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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with almost all of your comment--particularly strongly with regards to the way Apple has hobbled the web as a competitor to their App Store platforms, but notably also with respect to Firefox being locked out here--given your first phrase, it is worth at least considering the argument that the only reason why there is currently any "competition in web browsers" at all is Apple being a stubborn asshole about the whole thing, as otherwise it feels highly likely that everyone, everywhere, on every single platform, would be using Chrome...

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If apple was forced to allow competition in browser engines on iOS and wanted to keep some market share for Safari, then they would have to compete fairly with Chrome.

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?

"So maybe they would start investing some real money in Safari's development and add the features everyone is using Chrome for?"

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.

Chrome has the biggest market share (outside of iOS) because it has the more features (that is web APIs) and less bugs, making it the most reliable browser. 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.

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.

"Chrome has the biggest market share (outside of iOS) because it has the more features (that is web APIs) and less bugs, making it the most reliable browser"

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?

Not so sure about that last bit, Android is by far the most popular OS according to StatCounter, a global web analytics service: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

Which part aren't you sure about?

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.

> Chrome has the biggest market share (outside of iOS) because it has the more features

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.

Chrome has a large marketshare, in part, because Google paid to have it installed along with free software (such as free antivirus utilities) through the use of dark patterns.

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.

>What "features" are people using Chrome for? What do you think iOS users are being deprived of?

I'm not a chrome user(I prefer Firefox) but viewing WEBMs for one. Proper ublock origin support as well.

Chrome on Android doesn't support extensions at all, so that kind of invalidates that. Indeed, Chrome on Android is rather a piece of shit, so it's remarkable reading a thread by someone claiming that if only they could bring this to iOS they'd be winning.

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).

This is somewhat ahistorical. The concern was patent licensing fees and it impacted way more than just Google.

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?

I don't care about Chrome. Firefox on Android supports extensions.

>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.

"I don't care about Chrome"

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.

>This sentence is interesting given that Safari is faster in virtually every single usage model.

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.

I'm not sure what the conclusion of your statement is, but Safari is still head and shoulders faster than both Chrome and Firefox on macOS. Both on macOS 11.4 and Safari 14.1.1, and macOS 12 and Safari 15.

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.

Let's see Safari/Chrome market share on macOS.

Safari is just Webkit like Chrome and Edge. The only real competition is Firefox.

> Safari is just Webkit like Chrome and Edge

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.

Any web developer would tell you that nowadays Blink (Google's WebKit fork) and WebKit are very different. Blink has more features than WebKit, and less bugs. So with Gecko (Firefox's engine) we really have three different browser engines nowadays.

Firefox' engine is called Quantum nowadays. Not sure how much of the original Gecko code still exists in its depths though.

The engine is still called Gecko. Quantum was the project name that try ( and succeeded ) to bring components from Servo to Gecko. Where Servo was the experimental engine written in Rust.

Technically Chrome forked off WebKit a few years back and Edge (and most other browsers) use that. I do wonder how different Blink and WebKit are at this point considering there’s quite a bit of manpower behind Blink.

Blink gets many times more manpower than WebKit, it is also used by new IE, which assures Google the veto power on any new browser API.

With Google providing Firefox with life-support.

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