because "everyone had it" it was because "everyone had it and it sucked" (sucked~= lagged/slowed development/entrenched users with shitty and unique experiences). Don't get me wrong Chrome also shares some of those secondary (imo) characteristics but I imagine when people speak of "IE" it's because of the , what the parent comment and I, consider the primary characteristic.

> The web would be better if it wasn't dominated by a very small set of platforms. Adding 'a few more browsers' on a single operating system hardly helps.

Now that's a hot take. Can I assume you're an Mac user ? honest question

Safari is in no way any slower that chrome. Sure you might have some features that dev care about, but 99% of the sites works in safari as well as they do in chrome.

I suppose I use macOS about 40% of the time, Windows 10% of the time and the rest is various Linux/Unix/BSD systems. Not sure how that matters.

I'm also of the opinion that for the vast majority of 'users' a locked down, managed device is the best option. To clarify: with the internet we have a vast amount of interdependent and interconnected systems, which in itself depends on everyone operating and maintaining those systems while they are part of this larger 'whole'.

I think most people neither know, nor want to know how this works or how this is done, and as such, taking part in a system that is dependant on this would be a risk for everyone involved.

Coming back to the 'the internet would be better with more diversity' (as that seems to contradict my earlier statement): diversity can come in many forms and apply on many ends. Having multiple server implementations, multiple client implementations and multiple transport implementations would benefit the quality of every implementation as it would need to be robust and tested to the point where it integrates properly. That does, however, not mean that all those differences need to be present at every layer of every implementation. Having a combination of many vendors all vending a single device with a single implementation would add plenty of diversity, same as a few vendors vending many devices with lots of device-specific variations.

Also primary for me, and probably a couple hundreds if counting my colleagues and their families and my close friends and their families and of course my families. Huge proportions of them using iOS. So I concur with previous reply. Don't get too fixated with market share. Apple isn't that niche if you include tablets and phones.

The high number of security vulnerabilities is also something both IE and Chrome share.

The web is the only open platform we have ever had and probably will ever have. To shun it for proprietary app stores and OSes is really disheartening. I'm the exact opposite, the more web apps the better. And sadly, Safari is holding the web back. Not only does it miss many features of modern browsers, it's very buggy. I find I have to make work arounds for Safari specific bugs in almost every website I make now.

>The web is the only open platform we have ever had and probably will ever have.

Are you trying to make some sort of joke here? How is the Web more open than Linux or the BSDs running FOSS applications? And in fact how is the web under Chrome any more open than macOS or Windows? Seriously. In all cases, you can't just freely modify everything about the platform you're running on top of or most of the "applications" you're running. There's a megacorp behind each whose interests may or may not align with yours. You don't get to choose what they do or how. But you can still make whatever you'd like on top for no cost, though you may have to spend money to get attention. And if you make something malicious, you might get added to a blacklist that is distributed to all users. Etc.

In essence Google wants our "operating system" to be Chrome or another of their properties, either as a sort of meta-OS layered on top of the hardware OS or more directly via Chrome OS/Android+Google Play Services. And their financial interest in that is almost exclusively to get data about us to run ads at us, and to the extent possible prevent or hinder avoidance of that harvest or those ads.

It's not just that I don't want an ad company to make my operating system, I don't want an internet-required OS at all. And I want a wide variety of software with zero WAN dependency beyond maybe initial delivery somewhere in the chain. If that's not something you're interested in fine, but lots of us will remain willing to put our money where our mouths are on that one.

I also disagree that Safari is "holding the web back" because I like simple, readable and parseable websites.

You're conflating two issues. Chromium's dominance is a problem for sure, but that is separate from the web being an open platform. The web is more open than Linux (which I use btw) because a web app can run on Linux, MacOS, Windows, FreeBSD, Android, iOS and more without recompiling, redistributing or re-anything. Would it be nice if it wasn't HTML/JS/CSS based? Absolutely. But we gotta take what we can get.

I couldn't agree more that Google's dominance in web technology is a problem. But you're throwing the baby out with the bath water.

And just to add, the current situation is still better than proprietary native apps on MacOS and Windows. I can at least use Chromium in many forms and on virtually any operating system. Not ideal, but the alternative people in this thread are suggesting is far worse.

Works for simple web apps, but for anything complex you are going to run into performance and especially UI issues. (Maybe also being limited to HTTP(S) can be an issue?)

There has been a ton of work to address all of that such as web assembly, webgl, webgpu, webworkers, websockets, http2, sse, on and on. There's a lot of web tech out there (for better or for worse). You really can make a webapp that's just as feature rich, complex and performant as a native app these days. Still tons of work to be done though, web assembly in particular needs some additional features before it can really shine.

In theory you can, but it's a mindset of "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail", happily pushed by Google trying to wrestle control over people's computers from Microsoft.

Yeah I agree with that. But Apple has an app store hammer, and Microsoft has a Windows hammer too. Of all the hammers, I feel Google's is the least evil of them all. They're all really bad, the state of technology today is er ... something. But at least with the web, I maintain hardware freedom and really the most freedom overall.

Is it really the least evil ?

There's a wide panoply of programming languages that can be used on Windows PCs, including specifically to make user interfaces, which are cross-platform, like Qt.

>I like Firefox a lot on the desktop, but I have no illusions it'd stand in the way of total Chrome domination on its own. The only thing that really throws a wrench in Google's plans is iOS.

The thing that currently is holding Google from extreme derivations is actually Microsoft's edgium I think. Microsoft is one of the few companies out there with enough resources to hold a hostile fork of Chromium capable of easy/fast adoption.

If Chromium decides to do something ridiculously egregious. It is possible for it to 1) not affect Microsoft browsers or 2) for Microsoft to maintain a fork and win marketshare fast.

I recently switched from Android to iOS and this was super confusing. No plugins, except for on the OS level (like AdGuard) and then those don’t even work in that weird neutered Firefox, only in Safari :s

Oh and Bitwarden does not work in FF. It it does work in Safari! So now I, a Firefox by default person switched to Safari (on iOS at least). I wish full Firefox was present.

A lot of people notice that when downgrading from Android to iOS.

Be prepared to no longer be able to easily install new launchers / home apps / emulators / adult apps / etc either.

Hopefully we have you back on the open source side soon!

Hehe well, there were some pleasant surprises: Nextcloud works well (auto picture upload), imap mail, webdav, caldav all work with no extra apps needed (with Nextcloud as backend). WireGuard vpn works well, Home Assitant works. No extra app needed for podcasts. Element works, facetime is the best video call experience so far. I do really miss fdroid indeed and apps like GadgetBridge and OSMand (full version). Yeah it’s a walled garden but it has enough gates for me so far.

I do like the privacy notices a lot more though, often they’ll state that nothing is shared and everything stays on the phone. Android with Google play is not as open and under my control as I wished, it’s one of the reasons why the step to iOS is minor imho (freedom-wise).

Try nextdns.io. It blocks ads systemwide (except the YT app, and a few websites that use JS tricks to inject ads)

Bitwarden works very well for me in iOS FF and any other app.

Oh I see, indeed it works on iOS Firefox, thanx that makes a big difference, back to (neutered) FF it is.

Ah, but ad blocking does not work on FireFox, only Safari :s

Nextdns blocks the dns request so it works with Firefox too. I haven’t seen an ad on ff iOS in ages.

Ah, ok, that is also a solution indeed. Still, a bit annoying that one is forced to use the Safari basis, but not any plugins that apply to it...

Bitwarden works in Firefox. I used it to login to HN a few hours ago.

on iOS?

ah, no. Firefox doesn't run on IOs.

Well there is a browser called Firefox for iOS, but it's not the same as on the other platforms due to iOS limitations, that's the point of their comment.

Yeah and Bitwarden does seem to work, just tap “passwords” it brings up Bitwarden, not ff’s password store. Btw does anyone know why bitwarden then asks for a pin and does not use face unlock?

I can’t believe this was overlooked by a prestigious publication.

Honestly, I find NYTs privacy articles to be full of errors and deliberate omissions to drive the agenda. It's seriously made me question about their reputation.

I’m still in a state of outrage/shock over their article on the “far right” joining telegram in the millions in the aftermath of the capitol riots.

There I was, a week or two removed from helping my roommate move his gigantic Nigerian family group chat away from WhatsApp when [0] pops up in my HN feed.

They actually implied most of those millions of new Telegram users, 94% of which weren’t even in North America, were motivated entirely by the capitol riots.

Completely omitting the fact the WhatsApp -> FB data sharing message was sent to every single user in the world on that very same day, January 6th.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/world/europe/telegram-app...

I think the same is true of just about any non-specialist reporting organisation. Find the reporting they do on a subject on which you're an expert, and see how much they get wrong. Don't write them off for it—everybody gets stuff wrong—but read the stories on the material about which you're not expert with the same skepticism.

It's far more likely that the errors are because the editors are non-technical and they seem to have one primary author. It could reflect his bias or his ignorance.

Doesn't surprise me at all. The reality is that journalists are just that, journalists. They rarely have any relevant expertise about what they write. Coupled with strict limits on content size enforced by publishers and an audience that often understands even less about the topics discussed you get major errors like these.

The amount of text necessary to explain to the average NYT reader what a rendering engine is probably more then the allotted text size for this piece of pseudo-intellectual garbage. Should make you worry about everything else journalists write with the same lack of care and understanding of details.

This is why podcasts and longform youtube content form actual experts is thriving while traditional media is dying. They have optimized so much for short attention span, clickbaity and inflammatory content that they have lost all resemblance of quality and expertise. In short, for any given topic, if the explanation is less than an hour long discussion piece, it's almost guaranteed to be simplified to the point of being wrong and useless.

I read the comment you’re replying to as being sarcastic, but good points nonetheless.

> "The amount of text necessary to explain to the average NYT reader what a rendering engine is probably more then the allotted text size..."

it's not that hard to summarize: a rendering engine transforms html into pixels on the screen. most people will have at least a vague idea of what html and pixels are. there's no further need to dive into the details where that description is less than 100% accurate (e.g., sreen readers).

that's to say, the reporting is just lazy and uninformed. no need to bail them out with a technical excuse.

> most people will have at least a vague idea what html and pixels are. there's no further need to dive into the details where that description is less than 100% accurate (e.g., sreen readers).

I doubt very much the average person on the street has a clear idea what a pixel is, let alone what HTML is. And even your description is so incomplete it's wrong since the safari engine also includes JavaScript execution, media rendering etc. on safari, proving my point: if you try to simplify it for the average reader, your description ends up wrong

yes, i said vague idea, not clear idea.

but none of that stuff matters for reaching a reasonable conclusion. we don't need to know how a transmission works to reason about speed and acceleration, only that it converts power from the engine into velocity somehow. the whole purpose of abstraction is to take advantage of such decouplings within a brain limited in how much information it can hold in working memory in any one instant.

I think you can do an ok job. Something like the "The rendering engine's job is to translate the computer languages of the web into the picture you see on the screen. Like human translators two rendering engine's might not understand the same things the same way and differences can occur."

Screen readers are a distraction. Even completely blind readers would have a concept of what is displayed on a computer monitor even if they've never seen it.

> This is why podcasts and longform youtube content form actual experts is thriving while traditional media is dying.

It is kind of sad that the "longform content" that you mention as the new thriving alternative to traditional media, is rather time-infefficient audio and video. I regret the dearth of longform reliable text.

I don't know why he would think that, you can see good longform text examples on HN every day.

Yes, for the subjects that Hacker News is concerned with, but there is a lot more out there than just what appeals to this techie crowd. As someone who has been involved in travel blogging, for example, I have witnessed long-form text becoming less and less popular, and instead images or video are taking over. Obviously it is all well and good to show people things, but there was a lot of useful detail expressed in longform text that you don’t get from the low-information-density formats popular today.

Hard to believe anyone still thinks of the NYT as “prestigious” these days.

Actually safari has implemented some web standards before Firefox and chrome. For example beforeInput events that allow rich text editing.

>As such, Safari is basically the new IE6 — it lags all other modern browsers and prevents websites from taking advantage of nice new features

This tired trope must die. No, Safari is not "the new IE6".

The problem with IE6 was not that it lagged a few years before adopting some features, it was moving fast and implementing things on its own, forcing standards, etc, and forcing a monoculture due to his large adoption (until Firefox came).

The monoculture, moving too fast, dictating arbitrary standards, is what Google does with Chrome (and every Blink derived browser).

I thought the problem was that for 8+ years it had no feature updates, and he team behind it was disbanded. So everyone hated supporting it since it was buggy, and you knew the bugs would never be fixed.

Are you talking about IE on Mac? Because that was different from IE 6 (which was on Windows)

Safari on the iphone is probably the only thing keeping some semblence of the open web alive - it's the one place google can't take over.

You speak as if other browsers never lag in new features. It took /how/ long for Chrome to get position sticky or backdrop filter?

The author probably doesn't know this.

No, Chrome is the new IE6. Safari is... still safari.

I'm not sure that's relevant for privacy - for privacy, the specific thing you need is content blocking, right?

I agree it's important for functionality and the general health of the web as a platform, but those don't seem to be the point of the article.

> I'm not sure that's relevant for privacy - for privacy, the specific thing you need is content blocking, right?

Yes, and for example (to my knowledge) there is no good granular script blocker (e.g. umatrix, ublock origin, noscript) in any browser available for iphone because there is no extension support in browsers like Chrome and Firefox.

Not really. If your rendering engines does the spying for you than blocking other tracking and adware still leaves you without real privacy. Coupled with a lack of fingerprinting protection, simple content blocking may not even be enough to reasonably protect you from third party trackers.

Is the rendering engine doing the spying for you?

This article seems like it's focusing on websites spying on you, and I don't think anyone (either this article or elsewhere) has made a serious allegation that WebKit does actually spy on you. It would be pretty newsworthy if it did!

> So if you use Firefox or Brave on an iPhone, you’re simply using Safari with a different “skin.” This skin can clearly do some content blocking, and it can provide a different browser UI — but it cannot change the fundamental web technologies that are available in the browser.

Firefox Focus is a decent alternative with the best of both worlds.

http://mzl.la/1NDD2IB

What do you mean? I think on iOS it is still rendering with Safari.

Which is actually a good thing for the diversity of browser engines and preventing Google from commandeering web standards and “embrace, extend, extinguish”ing them.

If Chrome was allowed on iOS be sure Google would dump unlimited money to get people to use it. Websites would further go down the path of only testing on Chrome, and Google would continue stuffing their browser full of oftentimes needless features. And they’d continue all their other disgusting practices like AMP even less fettered than before.

The literal only hedge against this right now is Safari. I thank the powers that be that Apple doesn’t let other engines on.

That, and, Safari is miles ahead of any other engine in terms of performance. It’s not even close.

And answer this: how would allowing other engines increase privacy? WebKit does more for privacy than almost any other, and allows installing privacy extensions and wrappers like Firefox. Without that, you’d have people using Chrome more than using Firefox.. a regression in privacy.

> That, and, Safari is miles ahead of any other engine in terms of performance. It’s not even close.

How is it fair to make this statement about iOS where no other engine is even allowed? Maybe Chrome(ium) and/or Firefox would be faster than Webkit on iOS if they were actually allowed to develop for it, or maybe Safari would be the best. It's impossible to know because Apple prevents any competition here.

Because it’s the same engine on Mac and it’s far, far faster (and less battery consuming). Sure, opening it may incentivize Chrome to compete, but I doubt much more than they already are incentivized in general.

We have MacOS to see this is true to a huge degree there. The related and overlapping iOS wouldn’t change things that much.

> Safari is miles ahead of any other engine in terms of performance. It’s not even close.

link?

> Which is actually a good thing for the diversity of browser engines

How is only allowing ONE browser engine good for diversity? If anything it hinders diversity and progress on iOS.

> Websites would further go down the path of only testing on Chrome

If only it would be possible to test Safari on a non Apple device, Apple is partial it fault here

> And answer this: how would allowing other engines increase privacy?

Because then there could be competition between Safari, Firefox, Brave etc.

Answer this: why do you let Apple dictate what Apps you can install on a ($700 - $1100) phone that you own?

If you define diversity as market share, explain how v8 won’t gain market share if allowed on iOS. And v8 already has way too much.

Anyone paying attention can see there is a massive battle over web standards right now between Apple and Google, King Kong vs Godzilla (the other players aren’t in the same league), with the former being the one consistently fighting for privacy, and the latter for ever more invasive ads.

To me arguing for letting v8 on iOS is like saying why don’t we weaken King Kong so we can add a few more firefighters. It just doesn’t make sense. You don’t weaken the fighter thats lower in share (and stands against invasive advertising) because you feel bad for the local police not getting a chance.

It’s actually exactly why I’m happy to pay 700 - and if they opened it to other engines I’d value it less.

You can’t have a black and white view of freedom. Sometimes freedom is having an imperfect yet big and tough player that stands for what you want, against a worse option. The implementation is less free technically, but the outcome is more free dramatically (balance of power over the direction and control of the web and privacy).

I’d prefer a world where Chrome had a lot less market share, and then I’d not mind if it was more open. But we don’t live in that world. I’ll take the trade off.

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