Apple and Google investigated by UK competition body
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
This is very important because Apple is preventing competition in web browsers engines, forcing competitor browsers (like Chrome and Firefox) to use the engine under Safari (WebKit), which they fully control. By doing so they deprive other browsers of most of their value, and prevent the development of web applications capable of competing with native applications, because they do not implement crucial features in WebKit, like push notification.
The web browser is my single-most used piece of software, and I'd really like to choose which one I use, thanks (Firefox, in case you're wondering).
That and not simply being able to drag and drop mp3s to listen to.
Doesn't Apple Music support this? I have many MP3s I've dragged and dropped into Apple Music and then played them on my phone.
This incorrect, Blink (chromium) forked from webkit in 2013.
Blink has significantly diverged from webkit over the last decade, they are very different layout engines today. Also this only applies to the layout engine, the JS engines and web APIs are entirely different. They are pretty much completely different browser engines today.
So maybe they would start investing some real money in Safari's development and add the features everyone is using Chrome for? Maybe they'd also develop Android and Windows versions of Safari, like a normal browser trying to get market share would do?
This sentence is interesting given that Safari is faster in virtually every single usage model. Safari is lighter on memory. Safari is far more efficient from a CPU cycle perspective (ergo battery life). Particularly notable, iOS web browsing is overrepresented on the web versus marketshare.
"Everyone" is using Chrome because it was the browser in the early 2000s that they used on their Windows box. Do you think Chrome has made a particularly compelling argument over the past five to ten years? It's the incumbent that has been coasting on inertia.
What "features" are people using Chrome for? What do you think iOS users are being deprived of?
Notifications from web apps? Yeah, no.
I have serious grievances with Apple's restrictions on their platforms, and some of these walls will fall at the hands of government demands, however iOS users are being deprived little by not having a full version of Chrome.
I'm not a chrome user(I prefer Firefox) but viewing WEBMs for one. Proper ublock origin support as well.
As to WebM, zero users are missing the lack of WebM. WebM was Google trying to boot-stomp a codec that offered virtually no compelling story for their own reasons, while offering a worse experience for the vast majority of users (e.g. worse energy profile given that little hardware has full hardware support).
>As to WebM, zero users are missing the lack of WebM.
Let's just say pretty major platform I'm using daily uses webms extensively and the lack of support on iOS is a huge pain for me.
Neat. Only you replied with that refutation when I specifically asked what people are missing on iOS vis-a-vis Chrome. Neat that Firefox supports those features, but that seems to be so little of a competitive story that its usage on mobile is absolutely minuscule.
Which "major platform" is causing huge pain by the lack of WebM on iOS? LOL.
H.264 is (and pretty much all MPEG standards are) a patent-encumbered format. Anyone who encodes, decodes, or otherwise uses the format needs to pay licensing fees to a confusingly-named patent pool called MPEG-LA. Google is entirely capable of paying those fees; random webmasters and Free Software hackers are not.
The only reason why this didn't become as much of a problem as I'm making it out to be is because the H.264 pool had a very affordable or zero-royalty tier (can't remember which) for free Internet video distribution. At one point it looked like MPEG-LA was going to shitcan this tier, which would have basically killed every video site at the time except for YouTube. This wasn't an empty threat: previous ISO-standard formats like MPEG-4 Part 2 didn't come to an agreement on web video, so it was never used on the web. Macromedia wound up licensing On2 VP6 (WebM's predecessor) in Flash specifically because it had no known patent encumbrance.
Today, we have H.265, which is a licensing nightmare even for premium video providers and hardware manufacturers that are ordinarily used to paying licensing fees. AFAIK it's something like 3 patent pools and a bunch of other companies now?
Both Chrome and Firefox made tremendous improvement. Safari 12 being the best and efficient making headlines meant Google and Firefox spend in the last 2+ years optimising. All while Safari 13 and later Safari 14 added quite a lot more Web features and made it slower.
Not sure about Safari 15 yet.
Safari never got slower. Chrome got embarrassed into effectively cleaning up its act a bit and managing the catastrophic memory usage, but it's still slower and less efficient. And it's still a memory disaster compared to its contemporaries.
Here is a rather exhaustive list of all the features that Safari is lacking and which prevent the development of web applications that could compete with native ones: https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/
A lot of companies are deprived access to iOS users because they don't have the financial means to develop applications specifically for iOS. A lot of companies which have the means to develop natives applications have to compromise on the features they develop because development cost is much higher. A lot of companies are losing money because they have to use the app store and give Apple 30% of their revenue while they could use web applications instead and use payment solutions taking less than 5% of commission.
Because of Apple anti-competitive behaviour, iOS users are deprived of applications that just can't exist, deprived of features that companies can't afford to develop because of the high cost of iOS specific development, deprived of applications that could be of better quality if the developers behind it could focus on one codebase, and deprived of cheaper applications and in-app purchases.
They are deprived of the benefit of competition, basically.
ROFL. Chrome has the biggest market share because it rose while IE was a pile of dogshit and Firefox was going through a massive rewrite. It became the Microsoft of browsers, and turned lazy and fat as a result.
"It is very common to encounter websites or applications which do not work properly in Safari, and web companies and developers are encouraging users to use Chrome because of that."
Extremely uncommon, and generally a good sign that something is trash because it has a development team following the "IE" model.
Sure there is competition. Buy an Android device. But you know what's super weird? Android users leverage their browsers far less than iOS users. They're underrepresented online. Shouldn't they be enjoying that remarkable panacea afforded by such competition? You know, the competition where Chrome on Android is terrible, doesn't support extensions, etc?
Two facts-
-Android is the most popular mobile OS by a long ways
-But in every jurisdiction its representation among web visitors lags, usually significantly, its marketshare. iOS users, despite the horseshit that appears from Apple detractors, use their browser more than they do on alternatives. They are over-represented online.
Most users don't care. Chrome is the dominant browser because Google anti-competitively used their monopoly in search engines (and eventually their market power in phones). They're no better than Microsoft in using Windows to push IE/Edge on users. They're just far more successful at it.
Users who do not pay attention during software install wizards ended up with Chrome installed and changed to their default browser without knowing how it happened.
I use Safari in a similar way, albeit mostly between my iOS and macOS existence.
The number of times I've missed a Chrome engine feature is somewhere approximating zero.
So saying "most of their value" seems pretty specious. If Chrome were faster, used less power, or had some value proposition rather than integration, sure, but it isn't. Here's a fun hottake - Chrome forced to use webkit on iOS is almost certainly better than Chrome would be if it used Google's own engine.
"because they do not implement crucial features in WebKit, like push notification"
There is always something that becomes the critical missing ingredient. Yet uptake of web apps on Android and the desktop is somewhere in the proximity of non-existent (but always explained away by shaking one's fist at Apple). The suite of features in web apps has grown spectacularly, and now encompasses high performance graphics, a massive VM, game controllers, gyroscopes and cameras and microphones, but there is always just one more thing that Apple is always to blame for.
This is another futile thread that is going to be brigaded by the anti-Apple crew, so please enjoy downvoting to try to assuage whatever hangups you have.
Apple succeeded (and almost died first, I know, I was there at the time) in integrating hardware and software and Google succeeded in building a better search engine and dominating ads, plus buying Android, yet today there are basically no alternatives to iPhones and Android phones, and search is still majorally dominated by Google. Economically speaking, the market economy allowed them to become dominant in their categories. If you throttle competition to avoid mono/duopolies, do you throttle success for everyone? If you clamp down after successful domination, does that really increase competition? Is there a balance somewhere, or is this basically always going to happen?
I do not see any other possible result in a market for products with near zero marginal costs and high barriers to entry.
I also don't think making software or making a platform is "near zero marginal cost." Sure someone can hack something together with off the shelf components in a short time, but building a sustainable product or service isn't easy and takes a lot of resources. Copycat products or making the nth widget might be things which are low marginal cost, but then those who don't innovate die off.
As an example, Microsoft bundling Teams with its other software at nearly no cost to Microsoft versus Slack. In a physical product business, a seller does not have as much freedom to bundle in extras at no cost to prevent competitors.
Those wanting to use something other than Teams are still free to choose, the switching costs are the barrier to entry in this case and anti-trust can ensure it's not made artificially higher by platforms.
High Barrier of Entry is always going to create monopoly. Who wants to invest tens of billions every year just to stay on top of leading edge Node and try to compete with TSMC? Even Global foundry being bankrolled by Saudi couldn't afford it.
>do you throttle success for everyone?
It isn't about market monopoly, it is about the abuse of its power once you reach that status. It has to be fair and just.
The UK wants to show it has teeth post Brexit, but will find out shortly it can't tackle FAANG without broad political support from other countries.
EU? Even Japan is opening a case on it. Where iPhone has nearly 70% market shares it is ridiculous.