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.
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.
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.
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.
Sites already routinely require chrome on desktop. Remove Safari on iOS and ask yourself: will more sites support non-chrome browsers, or will fewer?
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.
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 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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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 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.
Safari is fast but compatibility is lacking, not just compared to Chrome.
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.
We don't have to call a browser "the new IE" to argue against their anti-features.
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.
I think that should answer the question about whether it's FUD or not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I say, let it happen. If Apple had a better browser, this wouldn't be a problem. C'est va.