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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

You can't separate the hardware from the software and corporate decisions though.

The problem you've got here is that the iOS model has worked incredibly well for Apple. Without that you wouldn't have had the investment that has delivered the M1.

I'd love to be able to run Firefox on the iPad. I also disagree strongly with some of Apple's decisions - especially on the App Store. However, where we are now is a better outcome than a hypothetical position where iOS is less successful and Apple is using inferior CPU designs. After all I can always buy an Android tablet if I want to run Firefox.

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I run Firefox on iPad with zero problems…

I'm sure you know but Firefox on the iPad uses Apple's rendering engine Webkit and not Mozilla's Gecko -so arguably it's more like Safari than desktop Firefox.

Why should I care? It works beautifully… I have zero concern for what rendering engine Firefox on iPad uses.

Well, for example, if it ran Gecko like it does on Android, you'd be one step closer to running extensions like uBlock Origin that run fine over on the Android side of the fence. Similarly, you might be able to use a password manager extension (e.g. LastPass or Bitwarden) that doesn't support the full suite of features that Apple gives its own password manager (e.g. updating a stored password based on an updated entry--and yes, I COULD just use Firefox's password manager, but maybe my usage of password spans beyond the browser or even THAT browser specifically).

And also you might care because we're on a forum full of developers knee deep in a thread and walled gardens and their relation to customer architectures, and it might be relevant to that thread that code that's common to every other Firefox platform target isn't as common on iOS.

I didn't say you should care.

If you used Firefox extensions - as many others do - then you probably would.

We’d all be spared confusion if you called it “Firefox sans WebKit”. It probably is too much to expect everyone reading a comment to know about the rendering bit.

Sorry no idea at all what you're saying here. If you know what WebKit is then you probably know what rendering means.

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