Apple's grip on iOS browser engines disallowed under proposed EU rules | Hacker News Reader

Apple's grip on iOS browser engines disallowed under proposed EU rules

theregister.com

170 pointsguerrilla145 comments

Very excited for this. My team is bringing Unreal Engine to the browser, and it works great on computers but not so much on iOS due to the restrictions that iOS brings. Being able to use a Chromium browser together with WebGPU will enable a whole new distribution path for game developers who don't want to fork over a 30% tax to Apple. The open web allows for direct online distribution with no middlemen, that's always been the beauty of it.

Video demo of our platform: https://youtu.be/WSIFyz-2PeY

Sounds interesting. How do you store assets? Unless it's a tiny game (for which UE4 isn't a great fit either) you could be looking at having to download 100MB or more every time you launch the game.

Some of the biggest changes in gaming engines is that they have gotten much much more advanced about streaming first low res assets in, starting the game, then continuing to stream high res assets in on the fly.

Even if a user doesnt have cached assets (which i think is the main point against your supposition, that assets can be cached after first launch), ideally a modern game could still load very fast at very low fidelity & keep pulling down higher fidelity assets as the user plays.

Exactly, this is what we're doing with our asynchronous asset fetching system.

We have our own asset fetching system which only loads in what is absolutely necessary, for example you don't need the entire game and can often get away with loading the first 5% or so. Everything else (assets) gets streamed in at runtime in the background.

Streaming sounds great. 5% instead of the whole game is an improvement over downloading 100% just to use a small portion of the game. But if the user has to keep re-downloading those 5% over and over, then it's a bit of a wash no?

Pretty sure you can get the browser to cache websites no?

> The open web allows for direct online distribution with no middlemen, that's always been the beauty of it.

I'm still surprised considering it's basically WebKit under the hood. What are some of the things that don't work on iOS? Are they part of WebKit and removed for arbitrary reasons or is WebKit worse than I imagine?

Apple is building a web browser engine, Google is building a sandboxed application runtime - that happens to be a web browser engine superset.

False narrative.

Google is building a web browser engine that matches the current needs of developers, while Apple has under-invested in its engine for years, leaving it rigged with bugs and lagging behind others in an obvious attempt to prevents web apps from competing with natives apps on iOS to preserve its App Store revenues and enrich its app ecosystem to boost iDevices sales.

This x 1000. Couldn't have said it better myself. Apple is greedy and doing everything it can to preserve it's precious App Store riches powered by their 30% tax.

- Safari Browser Extensions only work with Safari.

- Other browsers can’t have extensions.

- Stuff like WebTorrent or IPFS gets held back on iOS because WebKit.

- Only Safari can create app shortcuts on the Home Screen, even if you change your default browser

- Safari refuses to support WebMIDI, so only way to get MIDI access on iOS is to publish an app on the AppStore

- The website time limits feature (in ios settings) only works if you open the website in Safari. Other browsers can’t respect this setting.

> who don't want to fork over a 30% tax to Apple

a) It's 15% for most developers and not a tax by any definition.

b) It only applies to applications which accept money from users.

c) No government has ever said that Apple is not entitled to this.

d) You would have to be crazy to think Apple will allow b) without them being compensated. What is likely to happen is that Apple will have a Payment API that you as a developer will need to call every time you accept a payment. They will then bill you for the 15% each month and ban you for non-payment. And reconciliation is easy because they can simply download your app, trigger a payment and make sure they see a corresponding request for their API.

if games work in browsers, then they would have to ban the browser, which would presumably run afoul of these rules....

I think you're confused. There are two ways to distribute applications:

1) Create a website and ask users to open it in Safari/Chrome. You have not benefited from Apple's technologies nor customer base that they acquired. You used your tools, you acquired your customers and so Apple claims no commission.

2) Create an app that is a wrapper around WebKit/Chromium. For this case you have used Apple's technologies (e.g. Swift/XCode) and you are benefitting from Apple's customer base (via the App Store). Whether you download the app from the App Store or a third party store is irrelevant. From Apple's perspective you still owe the 15-30% commission.

And as I mentioned below this is not hypothetical. It's exactly what happened in Netherlands.

3) Tell your users to install the free unreal browser if they want a discount and cross-platform support.

This wouldn't be acceptable under the spirit of these regulations. And definitely wouldn't be acceptable to a lot of us.

If apple wants, they can split their OS and their phones if they want to "make money for writing an OS". At the same time that'd also obligate them to make it possible to install android OS on their hardware.

But yeah no, apple does not "deserve" a percentage of your revenue because they have written the OS and don't let you switch the OS.

Imagine arguing Microsoft should charge people x% of every software sale because they write the OS.

> This wouldn't be acceptable under the spirit of these regulations

You clearly haven't been paying attention to the EU regulations. Because it is exactly in the spirit of them and what Apple did in response to Dutch authorities demanding third payment providers [1]. They got their 15-30% either way.

And it is completely normal for Apple to have a commission on application purchases made on their platform. It's no different to how many websites e.g. Shopify or hardware e.g. Playstation work.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/storekit-external-entitl...

I have been. And I expect apple to get in a lot of trouble over the decision with NL.

I actually wouldn't be surprised if we saw a huge % of global revenue fine for that. And apple would deserve it.

This seems like a really elegant solution - it simultaneously improves browser technology for all of the internent and avoids the appstore walled garden tax.

The hope would be to that Unreal makes a generically useful browser that can navigate to any web page (include hacker news) so it can't be blocked from/taxed by the appstore. But also provides W3C/industry standard compliant WebGPU advances and ways to cache login info/game assets/game states and handle game networking - of which Unreal as well as its competitors such as Unity can use if they wanted to.

If Unreal implements its browser hooks in a non-standardized, purposefully cryptic proprietary way - then they are really just creating their own walled garden - which they can do but can't really claim any moral high ground (if that's important to them).

So you’d need to get users to install a supported browser on their device before they could play games built in this? That doesn’t seem like a great experience.

You are assuming everyone would stay with Safari?

I'm not sure the percentage, but a lot of people already use chrome on iOS. Which is just a wrapper around apple's browser engine (webkit).

If apple allows other browser engines, then Chrome would be an automatic app update away from changing to the chromium engine (blink?).

Safari has pretty high market share, something like 90% or something. However, I have a feeling Apple will want to compete with Google by if it becomes known that updated Chrome can play actual games on iOS through a mobile browser.

Good. Even putting aside the discussion on sideloading, Apple blocking all non-Safari browsers is utterly egregious.

To think we considered Microsoft simply bundling IE bad in the 90s — imagine if they had software that actively prevented you from installing Netscape.

Here's what I don't understand. Microsoft had (and still has) a monopoly on desktop computer software. Like 90% of the market. The anti trust concern was that they could abuse their position to gain dominance in another market, such as the browser market. A very genuine concern, given their install base.

Apple doesn't have more than 25% share in mobile or desktop markets. People can switch to Android and get what they want. It's egregious if a monopoly restricts you, but for smaller players where do you draw the line? 25% of the market?

Apple has ~57% of smartphone marketshare in the US.

And gaining

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31136586

From your link, iOS is at 25% https://stockapps.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/market-domi...

BRIC countries largely dominate the high volume / low end of the range [1], so the share will change drastically per country and region. iOS is at 22% globally [2], but much higher in the US [3].

[1] https://newzoo.com/insights/rankings/top-countries-by-smartp...

[2] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...

[3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/02/15/apples-iphone-dom...

So why should users in those countries should just be discarded out of hand as far as marketshare concerns?

Again, globally, an 87/13 split is extremely concerning and the numbers for actual browser share are even more tilted than that. Firefox and Safari are the only holdouts and they collectively make up about 10% of the market, everything else is Chromium in a wig.

The root comment in this thread is about market share in terms of monopoly concerns. Therefore it stands to reason that each local jurisdiction, whether the U.S., E.U., South Korea, etc., will determine monopoly standards based on regional marketshare.

The root comment in this thread is about browser marketshare in terms of monopoly terms. Hardware marketshare is actually a tangent to the actual discussion in the first place.

Browser monoculture is the problem that - if you'll read back to the OP - this comment thread is supposed to be about. Forcing iOS to open up is a short-term benefit for user freedom and a long-term downside for user freedom due to the monoculture that will result when that 87% marketshare becomes 100% and we see a return to "this browser is not supported, please view this page using Chrome" and having captchas that are impossible to bypass unless you're feeding Google your personal information.

Furthermore, even then, we're only at most talking about a 60-40 split even in the most cherrypicked markets... a 60-40 split is not monopoly power really. And in contrast, in the big picture Android already has an 87-13 majority, which is getting into the territory where monopoly is a concern (hence the concern over monoculture and privacy intrusions), and again that's hardware, looking at software the picture is even more bleak and Chrome/Chromium are over 90% marketshare.

Anyway, you may not care about the market as a whole, but you still are affected by it regardless, so it matters, even if a few niches do remain majority (but not monopoly) apple.

In this discussion, browser and hardware are intrinsically linked, because the hardware is the platform that the browser lives on, and iOS as a platform has specific restrictions about what browser engines can be used on it.

Substitution and lock-in are also things that the antitrust laws are concerned with as they are relevant to how you define the market in the first place. If the market is for iOS browser engines, Android browsers cannot effectively compete for consumers who are locked-in to the iOS ecosystem due to the switching costs and other barriers that must be surmounted in order for consumers to access those browsers. Almost no one is going to switch from an existing $1000+ phone to a new one solely because of their browser, leading to almost zero cross elasticity of demand between iOS and Android browsers (high cross-elasticity being indicia that products are part of the same market, e.g., mobile browsers).

So one way to answer your question would be to say that Apple has complete control over the relevant market, which is the market for iOS browser engines.

But, nobody pays for browsers (anymore). What are they competing for? It is ALWAYS about money. Are they competing to see who can collect your data to see to third parties? Who can show you ads in their browser? Those are both bad things in my opinion, so Apple blocking them is consumer friendly behavior. But, of course, in a country ruled by corporations, this would be seen as bad.

If every supermarket in the West half of the country is owned by one company, that is a monopoly even though they only have 50% of the market, as "the relevant market" gets analyzed to mean "the west side of the country". The real question is whether one believes that iPhone vs. Android counts as morally equivalent to West vs. East, due to how: 1) most normal people only have a single phone, and thereby they can't just randomly pop over to Android to buy something the same way they can just pop over to a different supermarket in a market with competing supermarkets; and 2) high switching costs--which are partly born from an active decision by these companies to make purchases be non-transferable--prevents people from even "moving to the other side of the country" (similar to the high switching costs of physically doing literally that) in order to switch markets.

> Apple doesn't have more than 25% share in mobile or desktop market

This is incorrect. In the US, Apple has over 60% of the mobile OS marketshare[1], and 60% of the market is therefore forced to use Safari and only Safari.

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-...

You're singling out one particular market and claiming that represents the big picture, when it very much is an exception. Specific niche markets having a small majority of one or the other isn't concerning, someone is going to be on top and 57-43 is basically as equal as it gets even in your cherrypicked example.

Globally, Android has 87% of the market and iOS has 13%. That is far far more concerning than Apple having a small majority in one specific market.

And to be clear it's not over 60%, even your own source says that's false - you're backing a literal browser monoculture with 87% global hardware marketshare and 90% software marketshare by wrapping yourself in the language of antitrust and competitiveness, and you still can't do it without using falsehoods and exaggerations.

I'm in the US, and advocate for regulation in the US. I do not care about marketshare in the rest of the world, and neither does the FTC. The only statistic that matters in this case is that iOS has 60% of the marketshare in the US, and what happens in other countries is irrelevant.

To be clear, the FTC doesn't have a problem with the current situation, so evidently they don't think it matters either.

The FTC's current priority under Lina Khan is data privacy regulation, which is already a huge topic. One can of worms at a time.

At this point, I think the chances the US won’t adopt similar stances as the EU in relation to browser engines as close to zero.

>Globally, Android has 87% of the market and iOS has 13%.

That is not true. Neither in unit shipment or usage. However one wishes to define as market share.

>You're singling out one particular market

And if that market has its own jurisdiction. Then yes, both UK and Japan has over 60% of Smartphone user on Apple's platform.

s/is therefore forced/have therefore chosen

There, fixed that for you. They chose to buy an iPhone and I think at this point people know what they’re choosing and why. Nobody forced them to do anything. If I buy a PlayStation, I’m not being ‘forced’ to not be able to play Call of Duty. I do feel some of apple’s App Store rextrications are excessive, although they are being pushed in the right direction, but this sort of frothingly apoplectic language gets really irritating.

No monopoly gets to 100% by simply existing, people chose to go toward that company... until it was so big that no one could compete with them any longer.

The problem really comes when that monopoly position is used to impose unreasonable restrictions, or leverage the company into additional market advantages. That is abuse of a monopoly position, or lets say an advantageous market position. I accept that.

But you can't argue that features and restrictions that people freely chose when the company had a minority market share are somehow imposed unfairly or are leveraging unfair advantages. They had no such advantage, but users were perfectly happy with the tradeoff anyway, so clearly they're not being coerced or 'forced' into anything. They're just choosing it.

Apple's mobile marketshare is much higher in the US, which is where an antitrust suit could reasonably happen. It's above 50%

> The anti trust concern was that they could abuse their position

No. The antitrust concern was that they *did* abuse their position to damage the browser market, which is evidenced by how long IE11 has been around. Luckily the value prop of the web was enough to overcome their strategy.

Being a monopoly is not illegal. A company can perfectly legally have a natural monopoly of 100% of a market without being illegal. The problem only comes when they use that position to prevent other competitors from entering the market, or when they use their position to take over other markets.

Sorry but where did I say that a monopoly is illegal?

Anti-trust doesn't care about monopolies, it cares about market power. Apple does have the market power, as evidenced by the 30% rent they extract from developers.

Soon I will need to use chrome on my iphone just to keep up with webapps that rely on apis not supported by Safari? That's terrible. I already have to use chrome on the desktop to be able to use a hanful of apps and I'm not pleased.

Chrome gets closer and closer to becoming the new Internet Explorer in terms of browser interoperability, privacy, and lock in.

To be fair Chrome is also far ahead of Firefox when it comes to performance and security (not to be confused with privacy).

Safari is fast but compatibility is lacking, not just compared to Chrome.

Yeah, but compatibility is already defined as "what chrome does". To be clear I mean quirks, not features. You can easily make objective comparisons on "does feature exist in browser Y" so I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader :D

But "compatibility" is things like layout quirks, and before Chrome was the IE of the web, "correct behavior" was "what IE does". A lot of the IE escape was engineering effort devoted to developing IE compatibility. A chrome monopoly is going mean google has functionally complete control of the web, so they can simply state that their behavior is the spec. On top of that they already regularly force the addition of google identity based spying directly into the browser.

It 'is' already working in this way. Firefox do support a few WebKit prefixed api due to heavy usage by web developers (also because chrome never finalize them, let them keep prefixed)

https://caniuse.com/css-line-clamp

Not even close. IE did things like include directx filters (which obviously need directx to work), activex, choose a non-standard box-model (which webdevs might choose these days, but back then there was no choice) and many, many more things. I don't like chrome and especially on the privacy front it's bad but they usually try to make sure that their features are at least technically adoptable by other platforms.

We don't have to call a browser "the new IE" to argue against their anti-features.

This is what I’m worried about as well. Remember those “Works best in Internet Explorer” badges and having to close Netscape and open IE just to have sites function? That experience is about to have a modern incarnation.

It’s bad news for Firefox, too. With Firefox/Gecko marketshare barely hanging on at 3%, WebKit/Safari is the last bastion against a near-Chromium/Blink monopoly at 19%. If devs don’t have to care to test against Safari they definitely aren’t going to bother testing against Firefox.

At this point I think it may be prudent to push for Chromium/Blink to be spun out of Google into a non-profit organization. Its overwhelming majority marketshare makes it too prone to abuse by its owning corporation.

> That experience is about to have a modern incarnation.

You speak like it's coming, but it's already been this way for years. I worked at a company with an SPA that officially only supported Chrome, and I've since used services by other companies that did not work in Safari or FF only be told by their tech support that I must use Chrome.

Line of business apps are definitely already this way, it's why I know the apocalypse is coming for the web when this goes through.

My favorite was being told we had to use Chrome on iOS for a site to work... even though obviously it's still just Webkit.

Because there are actually bugs in safari's shell (ui) instead of the browser part(engine). Safari on ios do have more bug than chrome on ios. Because not all safari bugs are browser engine bugs.

If other browser engines can be allowed, then Mozilla can port Gecko to iOS. Firefox Browser iOS is currently using WebKit.

You're missing the point: for better or worse, "Safari only" on iOS is probably the only thing causing any significant friction for "this site only works in chrome".

Sites already routinely require chrome on desktop. Remove Safari on iOS and ask yourself: will more sites support non-chrome browsers, or will fewer?

It’ll be nice to have real Gecko on iOS, but it’s moot because it won’t be what’s taking marketshare from Safari/WebKit. It’ll be something Chromium/Blink based instead, most likely Chrome.

Even now on Android Chrome is by far the dominant browser despite lacking extension capabilities (and thus, adblocking capabilities) entirely. Firefox for Android has the massive technical advantage of being able to run uBlock Origin but it doesn’t make much of a difference.

Users will go where developers and heavyhanded marketing (as Google has been notorious for with Chrome) push them.

I doubt it. I use Firefox on my phone (as in, actual Firefox, not the Safari shim available on iOS) and pretty much everything works perfectly fine. Web apps, addons, you name it.

Of course, Firefox and Safari lack a completely different set of features, but people actually need to test for Safari because of Apple's iron grip over their customers' phones. Nobody tests on Firefox, especially not Firefox mobile!

Sometimes someone here links a fancy new piece of tech relying on Google's weird proprietary APIs, and that's when I switch to Bromite.

You'll be fine. I don't know what applications you need to use Chrome for on the desktop, but I very much doubt there'll be an exodus from the app store to the mobile web any time soon.

Things might only work fine now because people are forced to test mobile apps in Safari. If Safari’s market share drops significantly over a 3-5 year period, you might see “Works best in Chrome” start to appear again…

I get it though. Every so often I find a site that works well in both Safari and Chrome due to WebKit but doesn’t work in Firefox. It’s pretty rare, but it happens.

I don't think Safari's market share will drop as much as Firefox's did. Safari brings some features for mac/iOS users that Chrome struggles to emulate. The Apple's laser focus to make their stuff work on their devices and their devices alone makes Safari have some decent value for people who bought into their ecosystem.

If anything, I think it'll drive Apple to pay more attention to their browser. They can afford to leave their bug reports open because users don't have a choice in browser, but once they can't anymore, they'll have a reason to use some of their excessive wealth to improve their browser.

Also remember that this law only applies to EU sales. Apple will likely still block real browsers in markets outside the EU just like they're setting up different systems for each government that takes action against their walled garden. Big web applications often come from the USA and they'll need to support the American general public.

On the flip side, you can expect Google to engage in a massive advertising campaign to push Chrome on iOS. I think Google would be very happy to enjoy the same level of Chrome marketshare on iOS as they do on Android.

They already have significant marketshare on iOS. But there's only so much you can get without official first party control or favoritism, e.g. Google being the default search engine on browsers. An advertising campaign will pick up some more new users, sure, but this EU mandate doesn't really ramp things up unless an iOS Blink-based Chrome offers substantially better experience than the current WebKit-based Chrome.

I can say from my current experience on medical leave the following websites start with a dialog saying that they work best in chrome:

* my doctors office * my specialists office * the hospitals website

I also recall encountering such a dialog on at least one other site I had to use, but can’t recall what?

These are facilities that people must be able to use.

I agree with you, I honestly don’t know why people are thinking about App Store exodus - my experience with web apps in Chrome has been decidedly meh. Maybe that will change as it becomes more viable? Who knows.

The problem is people thinking that opening up to different browser will do anything other than secure a chrome monopoly. Google has already demonstrated a willingness to use their dominance in many part of the web to kill off other browsers.

On desktops they aggressively push chrome on every user that is not already using chrome.

Currently they can’t do that mobile. So currently they can’t just drop everyone else.

That sounds like your medical facilities just have shitty developers, unless they use some kind of Chrome-only feature to deliver their services (idk, maybe webusb to read out medical hardware?). A lack of alternatives won't make them any more competent. If they try to redirect you to Chrome now, you're probably getting a broken interface anyway. They can also just show a popup that says "iOS doesn't support our website, open the website on your desktop instead" if they wanted to exclude mobile Safari at the moment.

The stuff I make isn't tested on Safari because there's no free way to test in it (even Microsoft provides free VMs for testing the browser) and there are no cross platform versions of Safari (WebKit and Safari aren't comparable in either usage stats or feature support). Maybe Apple will change their minds once they need to care about mobile browser compatibility, though I doubt it.

Google can already push Chrome on iOS. They have their own little skin over Safari like all the other browser vendors that includes all kinds of Google integrations. There's nothing stopping them from pushing everyone to their browser already. Good luck getting regular users to change the default browser, though.

*The majority of developers are “shitty”*

The colossal pain of “you must use IE” was caused by:

* Sites designed in IE, and thus having unusually munched layout in anything else. E.g. the “standard” is whatever their browser is.

* Sites that just gated access on a useragent check (which the above sites were doing, and mercifully was bypassable)

Using activex stuff was a problem, and for some super important platforms of the era it was the reason for IE only.

The web didn’t become “you must use IE” because of a few bad developers, it became IE only because the majority of developers designed only for the majority of their users.

The result was the web filled with sites that didn’t work in other browsers.

So, developers already think it’s acceptable to only develop for chrome and preface their site with a “this site is designed for IE” dialog.

The developers doing this are not small time firms.

Chromes dominance of the browser market shows that google can make people change their default browser. Because google controls a large number of the biggest, and for many, critical, web properties.

If that site doesn’t give you features unless you use chrome, or it just flat rejects non-chrome browsers, people will change their defaults. We have the existence proof in two forms: Chromes total dominance of the browser market, and the insane speed of IE6 dying when they stopped supporting it on YouTube and GMail.

You could run a chromium build or Edge. Perhaps Firefox would work, or one of the upstart new browsers.

What apps/sites are Chrome only for you?

I tend to think this is a huge non-issue, & outsizedly bemoaned as a convenient way to dock the obvious advantage of freedom. In practice I expect this only to be an issue where it is critical, such as the top current comment's example of running Unreal Engine, which Safari just cant do. The web still has enough collective memory of the bad times that social pressure against favoring specific browsers will be strong. I havent heard actual examples of problems/ outrage yet; if it became a significant issue, I'd expect then we'd see real vocal & concerted pushback.

In general I favor not governing technology choices/alignment by fear of the unknown. We dont know yet on tbis one. Insisting on a conservative limited approach, based on fear, without enabling exploration, consigns us to limited sad fates.

Nope, soon Apple will be required to compete with Chrome on features. As the largest company in the world, that shouldn't be an issue for them.

It doesn't matter. Even if Safari is competitive, Google will force everyone to use Chrome on iOS and it won't matter what Safari can and can't do.

Sounds like FUD to me, especially considering nobody is forced to use Chrome on Windows, macOS or Linux, and that I've been using Firefox on Android for a decade now.

What's the market share for Firefox ?

I think that should answer the question about whether it's FUD or not.

This is untrue: I regularly deal with companies forcing people and other companies to use Chrome on Windows and such. Your lack of experiencing it doesn't mean it isn't happening.

But you're also missing the point: Without Safari, there's no longer further incentive for Google to participate in the web standards process, over just forcing people to use Chrome.

> Without Safari, there's no longer further incentive for Google to participate in the web standards process, over just forcing people to use Chrome.

Nobody is getting rid of Safari, they're just repealing the idea of forcing any one user to use a first-party browser. Worrying about Chrome's dominance is a completely separate topic from the freedom to choose the browser you want to use.

They don't force it on macOS, so your description of this as a fait accompli doesn't quite gel.

You should look at the history of Netscape and Microsoft.

And how Microsoft would push proprietary features e.g. ActiveX which took nearly a decade to become a HTML standard and locked websites specifically to IE.

I'm familiar. I also remember how endless litigation and antitrust lawsuits forced them out of the practice, and sent a warning and a precedent to the rest of the industry.

I don't think you are familiar.

Because the litigation and antitrust lawsuits were to do with the bundling of IE and the coercion Microsoft applied against OEMs.

There was nothing against Microsoft for adding proprietary features.

Because proprietary features are fine? Nothing happened. ActiveX died. You're better off complaining about the "proprietary" APIs in iOS and how they're stifling cross-platform innovation because Apple refuses to publish them everywhere else. Whining about being forced to use certain platforms for certain features is pretty damn ironic when you're standing in iOS' corner.

I say, let it happen. If Apple had a better browser, this wouldn't be a problem. C'est va.

ActiveX is a far cry from Chromium-based browsers being available on every other platform which has nearly perfect Chrome compatibility save for some DRM bits if I remember correctly.

I've used desktop and mobile Firefox for everything for years and it's worked perfectly well. This sounds like FUD to me. Just because you're scared of Chromium doesn't mean that everyone should be forced to use Safari and only Safari on the hardware they own.

The fact that Safari is required to support iOS is the only reason site owners can't switch entirely to Google-proprietary standards. As soon as alternative engines in iOS is allowed, web standards are over, and your Firefox will stop being adequate.

Doubt it, considering that Firefox single-handedly defeated the IE monopoly and no one was forced to use it like they're forced to use Safari.

This is an entirely fictional history of the world. IE was never defeated on the scale we are currently forced to suffer Chrome. Firefox took some consumer market share (until Chrome took it), but most businesses stayed on IE for an extremely long time, until enterprise apps left Java/ActiveX only a few years ago for more HTML5-based design. Then Chrome took a large chunk of enterprise, and finally Microsoft killed their own child by forcing everyone over to the new Chrome forked Edge.

Comparatively, Chrome controls the majority of consumer, business, and mobile, and the sole defense against a completely proprietary web platform is Safari being required on iOS.

> IE was never defeated on the scale we are currently forced to suffer Chrome

IE actually had a much larger scale the Chrome does, as IE had 95% of the browser marketshare in 2004. Just because IE existed for years afterwards, despite only having a minuscule amount of marketshare, doesn't mean it wasn't defeated, either.

You're literally saying Firefox defeated the IE monopoly, and then turning around and saying IE had 95% market share.

"Just because IE existed for years afterwards, despite only having a minuscule amount of marketshare, doesn't mean it wasn't defeated, either."

Lets go look at what actual numbers were:

2008:

IE: 69% Firefox: 26% Chrome: 0% Safari: 2-3%?

2009/2010 (Peak Firefox): IE: 55% Firefox: 32% Chrome: >4% Safari: <4%

I'm going off graphs rather than tables so the numbers are a bit off.

2012 (Peak safari): Firefox: 24% IE: 34% Chrome: 32%: Safari: 8%

2018 (Edge Becomes a chromium wrapper): Firefox: 12% IE: 6% Edge: 4% Chrome: 69% (Hey that's where IE was!) Safari: 3%

October 2021 (From chart on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers) Firefox: 6-8% IE: / Edge: 12% Chrome: 73% Safari: 3% Actually just chrome: 85%

Opening up iOS is not going to magically make Firefox popularity boom, any more than android, if people install a different browser it will be chrome.

And once that is possible, Google will push Chrome on all of their properties. Just like they do on desktop.

To reinforce the amount of power google has. No other browser managed to kill IE6, not even IE>6. Then one day Google literally just decided that they would stop support IE6 on YouTube. Every person who came to YouTube with IE6 was greeted with “your browser is not supported. Update to a newer one. Chrome is a browser by Google that is designed from the ground up for security and performance. You can get it here”.

They rapidly rolled that change to their other properties, and by the power of controlling all the largest and most popular sites on the web they killed IE6 in like 6 months.

The entire existence of other browsers is dependent on what Google does with their dominance in web content.

I don’t know about Firefox, but in Safari when I go to pretty much any google property it’s aggressively marketing Chrome, and reasonably high % of the time. Google.com itself, possibly 100% of the time?

At the same time google has actively pushed back against most privacy efforts on the web, regularly nominates new standards that have the sole purpose of supporting their advertising business, etc

You start in 2008, so you skip the time period where IE had 95% share, and netscape communicator seemed as good as dead. Chrome isn't there yet. I remember how bad the web was with netscape / early firefox.

The IE team was being hobbled by MS management out of a desire to prevent as much as possible the movement of apps from Windows to the web.

Meh! Chromium is the standard, not what Google builds on top of it. There's Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi etc. which will continue to exist even if Google suddenly disappears.

Besides, Apple maintains Safari the way it does for no other reason than for disallowing people from building more functional open web apps so that to reach iOS users, one has to build native iOS apps.

iPhone's browser engine barrier is a domination problem, but it (maybe accidentally) helps avoid domination of Chromium.

Yeah I'm kind of torn on this one too :) . I know web devs hate safari, but I don't care since I'm not a web dev. The open source side of me wants to declare it a big win, but my practical side knows what happens next. A huge ad campaign by google and overnight 70% of people on ios are using google and google's proprietary standards.

One of the reasons for why Apple disallowed third-party browser engines is because Mobile Safari alone is allowed to use a JavaScript JIT, ostensibly for security reasons. This is why Firefox on Safari uses WebKit, and why Chrome must rely on iOS's stock webviews rather than Blink's own JIT. Mobile Safari has this via the dynamic-codesigning entitlement.

Further reading:

https://saagarjha.com/blog/2020/02/23/jailed-just-in-time-co...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22401146

Regardless of the validity of restricting JIT I'm sure many people would be happy having slower JS if they could use different browser engines.

It's possible that faster browser engines could be created, if potentially less secure. It would at least introduce more competitiveness into this space on iOS.

“normal” people would pick a slower browser? Why would they do that, for any normal person reason?

I don't see the word "normal" in my comment but judging by their behavior with Windows and Chrome: yes, they will pick whatever works.

It's not a "slower" browser if it's the only browser that works on sites not supported by safari.

The actual reason is rule 2.5.6 from the App Store review guidelines:

> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.

Sure, if Apple does the predictable thing and allows JIT compilation only for WebKit-based browsers, questions will be asked. But so far it has been impossible for anyone to just accept that tradeoff and publish a browser with their own engine anyway.

This is really the big reason. IOS blocks applications from running dynamic code. The kernel is immutable and replaced on every update, and safeguarding the JS engine is a huge benefit of controlling the OS. Antivirus's really struggle with this on PC because of all the dynamic code being ran that they can't really enforce things like code signing, requiring executable code to be mapped to the disk, etc.

This is going to make everyones phone ALOT less secure. There's a reason android malware and hacks are a big issue and there's almost none on IOS, as the footprint is so low due to things like this.

> There's a reason android malware and hacks are a big issue and there's almost none on IOS, as the footprint is so low due to things like this.

Actually, iOS exploits are cheaper than Android exploits because iOS exploits are so plentiful in comparison[1][2].

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/14/zerodium_ios_flaws/

[2] http://zerodium.com/program.html

Are they still? The first article is about iOS 13.

Apple is by far the most secure, which is why you rarely see kernel exploits and the market for IOS security researchers are in high demand. While the market for android researchers are hot, it's luke warm in comparison. Even in IOS 13, meaningful iphone exploits are hard to come by, while android it's like candy.

Key point, it's going to be difficult to find a way to unlock the bootloader on an Iphone, or a root on modern versions of IOS. Meanwhile you can buy a android phone day 1 and load your own bootloader and get code running in the kernel. This is exactly what a malicious application does. The security boundaries of apps are pretty strong on both OS's, but Apple makes sure apps can't violate that.

I do support this in principle, and I don't think apple should be allowed to block other browsers, and I also think they should be forced to allow sideloading in general.

That being said, in practice, I fear that this will lead to badness. Google already has so much power over what the web is and is not, and this will only strengthen it further.

Apple could actually compete and fix their broken WebGl support, sound API or whatever makes the games not work on their browser.

The reason I personally don't support Safari is because I can test it, there is no Safari for Linux and when I tried to use a third party service for testing they were missing the Beta versions and a coworker that had a Mac could not install the Beta because Apple wanted an OS update first. But we support Firefox so if Chrome/Chromium is not on your liking for my stuff you can use Firefox.

Epiphany is a pretty good safari substitute under linux, although I do share your gripe. In the end I did just buy a used iphone 6s to test stuff on mobile safari, but I agree that I shouldn't have to.

Still, I fear that if google manages to do to safari what it did to firefox, that it will be bad for firefox as well. Right now safari is realistically pretty much the last hurdle from people just testing exclusively against the chrome API along with all its bugs and proprietary interfaces.

A phone is not enough, you need a desktop too, most of our issues where with WebGl , first they broke it on iOS and we put a check to detect the mobile devices and disable th ee WebGl feature and use a downgraded 2D version , later Apple decided to update iPads browser to pretend it is a desktop(probably to avoid some websites sending iPad users the mobile version) but this broke our detection and this people where getting the webGl feature that failed on iOS. We fixed this iPad issue but later Apple put on desktop same broken WebGl thing and now we had to detect all newer Safari versions and downgrade them all to the 2d slower and uglier thing.

I do not control the WegGl plugin I spoke of so I don't know the details why it broke, anyway we had the issues reported by customers because no developer in our team wants to use Apple stuff. I don't think the GNOME browser would have caught this WebGl issues since is probably related with Apple removing OpenGl support for their drivers.

oh yeah, i imagine that's even more nasty to deal with. I just test rendering and basic javascript stuff, so for my usecase it works.

For anyone who dual uses Linux/iOS - Safari is a no go.

Even basic things like Bookmarks, Passwords, History sync can’t be used across Linux which means users like us _must use Firefox or Chrome_ which are crippled on iOS.

I guess that is the point: why not use mac instead, you would have better user experience! /s

Yes, Chromium/Blink should be spun off into a Mozilla Foundation like non-profit. There’s too much conflict of interest with Google wielding so much control over such a large piece of internet infrastructure.

That control is precisely why it will never be spun off as an independent foundation.

EU is making some solid moves in the legislation against tech giants. I love it.

Very exciting if this means PWA support on iOS can now reach parity with Android.

PWA support is improving, though. https://firt.dev/ios-15.4b (that post is based on a beta, it’s possible noted bugs will be fixed already, though this is Apple we’re talking about…)

I tried playing around with PWAs the other day, but certain like [0] seem to really jeopardize the "Progressive" part of PWAs which is one of their major differentiatiors.

[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=891339

What pwa support…? safari's fixed element is like bugged forever since safari 11 or 12. You can't even have a properly fixed header or footer without crazy hack (like wrap the whole site into a fixed element). I don't really know. If they aren't actively sabotaging web app, why such a big obvious problem is left untouched like that.

Man I hope this means we’ll be getting Firefox extensions on iOS eventually, that’d be so useful

I'm afraid it will mean we have to endure Google extensions.

Safari already supports those.

What do you mean? Safari definitely doesn't support Chrome extensions.

They probably meant that Chrome WebExtension API is re-used (with some limitations) on Safari. So you can re-pack your Chrome extensions to get them to work with Safari.

Of course you can only do this with a Mac.

Safari for iOS supports WebExtensions. Of course Apple has some really weird packaging requirements.

This is already possible, (some) Firefox extensions work in Orion browser on iOS.

Aye but the main benefit of using Firefox on iOS is the sync/share with desktop

If I was going to break sync I’d probably just use Safari

Orion can also sync/share to Orion desktop :)

Which exists only on Mac as far as I can see. Linux is my main driver

I’m not switching ecosystems for a few browser extensions on my phone haha

You have to start somewhere :)

Once web apps work properly across all devices and can provide native-like functionality, how many companies will choose to rebuild their app several times (with the vastly increased development and maintenance costs) [for multiple platforms] rather than just build it once [for the web].

This is uncritically presented as desirable.

Significantly reducing the costs of app development is desirable in so many different ways.

Well if there was any question whether the EU was more focused on personal data protections or kneecapping U.S. tech companies, this answers it. The reason Google and MS want to get their own browsers onto iOS is to get around the data collecting restrictions built into Safari. This will be a net negative for the personal data privacy of EU citizens. But hey, screw Apple right?

Not at all. It's about time someone did something about Safari. If Microsoft preinstalling IE was bad, Apple's mandating Safari as the only browser ever is worse. Both leveraged their position in a situation to gain dominance in e different situation.

Also, Chrome domination is just as bad as IE domination, but it came about differently.

Safari isn't the best answer for user privacy either so why grandstand for it as the only thing users should be allowed to run if that's your only concern? There is always a worse option to point at but that doesn't somehow mean Safari should be the only option.

But Chrome should be the only (inevitable) option?

Smartphones with ”Google Inside(tm)” should be (effectively) the only option?

As a consumer I care quite a lot about not requiring Google inside my phone, or on my desktop. The tendrils they have in sites are quite enough already, I don’t need them on both server and client…

Knowing Android gets me Google, I chose a device that couldn’t be consumed by the borg, and spoke with my money on that. And as a result, my bank, my airline, my social media, all have to support more than one browser engine if they want affluent customer share.

I have zero trust in this developer community clamoring for an open web simply so they stop having to test in any browser other than the one they install for dev.

This site^H^H^H^H app requires Chrome.

// Building websites since 1993 — none of this noise is new, just naive.

Again if your goal is to mandate "not Chrome" it doesn't follow that specifically Safari should be the only option on iOS devices. More likely the goal for users is to prevent is a set of activity, e.g. Chrome is doing, via policy and actively promote choice/competition. This is exactly how things are being legislated in Europe and is a better option than supporting just 2 inevitable options depending on the device the user owns.

Is this not just going to lead to Chromium dominance, and therefore same issues we've seen before?

You will get this Electron banking app and you will like it.

This sounds like a win for Europeans. I don't have much hope for similar legislation here in the states.

I’ve always believed that real reason Apple prevented third parties browser engines was to block calls to mprotect(,,PROT_EXEC).

Would love to hear a someone chime in on the technical aspects and implications.

Yet another case of "Ridicule the gdpr cookie banners all you want but I'll take that over the nothing everyone else has even tried."

I cheer them on, banners and all. go go go!

It is intriguing to see EU’s vs US’s philosophy differences. Such legislation would never fly in US. People will be up in arms about government interference and not letting businesses figure things out. The general sentiment in US is that government is stupid, incompetent and inefficient. They put more barriers to progress and almost always screw things up even when they are well intentioned. This philosophy has worked out well at least considering there in no Apple, Google, Tesla or other thousands of companies in EU and some how all these creative giants almost always born in US. The concerning part is that all EU legislation get automatically applied in US. For example, none of the US companies have to do stupid “accept cookies” things but they are forced into it anyway.

Have you considered confounding factors?

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