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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

This regulation is 5+ years overdue, but legislation always lags behind market conditions.

If the US/other countries follow suit there will probably be a big unintended effect though: the diminishing of open web standards and Google getting final say about what will work on "the web" and what won't.

With Firefox diminishing, Safari is the last bastion against a Chromium-only web.

There are lots of Chromium forks, but they own the project, and I doubt even Microsoft would take on any significant divergence from the upstream code base, considering the development velocity.

I would predict (native) Chrome graining a very sizeable market share on iOS within five years, driven in part by web app developers being happy to finally just focus on Chrom(ium) and add "works best Chrome" banners.

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What I see, as a web dev, is that finally Apple will have to keep Safari/iOS up-to-date with Safari/macOS, and that in turn up-to-date with all other browsers. I.e., they will no longer be able to artificially hamstring the web in order to prevent web apps from competing with their App Store.

They certainly have the money to keep pace with Chrome, and I certainly don't want to put up banners saying "works best in [anything but Safari]", which has been the case for many years now.

“They certainly have the money to keep pace with Chrome”

This point has been made before. But Chrome is a moving target. I actually am skeptical that Apple can spend more money on WebKit than Google can on Blink.

The way Chrome rose to prominence was by implement brand-new web standards faster than anyone else. If the question is only, “what engine supports the most websites,” I suspect Chrome will increase their development pace in order to try to extend their lead.

Isn't that a good thing? Like I'm a full time firefox user but what you're saying is "Google and Apple will fund development of web browsers/engines that support new APIs to outcompete each other"

Chrome is the new Internet Explorer. They have a ridiculous market share.

It's not about standards, it's about being Chrome-compatible.

I predict Chrome will come to iOS with working uBlock extension on day one, and that will be the last day I use Safari.

I'm not even a fan of this regulation (I think it's sour grapes on the part of the EU because they have utterly failed to compete in this space) but I loathe the browser experience, with its lack of working ad blocking, on iOS.

> I predict Chrome will come to iOS with working uBlock extension on day one

> … I loathe the browser experience, with its lack of working ad blocking, on iOS.

Well, chrome is castrating ublock on chrome desktop with Manifest v3 quite soon. What makes you think it will be any different on iOS?

Pretty soon chrome Adblock capabilities will be quite similar to that of safari on iOS which I find quite ironic.

Chrome doesn't have extension support on android. While there are many popular chrome forks on android, none of the ones I'm familiar with add support for ublock, rather they have some inferior adblocking experience instead. Firefox on android does have extension support, which while limited, does support ublock0.

Safari on iOS has extensions, including Adblock extensions, and has for some time now.

They even have an extension that blocks ads on YouTube and forces it to use the native video player, so you can get Picture in Picture without an app.

> Safari on iOS has extensions, including Adblock extensions, and has for some time now.

None of them are anywhere close to the quality of uBlock Origin.

The "Chrome's only dominant because Google's advertising it on their web properties and bundling it with Java's installer!" narrative is BS.

Apple is heavily advertising Safari on sites like reddit since a few months ago. They're also abusing macOS notifications to promote Safari[0]. There's no Windows XP-style "browser choice" screen on Mac or iOS; Safari is bundled (I know macOS isn't a monopoly, but bundling is bundling). Apple has more money than Google to advertise Safari wherever they want, including Google properties that obviously sell ad space.

But ultimately Safari is losing because it's inferior. It keeps shipping with critical bugs. IndexDB constantly gets broken, partially fixed, then broken again in another update. You couldn't play DRM'd videos in Safari and use Apple Music[1] (on a completely clean install) for a long time. There was an issue in Big Sur's public release where Safari crashed if you moved a tab, and lost all your open tabs when it reopened; they took weeks to fix that. They kneecaped uBlock Origin while using the "privacy excuse", when all it meant was forcing people to switch to proprietary adblockers that still had full access to all webpage contents (see my other comment). Apple only has themselves to blame if Blink becomes the majority on iOS.

[0]: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153379/how-do-you-...

[1]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252162447

> They're also abusing macOS notifications to promote Safari[0]

When you say "abusing" do you have a more recent reference than 2014?

> Apple has more money than Google to advertise Safari wherever they want

Google for a while put a Chrome banner on all their properties when you connected with a non-Chrome browser. This is something they obviously could afford since it was free for them to run that program.

You also forgot that Safari is also unavailable on non Apple devices (I think it was previously many years ago iirc) which means its market share is restricted to Apple devices. Even if Apple advertises Safari, it can only be used on those Apple devices.

Meanwhile, Chrome can be installed on just about everything.

Apple will probably try to deal with requirement to not require developers to use WebKit by allowing alternate web browser engines in European Union only - a developer would be required to provide WebKit version of an application or else it would be only available in European Union. That wouldn't violate Digital Markets Act, as Digital Markets Act only applies to European Union.

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