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Comment by cyanydeez | Hacker News Reader

maybe we need a good monopoly lawsuot since safari is usually the only browser available on the iphone.

im tempted to just x out the safari logo on mine since it likely cant be tested

Better Safari with buggy content blockers than Google blocking adblockers on mobile. Also, Safari has had much better JavaScript performance on iOS devices since at least the days of the A7-A8, looking at JS benchmark results relative to SPEC2006 results.

Firefox supports adblockers on mobile, and the functionality exceeds what Safari content blockers are able to achieve

Not really on iOS: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/7374

Right, I mean on platforms other than iOS of course. That's why third party browser engines ought to be allowed, so that vendors like Mozilla would be able to provide those features on iOS too.

Because safari gets to use its own special source and everyother browser on iOS has to use an ios web view, doesn't it?

Safari’s web view is almost identical to the ones that third parties use.

Once the Safari monopoly on iPhone is gone, the web will belong to Chrome.

I suppose you felt the same way about IE?

I don't know why you're being downvoted, that is actually a fair and surprisingly thoughtful question.

My answer would be that the landscape of the web, advertising and software ecosystems are drastically different today.

Once the Safari noncompetitive monopoly is gone, Apple will be motivated to make Safari best-in-class.

For me, Safari is best in-class on OSX.

It has the fastest UI, uses the least memory and uses a fraction of the battery life compared to all other browsers.

And from what we've seen in Monterey they are continuing to invest heavily in improving it.

> And from what we've seen in Monterey they are continuing to invest heavily in improving it.

lol, no. they're not. Safari specially on mobile is a joke and a bad one at it. Their whole strategy is to pull you into there Appstore and monetize every part of it and keep Webapps at a disadvantage

Yeah, I have no idea what people are talking about with Safari being the modern IE when Google is off in a corner trying to push web standards no one is asking for on a browser that makes its RAM consumption look like you’re doing video editing.

Agreed. Apple are dragging their heels and will fight tooth and nail to protect their precious Apple Store revenue powered by the almighty 30% cut.

Which is kinda unnecessary: PWA are so bad that a good strategy would be to allow them (for instance by allowing Chrome with its own rendering engine), then let users decide what they prefer.

PWA are indeed limited, but they are particularly so because Safari drags them down.

No, it is because the idea that everything must be build using web tech is dragging them down.

Pretty much 100% of users would prefer which ever technology solution that solves their problem for the least cost (in terms of money, or storage space on the device, or battery, or time, etc). For most apps that aren't graphically intensive, or require massive amounts of data in memory, or that require a ton of side effects when the user interacts with the UI, a PWA should do the job perfectly adequately even if it's worse than something native.

Being able to deploy a PWA that avoided the 30% cut Apple takes for all digital content would suit many users very, very well.

It can only improve as fast as the slowest actor.

Plenty of native apps are terrible, oversized, over reaching in permissions or just plain battery drainers. Nothing stops PWAs being these.

If you're on about features? Ask Apple why they shy away from them on the web? Hard to justify imposing the 30% cut on a website/app.

Hell, Apple could have lead the charge on "web app privacy", implement the specs they've "missed" for web (notifications, background sync etc), and GATE THEM TO PWA/installed web apps, no more news sites asking to notify you when you just go to an article.

Heck, add keys to the web app manifest so as a developer I need an Apple Dev account and the holy $99 entry fee as well as my personal info in Apple's hands to make sites that do these things, so they have recourse to nuke the bad actors.

Nothing excites me more as a mobile user than having every website I use littered with push notifications and background processes that I need to dig through some Debug/Settings screen to discover.

Because web developers can absolutely be trusted to do the right thing.

almost every browser rrquires approvals. youre saying safari is write to have a shityy pwa implementation because the web isnt a walled garden

I’m fairly certain there are other browsers on iOS. Like Firefox and chrome.

But they use the same engine, they're basically skins for Safari.

Which means they all have exactly the same IndexedDB bugs and no one but apple can do anything about it.

There are other browsers but they’re all forced to use the Apple browser engine, so Chrome on iOS is WebKit-based, for example.

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