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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

This argument makes no sense. When people want "other browser engines" on iOS what they mean is "I want Blink so I can write my websites only for Chrome and push the operational burden on browser vendors to maintain compatibility" which isn't exactly innovative.

Apple's browser ban is literally the only thing in the whole world making it so that publishers have to put any effort into cross-browser compatibility and graceful degradation. Having a browser that people have no choice but to make work that doesn't move at the speed of Google's CI pipeline is such a good thing for users of Not Chrome.

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Alternative view point: other browsers on ios would actually force apple to compete and make designing for safari not a cluster fuck.

How exactly do you want engineers who don't have an apple computer or phone to test for safari?

Compete on what though? Every web developer right now has no choice but to design for Chrome as well. You just don't care because it's what you would have chosen anyway. There's no "competition" in the browser engine space. There's only posturing for market share dominance and lock-in which you can call competition if you like, but nobody is competing based on "may the browser users like best win."

Browser specs are actually pretty well communicated. Most stuff get buy in from major players in the game (e.g. Google and Mozilla). Some stuff remain specific to one browser (e.g. idle detection in Chrome).

Apple is the one that has consistently been either extremely behind on new functionality, or just broken implementation of existing functionality (basic auth on mobile safari comes to mind).

And again, my main issue is that there is no way to test on Safari without owning Apple hardware.

True, but if I want to test Chrome I need to install spyware on my computer. ( I'm aware of Chromium releases)

So.. you're saying you can use (pure) Chromium or Brave, Edge, etc, to test, right?

Not sure what your point is, because you're immediately saying you know there are alternatives :)

Point is that Google is not a saint for following web standards.

Compete on standards adherence? Look at how many features are either only partially supported or totally unsupported on Safari vs. other browsers: https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+94,chrome+97,safari+15,...

It may also mean "I don't want to pay the 30% app store tax, be subject to their review process, purchase an Apple device for development, etc."

Of course, those objections could come from good or bad actors alike.

I think we’re talking web apps, but the third complaint could still be valid.

Right, but building a web app is a way to not have to use the app store payments. But web apps' capabilities are limited, so you must build a native app and go through the app store.

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