Hacker News Reader

Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020·

IMO it seems like "all browsers on iOS are Safari" isn't that big of a deal because 'browsers' on iOS still get to throw all their own features and sync services into their browser app. It'd be like saying you wish you didn't have to use Windows' window APIs to create windows or wished you could avoid UIKit to do anything on iOS.

View on HN

This is conflating "Browser Chrome/UI" and "Browser Rendering Engine", from a developers/business (and a web standards) perspective the rendering engine is what matters. From that perspective all bowsers "engines" on iOS are Safari/Webkit.

From a purely business standpoint, the UI really is all that matters. Users don't choose firefox over Chrome just because FF has CSS cascade layers[0] (for example), they choose it because they think the sync/PW manager is better for them, or they might like the look of it more compared to alternatives.

0: https://caniuse.com/css-cascade-layers

No, they choose Chrome because it doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere, which has everything to do with the underlying tech.

Firefox doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere, and Safari doesn't crash (although it only works on Darwin); that doesn't sound like a differentiator.

> Firefox doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere

Hell, it works more "everywhere" than Chromium (let alone Chrome) does.

Not in my experience. Developers develop for chromium, I find many more rendering issues with Firefox's rendering engine than I do Chrome's.

I meant more in the sense of operating system + hardware combinations on which you can compile/install/run Firefox.

That might well be why a user chooses it, even on iOS. But from my perspective as a business owner and developer, on iOS Chrome is Safari no matter what. When I test my site for use on iOS, I test in Safari. Which variant they use is irrelevant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com