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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

> (The alternatives can’t replace the important parts)

I’m genuinely curious what you mean by this. I don’t think I’ve opened Safari in iOS in 5+ years. I am also not as tech savvy as most of you so the question is genuine lol

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Whatever you use (I’m guessing Chrome?) is actually Safari under the hood on iOS, not Chromium.

Apple has stated reasons besides “control everything”. Many people dislike/disbelieve the reasons and have objections. It’s not worth litigating here (see: every thread anywhere mentioning iOS or Safari).

The point is, from a technical point of view there is only Safari on iOS. Chrome can’t add new APIs or rendering features that aren’t built into Safari.

And since Safari on iOS is very common and adds things when/if Apple decides, it’s often compared to IE6, rightly or wrongly.

(Not trying to debate the issues, just explaining the comment)

I use brave and more recently, Firefox. Dropped brave entirely (chrome).

So if I only use Firefox from here on out, what do I need safari for?

Not seeing as a debate! Thanks for answering my questions.

I mean you can “remove” it. It won’t show on your home screen anymore.

But under the covers the code that does all the heavy lifting will be the Safari code. Firefox on iOS will get new features when we Safari does, because that’s how (it’s forced) to work.

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Don’t worry about the last part of my comment. I’m happy to explain this, I’m just tired of the debates of “policy X is an antitrust issue.” Or “They’re doing it to kill PWAs.” Or “The JIT rule is just an excuse.”

The debate has existed since iOS 2.0 in 2008. So 14 years of roughly the same arguments. And I’m just tired that it’s impossible to talk about Safari or iOS or Apple without the exact same argument happening. Like elsewhere in these comments.

That’s the discussion I don’t want to have. Your question is totally fair.

Apple makes other browsers on iOS use the safari engine under the surface. So the core functionality you're seeing of, e.g. rendering the webpage and video codec support is just safari. Chrome/FFox are just sugar around the safari engine, they won't allow other engines

Every browser on iOS is essentially safari but reskinned. Apple forces browser apps to be WebKit based. That means supporting other codecs, and different types of web technologies, etc, only happens on iOS when WebKit supports it, because all browsers have to use the WebKit that’s provided by apple.

Is firefox WebKit based? Does it have the same drawbacks/exposures?

On iOS, yes. My understanding is that Apple forbids installing full Safari alternatives on iOS. On iOS the only permitted browsers are Safari reskins that use the Safari webkit. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_for_iOS

If I'm misinformed please let me know.

This greatly impacts ALL web development. Many people use iOS, and Apple prevents the installation of real alternative browsers. As a result, it's typically financial suicide for any web developer to use a client-side feature not currently supported by iOS Safari.

There is one partial exception: Puffin. It uses Chrome on Linux and a custom lightweight remote desktop-like client to let the server render the pages and the phone view them.

It's an impressive work around, though it adds it's own problems, not the least of which putting a lot of trust in a third party.

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