Microsoft threatened to cancel the Windows license of several PC manufacturers including HP for making Netscape Navigator their default web browser instead of Internet Explorer. This would essentially put those companies out of business, so they had to comply.
Not to mention, for corporate and home users, Netscape Navigator was commercial product that customers had to purchase while Microsoft bundled IE with Windows for free. This was back in the day when most people didn’t have broadband and stores sold shrink-wrapped boxes of software containing floppy disks or CDs.
I’ve written this many times here on HN: a monopoly isn’t illegal; what is illegal is using your monopoly in one market (PC operating systems) to disadvantage competitors in another market—web browsers.
Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in either PCs or smartphones; there are plenty of alternatives to iOS and macOS. There are lots of examples of platforms where the platform owner decides what can run on that platform, starting with game consoles.
Ah yes, the free market will come up with a solution to this.
Do you have anything constructive to add?
Reiterating, being a monopoly in the US is not illegal, but it having chosen to have a monopoly makes you subject to extra fairness laws. These laws should be enforced as written, but no recent administration has been willing to step up, and Americans are the poorer for it.
Apple gets to break all the rules Microsoft and Google get dinged for, because they are vertically integrated. It feels like a bug in the law that corporations are incentivized to take everything in house. Somehow being a bigger, more powerful company makes you less vulnerable to anti-trust laws.
No, everyone who’s a registered developer knew they couldn’t use a different browser engine. That’s been the policy from day 1.
It would be different if Apple allowed 3rd party rendering engines and then forced them off, but that’s not the case.
Among other things, 3rd party engines would be incompatible with Apple’s Lockdown feature. Because browsers are required to use WebKit on iOS, they automatically work with lockdown mode; it would be much more difficult if every browser on iOS had it’s own rendering and JavaScript engine:
On a more technical level, a number of web technologies are turned off,
including just-in-time (JIT) JavaScript compilation (where code is run
and compiled at the same time.) In addition, configuration profiles
(for work or school for example) can't be installed.
Google is already sued for that, but the sailant point to me is that it took so much time, and it's far from a clear cut case.
We are way past the point where Apple, Google and Amazon abused their position in provable ways, but they got left alone for so long by the regulators it's disgusting.
PS: the definition of a monopoly comes down to the definition of the market. If we were playing games, Microsoft wasn't a monopoy when looking a computing platforms in general, for instance, it was "only" on the PC home market. Apple has a monopoly under many framings, now it comes down to wether a judge agrees or just kicks away Apple opponents.
How so? Google has 80-90% of the search engine market and Microsoft had 95% of the desktop operating system market and used that disadvantage competitors in the nascent browser market.
The bottom line with Microsoft was: should Microsoft be allowed to use its monopoly position in operating systems to essentially force customers to take your web browser, whether they wanted it or not? It certainly wasn’t okay for Microsoft to use the threat of canceling HP’s ability to be a Windows’s OEM (and therefore destroying their PC business) if they made Netscape Navigator their default browser.
People forget how dominant Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were back in the MS-DOS days; Microsoft used Windows to make Word and Excel the dominant word processor and spreadsheet.
Apple’s worldwide market share is barely 30%; it’s closer to 50% in the U.S. It’s also not illegal to disallow 3rd party developers to “break” your platform, especially when they entered into a legal agreement with you to not break your platform.
There’s nothing illegal about controlling a successful platform and deciding who and what can be present on that platform. Game consoles have long operated the same way but that seems to be okay.
Apple doesn’t have a monopoly position in either phones or computers; if a potential customer doesn’t like how Apple operates, they are free to buy something else. That wasn’t the case with Microsoft back in the day and it’s pretty much not the case today with web search, since it’s realistically not an option for a business to not be available on Google search or to ignore its advertising platform that reaches billions of users.
You should have a look at the Apple vs Epic fillings, where Epic came with a pretty different perspective on which definition should be taken into account. They of course lost as the US judge sided with Apple’s definition (while Korea came with a different verdict…), but that’s at least an indication of how important that definition is. “30% of device share” or “80% of in-app purchases” are completely different perspectives.
> if a potential customer doesn’t like how Apple operates, they are free to buy something else
Customers are mostly irrelevant. To get back to your Microsoft example, no developper was stopped from developping for linux, nor were customers stopped from buying barebone machines, or Apple, or beOS, or mainframes. The issue was Microsoft making backroom deals with the vendors to make Windows alternatives pricier and non competitive. This makes it worst for customers as a result, but that’s the result, not the core issue (I’m referring here to the EU rulings). Definition of a anti-trust issue should be about how a player distorts the market by pressuring other business, not wether the customer has theoretical choices or not.
Microsoft got in trouble for anti-competitive practices with IE, because they were tightly integrating their OS with their browser in ways that meant that their browser was uniquely enabled by the OS to do things that third-party browsers couldn't do (not having access to the same APIs), thus using their position in the OS market to steal browser market-share away from third-party browser companies like Netscape, in ways those browser companies could do nothing to respond to.
In contrast, on iOS, there's nothing Safari can do that third-party browsers can't. Third-party browsers do exactly the same things Safari does, rendering-engine-wise — no more, no less. And meanwhile, they all do more than Safari does UI-wise. There's nothing Apple is doing to bias users of iOS in favor of Mobile Safari, such that it steals market-share away from competing browsers. Instead, their OS is just ruining the browser experience for everybody, equally. That's not anti-competitive — it's just dumb. :)
You’re joking, right?
The free and open web, to the extent we have it, only exists today because Microsoft wasn’t allowed to force IE, Active X, Silverlight and the rest of their technologies down everyone’s throat. Oh, and JScript [1], their proprietary version of JavaScript would have been the industry standard.
We wouldn’t have the W3C or WHATWG creating open standards for the web had Microsoft been allowed to essentially turn the web into another Microsoft runtime environment.
The justice department at no point stopped Microsoft from bundling IE with Windows.
Besides that, up until 2008-2010, the “free and open web” was littered with proprietary Flash apps. It wasn’t until Apple refused to support Flash on iPhones that anyone started worrying about standards.
> Microsoft been allowed to essentially turn the web into another Microsoft runtime environment.
Nothing that the FTC did prevented that. No part of the consent decree caused MS to behave any differently with respect to IE.
And if you don’t remember, the “modern web” as it exists today with Ajax was actually a Microsoft addition that everyone else added.
JScript was no more or less proprietary than Netscape’s “LiveScript” before Netscape jumped on the Java bandwagon and called it Javascript. It’s not like JS came from a standards body.
Nobody suggested otherwise; but that actually wasn’t the point. Microsoft made a deal with the government to stop most of its anticompetitive behavior. It was less about the bundling of IE with Windows than giving OEMs the choice to ship other browsers in addition to IE.
Besides that, up until 2008-2010, the “free and open web” was littered with proprietary Flash apps.
But that was a choice made by the market to adopt Flash instead of having of having all of the Microsoft stuff forced on them. Nobody forced developers to adopt Flash and there were other choices for audio/video, even if they weren’t as popular as Flash.
And if you don’t remember, the “modern web” as it exists today with Ajax was actually a Microsoft addition that everyone else added.
Well, to be accurate, Microsoft shipped XMLHttpRequest in IE 5.0 in 1999, as a proprietary Active X component for their products; it was never intended to be a web standard. But it was a cool idea so the other browser makers implemented it.
The term AJAX was coined by a Google employee in 2005 and was standardized by the W3C in 2006 [1].
It’s no different than Apple developing the canvas [2] element, which became a web standard, except they were more intentional than Microsoft was about XMLHttpRequest which would be renamed as AJAX.
Things would have been very different if the FTC and European regulators (who did make Microsoft ship a version of Windows without IE [3] hadn’t gotten involved.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element
[3]: No IE onboard Windows 7 in Europe http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8096701.stm
The comment I replied to gave credit to the FTC. Which is not true.
> Microsoft made a deal with the government to stop most of its anticompetitive behavior. It was less about the bundling of IE with Windows than giving OEMs the choice to ship other browsers in addition to IE
Microsoft didn’t just promise “we will be good little boys”. The parent poster gave the credit to the FTC. Firefox didn’t become popular for awhile because it was bundled by OEMs. MS basically just stopped development on IE. Then Chrome took off because it was heavily advertised on the Google home page and bundled with third party downloads.
As far as IE not being bundled with windows 7 because of the EU. This is an example of government ineffectiveness. Windows 7 came out in 2009. Web browsing on the desktop was starting Gibbs yesterdays news by then. The iPhone had been out for two years and Chrome was already ascendant.
Popular programming/markup languages don’t originate from standards bodies; it’s usually one person or a small group to start. Ruby, Python, Lisp, Pascal, Perl, PHP were created by a single person or a small group and (sometimes) would be submitted to a standards body.
Javascript was created for the Netscape Navigator browser in September 1995 and was submitted to Ecma International November 1996 [1] to start the standardization process. That was probably in response to Microsoft reverse engineering Javascript to create JScript in… 1996. Funny that.
So… yes, turns out JScript was significantly more proprietary than JavaScript and was only created to further Microsoft’s dominance of the web--“Best viewed in Internet Explorer”. JScript, like most of Microsoft’s tech at that time, probably relied on features that only existed on Windows and no where else.
So it wasn’t “proprietary” when Netscape created it. But it became “proprietary” when Microsoft copied it?
> So… yes, turns out JScript was significantly more proprietary than JavaScript and was only created to further Microsoft’s dominance of the web--“Best viewed in Internet Explorer”
Were you around then when before IE, there were plenty of sites that had “Best viewed in Netscape Navigator”?
And don’t pretend that Navigator was a great product. In its heyday in the mid 90s, it was a point of nerd pride how well your operating system handled a Netscape crash.
IE3 was much better than Navigator on the Mac and Windows. In fact, the Max version of IE was one of the most standards compliant at the time.
If your project is itself a web browser, then all that complexity is already inherent to the project, whatever you choose to build it with. It's just that the "digging deep" would be in the docs for how to glue Apple's low-level DOM/JS/etc library frameworks together in mostly-undocumented ways; rather than in the docs for how to feed WKWebView the right delegate logic in just the right place to get it to do something that'd be easy if you were directly doing it yourself.
That is not the case at all for iOS. Android is a very healthy market and a viable alternative.
It was actually worse than this--when Microsoft was ordered to separate IE from Windows, they lied and said IE was integral to Windows and that it could not operate without it.
Turned out Windows worked just fine without IE and Microsoft ended up settling with the government.
iOS supports changing the default browser to something that’s not Safari.
It’s not only about the rendering engines; Brave on iOS has other features and a UI/UX that I like that’s not present in Safari.
3rd party browsers on iOS have other ways of differentiating themselves, especially if you use those browsers on other platforms, like bookmark syncing, etc.
90% of end-users couldn’t care less what’s being used to render their websites on iOS.
What Apple is avoiding is all of the security issues attempting to support multiple web engines.
Imagine a truck maker who could somehow prevent other truck makers from making a truck that caries more or runs faster or is more fuel efficient. Of course that would be anti-competative.
Apart from, you know, run?
(Strictly speaking not technically true of course, but enough to get the point across.)
Do we want the government dictating which video encoding standards we have to use?
It’s not Apple is only allowing QuickTime, their fully owned protocol that others must license from them, and nothing else.
What is Apple doing on this issue that would be an anti-trust issue?
Maybe all the re-encoding would negate the benefits for them?
Maybe they didn’t think it was enough of an improvement over h264. Maybe they bet on h265 and it worked out well enough (for them) or it didn’t but they figure by the time they got everything set for VP1 something better will be ready.
Who knows.
A minor improvement in network bandwidth and storage costs wouldn't be as high a priority as "up to 16 hours video playback (streamed)" on the iPhone 14.
Sure they could optionally support it in Safari without hardware decoding, but a service like YouTube will want to negotiate the lower bandwidth protocol over one that will make the device's battery last longer.
Maybe the licensing cost of h265 works out better for them than rushing out AV1 decode support on their chips or lowering the average battery life of their devices.
But Netflix announced they would be using it in 2016. YouTube started using in 2018, the year the standard hit 1.0.
Apple had plenty of warning and time to get the necessary hardware acceleration blocks available by now. Chips have multi-year timelines but it’s been 4+ years.
Now on the other side, Netflix actually started using it in early 2020/late 2021, depending on device. YouTube rolled it out wide in 2020. Twitch is working on it.
So Apple is at most 2 years behind the content. It’s not like it’s been 5+. And if they decided to wait to see how those early rollouts went due to hardware timelines it might make sense support only appears to be coming now (based on someone pointing out AV1 shows up now in the AVPlayer framework documentation).
I doubt it.
Apple Silicon is more than fast enough to decode AV1 in software. Sure, the battery life won’t be as good but there are other trade-offs that can be made.
Their latest chips were developed before AV1 had gained enough traction to be concerned about. I suspect that future M2 and M3 and A-series SoCs will have hardware decoding for AV1 built-in.
In the meanwhile, a future version of macOS Ventura and iOS 16 will have AV1 support; it’s just going to take a little longer. They probably want to roll it out simultaneously on iOS, macOS, tvOS, and iPadOS.
Because it's not like there are no alternatives.
If there was no Android, I'd say yeah, regulate away.
For comparison, imagine Microsoft banned all browser engines other than EdgeHTML from running on Windows. Would you find that acceptable?
So my comment was about their video codec policy.
It's just that they don't allow JIT code execution for security reasons which is needed for a comparatively performant engine.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#2.5...
> Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.
I use Firefox on iOS for the password and tab sync integration, and am supper happy that it’s using the WebKit framework. I care about the iOS experience more than some video codec support.
Since they can not do it, you don't have that option.
So it’s okay for user who (in theory) installed a 3rd party browser on iOS to have a worse experience and potentially make themselves vulnerable to malware? That’s exactly what Apple doesn’t want.
Court action could compel any deal like this to be made public.
They’ve done it many times before (though usually in the Steve Jobs era).
I couldn't believe this and looked it up. It's $9 billion. Which is ten digits.
Good god.
You really don't know what you are talking about. The issue with Microsoft was not bundling a piece of software and not fixing the box model.
Microsoft (of the 90s) deliberately worked to undermine the web using their dominant market position, adding their own extensions to ensure lock in. Their behaviour in the web standards process was appalling, and directed from above (sometimes by phone outside meeting).
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" was not hyperbole.
nah........ that's not true
Windows had, IIRC, something like 97% of the market. It appears[0] that iPhones have a bit over half the phone market today, but they have nothing like the monopoly that Microsoft held.
Re b: Apple has never been a monopolist so they never got into that situation. This allowed them to have such opinionated choices that would have never worked for Microsoft. However, this might be changing. Recent statistics show that they have extreme market shares in the teenager demographic. If those kids grow up and keep buying iPhones, Apple will become one, in the US market at least, and this means they will have to change.
One of the thing that it specifies is that Gatekeepers (Apple in this case) can't prefer their own services and apps over other people's - they must allow third party interoperability. If I understand it correctly:
* You must be able to uninstall preloaded first party apps * You must be able to install your preferred third party equivalents (e.g. Firefox) * I believe also - you can install alternative app stores
We shall see what actually happens once Apple's lawyers dig out loopholes, and we'll see if the Gatekeepers of this world have an alternate 'EU vs rest of world strategy'. Also, if that does happen, which side the UK falls in...
When the iPhone was first released, telcos were extremely paranoid, because there were legit scams by which an abuse of the telco network could result in monetary transfers. If you called the wrong number, whether a US (and Apple was a US company first and foremost) 900 number or an international number, you might owe a great deal on your next telco bill. The original iPhone had no native code applications, only web apps, because of the paranoia resulting from scams that had been perpetrated in the 90's. The telcos required a level of security that, in the early 00's and its embrace of Adobe Flash and other high-vulnerability-surface technologies, seemed prudent.
A short while later, Apple proved its security model enough to allow native code applications. This happened because, despite the initial fears of a "smart phone" being a lure for scammers, Apple's security model, which included mandating WebKit so that its security model would be imposed on anything touching the web, kept those web things separate from telco charges.
Fast-forward to 2022: now we wonder why Apple keeps locking things down so that no app can use a security model that Apple has not vetted. In this era, rogue calls to Nigeria don't drain thousands of dollars from your account. Now, we wonder why Apple seems so paranoid.
For me, whose memory reminds me that there was a time that telephony involved the risk of connecting to the wrong number and losing money, there seems to have been a time that "smart phones" ran the risk of presenting an attack surface that could incur dire financial consequences for individuals. I also suspect that those times have passed, but I'm not sure. I have to wonder what the intersectional implications of a more open environment for a device capable of both web browsing (with its security issues) and telephony (with its billing issues) might be. When I wonder about things like that, I'm happier with walled gardens that I would not accept on my laptop, which is not connected to a phone number and billing account.
A computer running Windows and using IE is one thing, namely a computer on an IP network; a phone running iOS is two things, a computer and a telephone, and there are (or were) mechanisms by which a telephone could charge money that a computer cannot (or could not).