Apple attempting to stop investigation into its practices involving browsers
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It pushes proprietary features, from what I know it starts enforcing some analytics/ads without possibility to block it out and there are other thing too, but since I’m not really an user I don’t track them deeply.
Based on my personal experiences with IE, ActiveX, Adobe Flash and not being able to fill my taxes without Microsoft license (that was around 800$ back then for me not adjusted for inflation) I am afraid the same will happen with Chrome once it gets enough ground.
“Hey, sorry but we can’t sell you toothbrush because you’re using Safari/Firefox/Vivaldi/whatever. Please switch to Chrome and continue with your tracked and dissected purchase route.”
Is there any other anti-Chrome bastion than iOS’ Safari?
Old E2E runner installed Google Chrome on my machine (didn’t even ask but that’s user space on dev machine so whatever) which grew into my MacOS machine. It cannot run in background but there is another daemon that constantly updates it. Multiple times a day I get notification that new service has been installed to run in background.
I’m not sure if that’s something I want to fight for.
Since you asked, Firefox is the browser to use if you do not want chrome.
There is video playback on without fan noise (Chromium) or a very audible fan noise on Firefox (Notebook & Steam Deck + Fedora/Pop/Arch/Ubuntu) => More use of power resulting in less time for me.
Switching to Linux resulting in me ditching my forever browser Firefox is something I would not have guessed.
Personally, I bounce between macOS, Windows and Linux (mostly Linux, with Wayland), between Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari (mostly Firefox), and also between laptops/desktops and Firefox on Linux is consistently the fastest one with the least amount of crashes for me. Also the combination that lets me get the most battery life out of my laptop.
Maybe it should be browser's task to do it. As a user I just do not want to waste my time on things like that unless they're vital. In this case I'll just use different browser.
Unfortunately you don't really get that luxury if you use Linux.
I really wish this weren't true, but the user experience has barely improved in the past 15-20 years. The specific problems may be different, but it's still the same struggle.
If you don't like bleeding edge, warts or sometimes unpolished experiences, might be better to go with Windows or macOS, no one would blame you.
If you've managed to get battery life from Linux and Firefox even remotely near default fresh install of MacOS and Safari, you should write that up and post the link to it on HN.
Then again, Windows was even worse. It was constantly waking itself up in a cramped bag, where it would try to forcibly install updates, overheat, drain the entire battery, then shut down and need to charge for 30 minutes just to light up at all. At which point it would boot into the recovery menu since it botched an update and needed to try again.
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
I have an nvidia card and non free drivers if that matters
That said, Apple is doing something worse with Safari, in that not only are they bundling the browser, they are using their tight control over the operating system to prevent other browsers from being installed in the first place. It's slighly murkier than the MS antitrust case because the counter-argument is "but they do allow other browsers! You can see Chrome/Firefox/Brave/etc in the App Store!" and then you have to get into a technical discussion of the difference between a browser application and a browser engine.
Sigh.
This was not that obvious in the 1990s.
> It would be absurd for antitrust regulators to prohibit software vendors from enhancing their products just for the sake of protecting competitors' revenue.
This is absolutely a situation where a bundling case could apply, if a large incumbent uses their monopoly power in one product area to enter another and unfairly compete. IANAL but I don't believe whether or not the product was available separately or not would factor much into such a case.
This was not at all the case in the 90s during the period of MS antitrust action.
> For the same reason it's not bundling if their operating system contains a scheduler or network drivers
There is a robust market (even today) for web browsers, and the makers of browsers make millions of dollars in revenue from their products. Therefore, I disagree, and I believe the bundling concept could still apply today to browsers. Network drivers and schedulers are not at all the same, because there isn't much of an independent market for them.
Which is also what Apple is doing but then going even further and just outright banning other browser engines.
And even without them, we could write a browser and distribute to people so they could install it.
That cannot be said about iOS.
That wikipedia page has a support table saying IOS supports PWAs as YES and Firefox as NO is odd considering Apple requires Mozilla to ship a crippled form of safari on IOS, if Firefox could ship their own true application, I suspect they would have better PWA support as a differentiator with Safari.
[1] https://thenewstack.io/owa-takes-on-apples-browser-ban-for-p...
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
"web bluetooth" and many other hardware APIs are Chrome-only non-standards that OWA pretends are standards and core features for PWAs.
It's in Google's interest to replace native iOS apps with web apps.
It's in Apple's interest to replace web apps with native iOS apps.
Native apps also tend to be more power efficient and to present a platform-native look and feel.
I don't see any incentive for Apple to support PWAs (or Google's vision for web apps) ever.
Firefox is not a serious competitor at this point and its tiny 4% of the market has already slipped to 3% in the last year.
That’s inching close to the “can we please drop IE11” sort of numbers from some years ago.
- It comes last out of the three major browser engines in feature support. - It has the most number of bugs out of the three engines. - It has the worst support for Web Apps.
Apple has deprived the Safari/Webkit team of funding for the past decade.
Safari places no competitive pressure on chrome, and has deprived Mozilla and thus Firefox of 100's of millions of dollars in search engine revenue. Apple has done untold damage to the web and this needs to be fixed.
Safari (WebKit) is the only one competing against the Chrome ecosystem, especially on mobile devices market. The EU Digital Markets Act will just declare Chrome the winner and will increase Chrome's dominance and will make Mozilla even more irrelevant.
The force keeping Safari afloat is not the one keeping Firefox down, the problem is that Firefox has nothing to drive up its adoption. Telling people that they're "free" to use Firefox and see as the web is swallowed whole by Google with Chrome, like MS did with IE, is missing the point so badly.
Sent from my Firefox install.
There's a case to be made that they handicap PWA features, but I don't see their team directly implementing features incorrectly.
wat. Firefox and Safari are more closely aligned on standards support than Chrome which pushes its own non-standards aggressively
The "use an inferior tool for philosophical reasons" mindset is already pretty unconvincing for me. A chromium fork maintained by a pro-user, pro-privacy team is the best of both worlds and doesn't expose you to Mozilla's fad-chasing.
These assumptions would be true of a for-profit entity like Google, Apple, Microsoft, but it's not as directly applicable to Mozilla.
Mozilla exists as it does today entirely due to Google's largess.
[0]https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti... [1]https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection#trackers-we-block
> “Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there's no denying the decline,” says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox
But I'm not certain that this is the case. https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection claims to link to lists that show which trackers are only identified and which are identified and blocked, but those links just go to https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti..., where I do not see such a distinction being made.
Did we see a massive drop in Firefox users when tracking protection was introduced?
You can test behavior on this tracker here: https://www.jefftk.com/test/statcounter
<html><head></head><body><img src="https://statcounter.com/" vt9kpu8nj="">
</body></html>
1. Plain install: Not blocked 2. With uBlock Origin: Blocked 3. Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection: Blocked 4. 2+3: Still blocked (unsurprisingly)
I would expect knowledgeable and concerned users (i.e. installing at least uBlock Origin) and people on systems managed by such people (e.g. family members of people in the first group who let that person manage their system) to be a higher percentage of Firefox users than other browsers.
I don't think Firefox has say a 10% share, but I do think that data derived from statcounter.com is going to underrepresent the share of Firefox users. As Google continues to make larger moves to fight ad-blocking, I expect that gap will widen.
Maybe they don't see as many Chrome browsers too, in percent. Maybe Firefox users are not the ones who block more tracking, who knows.
At the same time, Firefox has 200 million users. For perspective, that's just behind the population of Brazil, the world's seventh-most-populous country. It's hardly dead in absolute terms. It's hard to think of any open-source end-user application that's more widespread.
not sure it is also possible to compete on battery performance with Safari but that is the only one I see. Drop any other project, any initiative and just focus on this.
Why:
1. Because there is a big chunk of developers who code web on MacOS thus winning them means what they build will run on MacOS
2. Becoming default for this group of technical people means they will recommend it for their families and more important install it for their young kids laptops
3. Can do it with Google money :)
My idea was primarily based on my experience is something like this:
I know (meaning I know what they use) around 15-20 devs on MacOS.
Almost all of them have FF installed. Some may open it occasionally but just as an alternative to open in private mode or check some weird behavior to see if it is cross-browser or cache related.
- personal usage: except maybe 2, all the others are using Safari (most of them) and Chrome few
- professional usage: except for the same 2, here I think Chrome is more used and Safari less
Thus in these developers' case, I don't think they will recommend FF to their friends or relatives even if FF is installed on their machine as it is not their daily driver.
I am in the same category regarding usage: I forced myself multiple times to use FF. Still try to do that couple of times per year.
But fallback to Safari because the battery lasts so much longer and because it is integrated with the MacOS keychain.
One might think that with M1, people might afford to lose a bit of battery but it is the reverse. Seeing how long it lasts one barely thinks of cutting those hours short :) Could mean starting to carry again the power adapter or always looking for a table near a power socket.
Here is a browser that I installed not long ago and start to like it more and more: https://browser.kagi.com
Many of those who have not learned from history are so anti-Apple (or possibly subpar webdevs) that they completely ignore the lessons we've previously learned about why browser monoculture is dangerous.
Even more worrisome, these people often ignorantly call Safari "the new IE", meaning they're aware of the history and problems and choose to pursue their own broken interpretation.
If these people will ignore a browser with 50% market share on mobile and 20% overall due to their own shortsightedness, clearly they're going to ignore Firefox or others hanging out in the single digits.
I'm confused, because to me it seems that the pro-Apple folks are the ones ignoring the lessons from large corporations using their weight to force monocultures.
Firefox is the only meaningful browser that is open and won't be leveraged by its steward to promote their business interests.
--- sart quote ---
Back fifteen years ago IE held back the web because web developers had to cater to its outdated technology stack. “Best viewed with IE” and all that. But do you ever see a “Best viewed with Safari” notice? No, you don’t. Another browser takes that special place in web developers’ hearts and minds.
--- end quote ---
Said nothing about "anti-Apple". I'm just agreeing with the poster above saying that people being vehemently anti-Apple actually haven't learned anything from history. At all.
> Apple's leverage is being used in many of the same ways, just much more aggressively than 'best viewed in IE'
Of course this is bullshit. Again. There's probably not a single site out there that is "best viewed in Safari". And there are numerous sites that are "best viewed in Chrome". Including, especially, the ones that Google themselves (#1 search, #1 mail, #1 video hosting, #1 web ad business in the world) creates.
And to quote again:
--- start quote ---
Regardless of where you feel the web should be on this spectrum between Google and Apple, there is a fundamental difference between the two.
We have the tools and procedures to manage Safari’s disinterest. They’re essentially the same as the ones we deployed against Microsoft back in the day — though a fundamental difference is that Microsoft was willing to talk while Apple remains its old haughty self, and its “devrels” aren’t actually allowed to do devrelly things such as managing relations with web developers. (Don’t blame them, by the way. If something would ever change they’re going to be our most valuable internal allies — just as the IE team was back in the day.)
On the other hand, we have no process for countering Google’s reverse embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy, since a section of web devs will be enthusiastic about whatever the newest API is. Also, Google devrels talk. And talk. And talk. And provide gigs of data that are hard to make sense of. And refer to their proprietary algorithms that “clearly” show X is in the best interest of the web — and don’t ask questions! And make everything so fucking complicated that we eventually give up and give in.
--- end quote ---
Google releases 400 new APIs a year with little to no oversight and with complete disregard of any objections or concerns from the other browser vendors: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
The things that you think Safari is lacking in are largely Chrome-only non-standards.
That is why I use Firefox, as the only remaining browser that hasn't shown a long-term pattern of curtailing user freedoms or rights when it suits them. I don't see Safari as a solution here; Apple is not pushing for an open web because it is righteous, they are pushing for a platform they control and to hurt their competitor. They are not to be trusted either. If they can, they will absolutely leverage that control against the user as they have shown time and time again that they are more than willing to do.
> Of course this is bullshit. Again. There's probably not a single site out there that is "best viewed in Safari". And there are numerous sites that are "best viewed in Chrome". Including, especially, the ones that Google themselves (#1 search, #1 mail, #1 video hosting, #1 web ad business in the world) creates.
When I say 'Apple', I mean 'Apple', not 'Safari'. Apple are the ones with a platform that will not run unblessed code. Apple are the ones that don't let developers or users choose how software is distributed. Apple are the ones that tell you which APIs you can and cannot use, and what your app can and cannot do. Apple are the ones that tell you what browser engine you can run, which is much stronger than a website saying 'yeah we tested this against IE, but go nuts', instead it is Apple saying 'if you want a browser engine, you can take Webkit or pound sand'. This is Apple's modus operandi, writ large. At least with Google's level of control you can still do what whatever you want with the website that runs in Chrome.
Second, your use of "open competition" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, suggesting that browser market share is determined by ordinary market forces (it's not) or that Apple isn't competing openly with Google already. Why would allowing the competitor's browser on your hardware be considered "open competition?" Again, it's not clear.
It is not a fair market since the maker of one of the browsers also owns a significant portion of the websites that people use daily. Now Google has to play nice with Safari to some extend, since the don't want to miss out on the lucrative iPhone market. Once Google can offer Chrome on iOS, they will destroy Safari with the same underhanded practices as they did to Firefox (a pattern of subtly breaking Firefox with Google products).
I don't believe that would happen, firstly Apple would fight back, and secondly the competition authorities would take action against Google.
Google is under scrutiny for its behaviour too.
You can't fight or justify anti competitive behaviour with anti competitive behaviour back.
With what?
It will be a sad day for sure.
Apple is not the company fighting for the web or browser diversity, they are the ones holding back.
Now Firefox is declining into irrelevance. The EU Digital Markets Act demands for Apple to open up to more browsers with just cement Chrome's dominance and make Firefox even more irrelevant.
With Firefox's declining usage and market share, they are essentially on life support with Google's money since they know they would be completely irrelevant without it.
It appears that [0] has not aged well at all.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
Of course I would love to see Gecko running on iOS. I just don't like the possibility of Google's browser dominance become even stronger either. It's a hard one.
I understand your frustration that you can't use the browser you want on the devices you want. That is annoying. However, *now* is the wrong time to go after Apple. Get more people using other browsers on other platforms first.
Wikipedia suggests this breakdown:
> As of November 2022, Android, an operating system using the Linux kernel, is the world's most-used operating system when judged by web use. It has 42% of the global market, followed by Windows with 30%, Apple iOS with 18%, macOS with 6%, then (desktop) Linux at 1.0% also using the Linux kernel.[1][2] These numbers do not include embedded devices or game consoles.
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... )
Android and Windows make up 4x the number of iOS users on the web. When the % of Chrome users on those platforms goes down, and Firefox and others go up, to a level where any of them could temporarily steer the direction the HTML/W3C standards take, _that's_ the time to go after Apple. Until then, lean on the fence Apple are holding up for you (and getting Google to pay for).
...because Chrome is a much better browser? That's what you're trying to say?
This is not theoretical, the playbook is obvious and has been run before, by Microsoft.
You're now demanding to be forever locked into an inferior corporate owned product because you're utterly afraid that the better product would win. It's insane.
The situation is not “Apple good, Google bad” or vice versa. The benefit of the current situation is that places these two huge companies in direct opposition and competition in the browser space. Using the law to force Apple to lose would take that away and cede the entire Web to Google’s control, thereby actually creating a monopoly.
Some of us are not. Some of us are saying "now is the wrong time to force Apple to open up its platform to other browsers". Safari on iOS is the one browser holding back Chrome from a monopoly for now. If you really want to see an open web, a more diverse web ecosystem, we have to expand the use of _other_ browsers such that there are again multiple, successful engines at the W3C; so that Google can't lock users out of their tools by forcing them to use Chrome. Only then will it be the right time to go after Apple's browser restrictions.
What a bullshit statement that has no basis in reality. I wish high-visibility "thought leaders" would stop spewing this bullshit (but they won't)
Safari is definitely not choking the web platform to death. It's as lively as ever.
What you want is a bunch of Chrome-only non-standards that both Safari and Mozilla vehemently oppose to, and a smattering of other bullshit features under the PWA banner that are coming to the next versions of Safari.
Android and Windows make up four times the number of web users as iOS. That's almost the same ratio (Chrome:others) as browser use across the web. Get a significant proportion of those user to move onto to other browser platforms first, then go after Apple give the final 20% of users more choice.
(based on stats from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... )
As for walled monopoly - what if Apple allowed Firefox with its free extension model - what argument would you come up then? One can easily use ublock origin with Firefox, a thing Apple fears quite a bit - its by far the best ad-blocking and to certain extent tracking technology out there currently. We all know here on HN that Apple is moving to marketing more and more (currently 4 billion/year for them and growing fast), so they will never allow this unless forced by law.
Which is one of those situations where users lose and corporation wins (unless you consider ads and tracking a good thing when Apple does it, but that's... illogical to be polite).
It can’t be that afraid, because you can use the Firefox version of uBlock Origin in the WebKit-based iOS browser Orion[0] right now.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...
Extensions, as originally implemented, are a security nightmare. That's why every browser, including Firefox, is changing the way extensions work. Firefox is keeping blocking WebRequest specifically for ad blocking, but acknowledges the security risk. Apple and Chrome are removing it, which breaks uBlock Origin.
Ironically you don't need to look any further than extensions to see the impact of giving the entire web to Chrome. Firefox said they have to implement Manifest v3 because "support for MV3, by virtue of the combined share of Chromium-based browsers, will be a de facto standard for browser extensions in the foreseeable future." Imagine what Firefox would need to do if Chrome was the only other browser, with near-total market share.
This is why free markets work and command economies don't.
Using the law to force Apple to run Google software would be an example of a command economy.
It outright prevents existence of new browsers and competition and it's a flagship examples of monopolistic corporations killing innovation and competition.
You yourself admitted that free market was required for current iPhone browser to exist and Apple locked out free market.
No it doesn't. Tens of new browsers appear on multiple platforms every year, in parallel with Apple's approach. All of them fail to gain significant market share, and most of them are based on Blink.
The bigger obstacle for browser innovation is the complexity of making a modern browser. That complexity is actually partly driven by developers demanding constant feature expansion in browsers. It's been great having web apps explode, but also that makes browsers fiendishly complex.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the term.
> You can't fight or justify anti competitive behaviour with anti competitive behaviour back.
The way it seems to me, for this case, is that those two "anti-"s cancel out and leave you with direct competition?
Can you give an example of a G-suite (or any google product) feature that does not work in Firefox?
GCP periodically breaks their console logins for Firefox users.
Search - I don't really see a browser specific optimization potential here.
YouTube is probably mostly app based on mobile.
Gmail and other gsuite apps are also app based on mobile.
I'd be surprised if they cared about mobile Safari support in those much or if it played a big factor.
YouTube also had an interesting example of the problem: they shipped some code using Chrome's early draft of what became Web Components. Firefox and Safari implemented the standard version, but there was a LONG period where YouTube used a very slow polyfill instead of upgrading to the standard version, causing Chrome to appear to be faster because it wasn't all of that extra JavaScript. If YouTube was an independent company they would likely have fixed a poor user experience much faster.
Complaining about this is memetic rather than fact based.
The biggest exception is Web Notifications and while that’s useful the desktop situation suggests there’s more than a little validity to the spam concerns. I would like that for a couple of sites but suspect I’d get really tired of selecting the “never allow” option in prompts.
The moment Firefox implemented one of the many hardware APIs aggressively pushed and promoted by Google, they immediately discovered it was used for fingerprinting: https://twitter.com/denschub/status/1582730985778556931
Chrome doesn't even show a prompt in this case. So much for "control".
--- start quote ---
Chrome still allows web developers to enumerate attached MIDI devices without user consent or even a notification, btw.
--- end quote ---
1. Install prompt (the user has to start with the "Add to Home Screen" command)
2. Link interception (i.e. browsing in the normal browser switching to the PWA rather than continuing normally)
3. Shared storage between the normal browser and the PWA
4. Ability to start fullscreen
5. SVG icons
6. Background sync
7. Push notifications
The rest of that is largely a list of things like "Web Bluetooth" which are non-standard Chrome features which Firefox also doesn't implement and often have significant privacy or security concerns.
Do you feel like the current state of PWA's in iOS presents a viable alternative to publishing an app for any real usecase?
Features HN developers think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": notifications, prompt banners, link interception, Chrome-only non-standards like bluetooth etc.
Features actual users think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": actual native-like experience: responsiveness, smooth animations, polished usable and accesible controls, maintaining scroll position and location in the app, fast scrolling through large lists, no loading states for the simplest actions...
I mean, people people keep bringing up Twitter's objectively bad web app as an example of one of the best PWA apps... Have these people never seen an actual native app?
It's not everyday but I have to open Chrome, or recently Brave, atleast once a month to deal with shitty frontend developers that only test their latest code in chrome, awful security captchas that only work in Chrome, and just total shit show foreign/non American sites that went from worst practices in IE to worst practices in Chrome because some old man/men in their government/company decided it needs to be done in a certain way because it works best on their ten year old laptop.
I just open tickets, complain, limit interaction with offending sites, because as someone who lived through AOL and internet explorer I know how awful it will be if a mega tech company is allowed to dictate web standards because they don't have to interoperate. Most sites can just be cordoned off until they fix the issue or be forgotten about but banking sites often intersect total shit programmers and by the book regulations that are poorly written sadly.
Also Firefox is the only cross platform browser that lets me control what I see and doesn't force me to waste time in my life by seeing ads without jumping through hoops.
Though for me it turns out the reason Firefox wasn’t working for me for some sites was that some sites didn’t work with ublock origin which wasn’t installed on my chromium. Turning it off for non working sites in Firefox fixed the issues for me.
Brave blocks ads by default
Well I respect your opinion. However I have no time / desire to get political about this particular issue. Brave works for me.
On the other side, Chrome runs on any hardware and people using Safari on their iPhone are likely to use Chrome at work or on their PCs. The competition is almost one sided and can't be won by staying inside the closed world of Macs and ìPhones, especially ìPhones because of the internal competition from native apps.
Don’t buy there. This has nothing to do with chrome.
Which reminds me it is about time to send one of my approximately twice-a-year reminders to competition authorities around here and remind them about it.
If anyone else feels the same, please do, maybe if letters start arriving from other persons than old grumpy reitan they will actually care?
But something along the lines of:
--------
header, greetings etc
I'm writing you in the hope that you would have time to look into the abuse of market power by Google that has destroyed a well functioning market for web browsers.
Background:
Back before 2008 IE was both stale and very dominant and [...]
The reason for this was both that Internet Explorer (IE from now) started out as a very good browser for it time, but more importantly that Microsoft (MS) abused its market position to push it everywhere and to intentionally degrade experiences for other browsers as proven by Opera Software when they showed that MS technical support web pages magically started working if one let their browser identify itself as IW.
Microsoft was fined severly for this and was also forced to create a browser ballot on machines sold in the EU at least where they had to present IE togheter with competing browsers. Around this time MS also to some degree started changing their ways
This was followed by the rise of OS independent browsers, especially Firefox in the beginning but also Chrome later.
Since around 2010 the growth of Chrome has been happening by eating every other browsers share and there is a lot to indicate that technical superiority is far from the only reason why this has happened:
- remeber to mention bundling (w/Adobe and probably others)
- ads on the front page of Google, something that no others have been allowed to
- misleading ads (showing download a better browser also to firefox users and opera users)
- and last but not least: Google has also been caught red handed in degrading experiences for other browsers, not based on technical capabilities but how they identify themselves
--------
This should serve as a starting point. I need to get back to work and English is not my first language so make your own : )
Write a letter to a politician that urges them to investigate and enforce laws around the anti-competitive behavior that Google is exhibiting when they abuse their market position to push their Chrome browser. Include a comparison to Microsoft's anti-trust lawsuits around Internet Explorer. Also include specific information around the actions Google is taking that is anti-competitive.
AI:
Dear [Politician],
I am writing to urge you to look into and enforce laws related to the anti-competitive behavior of Google, which is abusing its market position by pushing its Chrome browser. This situation has alarming similarities to the Microsoft antitrust lawsuits surrounding Internet Explorer.
Google is using tactics such as preinstalling Chrome on Android devices, and making it difficult for users to switch to a different browser. It uses its dominance in the search engine market to promote Chrome over alternatives. Google also restricts Android device makers from using modified versions of Android that would allow them to use a different browser. Google has gone even further to promote Chrome by incentivizing device makers to preinstall Chrome and Chrome-related apps through its Android Mobile Services agreements.
This is unacceptable and we need strong action to prevent large corporations like Google from abusing their power in the tech sector. Therefore, I strongly urge you to investigate and enforce laws around this anti-competitive behavior.
Sincerely, [Name]
It does give me hope that not all folks are lemmings. Just like during the IE6 days, there was a nice ground-swell of Firefox (or "Fox-fire" as some of the older folks called it) users.
It does actually have some interesting features nowadays. The background resource limiter would have been nice when back when I played WoW, since the usual database site had some serious memory leaks.
I'm not sure he gets the concept of "browser engines".
What an insane take, I don't believe you are serious, there's no way you're not a troll.
Safari is not an anti-Chrome bastion, Apple does not care and does not want Safari to be a better browser than Chrome. They just care about controling from where you install the apps on your phone.
Then we could possibly have new, from-scratch, independent browser engines that could compete with the status quo.
We did have a technology for adding interactive app-like content to hypertext documents, it was called Flash. I do hope that it gets eventually resurrected but as an open standard. There is an open-source Flash player being actively developed right now, Ruffle. There isn't an open-source authoring program yet, but this feels like a much lesser issue. IMO it's important for there to be that boundary between the "document" and the "app". The only real shortcoming of the original Flash was that it relied on a proprietary plugin.
Of course, Apple also needs to be forced to allow app sideloading, that's regardless of what they do or do not implement in Safari.
No more porn. No more innovative experiments. No more kids making dumb little things to learn programming. No more freedom to set your own app policies.
The web is the only platform keeping user and dev freedom alive and it's imperative that hackers like us fight for it.
The following things have been pushed and enabled by a single web ad agency with complete disregard to concerns and objections: WebUSB, WebBluetooth, WebSerial, WebMIDI. There are countless others.
The web hasn't been neutral for a very long time. Google believes the web is it's own playground now.
I think that Chrome is way past that, being at ~70% browser market share.
It's not just funding. Apple changed webapps to delete indexedDB periodically even if they are inatalled on the home screen.
There's no way to have a great experience if you can't store data permanently.
If so this is something we really need to follow up.
> As mentioned, the seven-day cap on script-writable storage is gated on “after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site.” That is the case in Safari. Web applications added to the home screen are not part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use. Their days of use will match actual use of the web application which resets the timer. We do not expect the first-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted.
> If your web application does experience website data deletion, please let us know since we would consider it a serious bug. It is not the intention of Intelligent Tracking Prevention to delete website data for first parties in web applications.
So, while adding it to the home screen still involves this mechanism, the "first-party"--which I understand to be the website which was actually added to the home screen, differentiating it from all of the third-party websites that it might link you to--is presumably going to be used every time you use that icon on the home screen and since that icon also has its own usage counter it won't ever be counting up when you aren't using it, so you are "good" (unless the user manages to use your home screen added app for seven days without ever ending up back at the "first-party" site somehow, which seems like an oddity and maybe one they mitigated directly).
Ask yourself the same question about Native Apps. Why should any Native App be allowed to store data permanently. The answer to that question is the same for Web Apps.
Web Apps can be every bit as capable as Native Apps except with security and privacy built in. For consumers, businesses and competition, Native Apps need to be relegated to to apps that require cutting edge use cases
2. You (as a user) lack autonomy or control over them.
3. While built on "free and open technology", they are not by design.
4. Is totally subject to the whems, taxes, and control of the gatekeeper (the app developer)
Web applications have demonstratively made the experience worse for users without them knowing it. And web app developers know this intrinsically and refuse to acknowledge it.
2. Not any more than native apps.
3. I guess.. Not sure that matters though..
4. Not any more than native apps. But what mtomweb refers to is obviously the app stores which act as gate keepers, which web apps are not subject to.
>Web applications have demonstratively made the experience worse for users without them knowing it. And web app developers know this intrinsically and refuse to acknowledge it.
What? Not in my opinion, they haven't.
2. You have far more control over Web Apps than Native Apps. The permissions are more granular + via your user agent (browser) you can change privacy and security settings and install extensions to change the behaviour further.
This is not available on native.
3. We're not advocating for "free" apps (App Developers need to make a living too), We're advocating for free and open web tech.
4. Having hundreds of thousands of competing App Developers is not an issue, having 2/3 gatekeepers controlling and extracting rents is.
5. Web Applications only have to be written once, which will result in BETTER products. There's a reason Adobe, Microsoft and many other companies are all investing in Web Apps.
No, its so they can better get money out of the end users. A user cant keep using their 5 year old copy of XYZ, they have to pay every month or they will be cut off from the application.
Unless the app is open source why would it matter to me if it is build on free and open technology?
I would say per definition a webapp is less free than a native app as its under the control of the server operator and not running locally. I know iOS have somewhat webified apps to let them control if people can run them but the old idea of the native app would be entirely under the control of the user, even if its closed source.
I also dont think a web app can do privacy as well as a native app. A native app you can firewalled off from network access while with a web app you are at the mercy of the developer and server operator.
They'll make you submit your PWA for app store review, sign your asset and JS bundles so all other's won't load, make you support "Web IAP", and go through review again every time you want to update your bundle.
Hitching your "I want to be be free of Apple's platform control" to "I want PWA's" is a recipe for disappointment.
So much of the software industry has been consolidated into the hands of a few monopolies. Web, with all of its horrible problems, is pretty much the only democratic platform we have left, and even it is constantly being eaten away by these monopolies.
It's your device. If you want a website to be able to store data permanently on it, it is your choice. Not apple's. Not google's. Fucking yours.
How to balance that desire with advertisers' desire to track users is of course a difficult question.
But it would be nice if the user could make this setting on a per-webapp basis.
I am pretty sure most apps use AT LEAST iCloud to store data
Modern web apps can cache all the files they need to function. They can work offline. So when iOS deletes a web app's data, it doesn't just delete some content and maybe a few settings. It's basically like it deletes the entire app and you have to reinstall it (by opening the web app and re-download all assets that make it work). Sure, the icon is still on your home screen, but the entire app behind it is gone.
It'll also delete things like your login status/tokens/etc, so you have to log in again, maybe the web app has settings that it doesn't want to sync across devices, etc.
I assume that when Web Push hits iOS, notifications will only work as long as you open the web app often enough.
It also impacts the UX of the app with more complex caching or having to load things over the network as you use it.
It's not good for storing media, but for other things it can be used as a backup and communication tool for web apps.
This makes users feel like they're never logged into a website when they need it, unless they're using it almost daily.
That high-friction experience pushes users towards apps, which of course are always ready to go.
EDIT: source: https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki...
> Back in February 2019, we announced that ITP would cap the expiry of client-side cookies to seven days
> ...
> Now ITP has aligned the remaining script-writable storage forms with the existing client-side cookie restriction, deleting all of a website’s script-writable storage after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site. These are the script-writable storage forms affected (excluding some legacy website data types):
> Indexed DB
> LocalStorage
> Media keys
> SessionStorage
> Service Worker registrations and cache
EDIT 2: That page indicates web apps on the home screen get some variation for this behavior, but the difference isn't clear to me.
That’s a gross misrepresentation of how Safari ITP works.
However I note that contrary the parent-poster's implication that Apple is using tricks like these to steer users towards native apps, the same linked article talks about how pinned web-apps (i.e. PWAs) _don't_ have their local content deleted after inactivity, which contradicts the claim that Apple is using this in particular to sabotage PWAs:
> That is the case in Safari. Web applications added to the home screen are not part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use. Their days of use will match actual use of the web application which resets the timer. We do not expect the first-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted. > > If your web application does experience website data deletion, please let us know since we would consider it a serious bug. It is not the intention of Intelligent Tracking Prevention to delete website data for first parties in web applications.
But I do agree that Apple very likely has internal orders from the top-down to de-prioritise PWAs because Apple definitely wants to see users (and devs) go native (or least via the App Store) instead of being PWAs - but I don't believe it goes as far as _actively_ sabotaging PWAs (i.e. just merely "passively-sabotaging", I guess?).
I wish that were true. But since many apps these days are just slapdash shims over web portals, they time out login sessions and forget things anyway.
Source? I had thought the usage counter ignored days when you didn't open the webapp.
In app browsers are designed to lock the user into the app they are currently using, allowing it to track the user after they have followed a link, and coerce them to come back. For the websites being visited (on iOS) this is a separate session, no shared cookies with the main browser. This fundamentally breaks shopping carts on online stores, and I have seen it result in a 50% drop out rate at checkout (users often don't have access to their stored card details).
I frankly can't understand why there has not been more push back from advertisers using platforms such as Facebook, they are only a net negative for them.
Also, I don't see how fighting a potential monoculture with an actual monoculture is a solution.
For further reading: https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-brow...
The mass of iOS users "forced" to use the browser that comes with the device they buy gives you more chances that a given website will work on Firefox on your personal computer.
That link is a blog from a Chrome engineer and shows a chart of Chrome cornerning the browser market with the caption of "Destkop OSes have long created a vibrant market for browser choice, enabling competitors not tied to OS defaults to flourish over the years.", it's ridiculous.
I personally do not support apple not allowing other browser engines, just as I do not support them not allowing other ways of installing apps besides the app store, but I also think that them allowing other browser engines will ultimately make the web worse as a side effect.
I assume they'll be forced to allow other browser engines on iOS at some point in the next few years, at which point the floodgates will be opened for Google to have free rein on web standards and further cement themselves as owners of the internet.
As if the worlds largest web ad company is in it "for the web". They are in it as much for control as anyone else.
> Also, I don't see how fighting a potential monoculture with an actual monoculture is a solution.
We're already in a monoculture. And that monoculture is Chrome, not Safari which is a very distant second in comparison.
Now there's some easy money. Receiving 20 billion for doing absolutely nothing. To literally keeps things as-is. No product moved, no labor performed, no service provided. Just leave it. And we wire you 20 billion USD.
Simply buying the market in the open, without a care in the world. The things we let companies get away with. Astounding.
This is slightly hyperbolic. Google is buying a default¹. It can be changed.
https://appletoolbox.com/change-default-search-engine-iphone...
With Safari, yes, but Firefox for iOS (for example) allows you to add arbitrary search engines.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-your-default-sea...
That's a bit of a myopic view. Apple has invested billions in building a platform and user base, and that is what Google is buying.
We've been shipping a B2B, PWA-enabled web app to iOS Safari users for almost 2 years and it all mostly "just works" now. We even have a customer using hand-written provisioning profiles via Azure InTune to roll out PWA web apps to their iPad home screens automatically.
To be fair, figuring out how to do this is not documented in any meaningful way whatsoever. I had to reverse engineer another PWA that already worked on iOS/Safari in order to figure out the right path.
If anything, Apple should be punished for intentionally obfuscating the capabilities of their products. I feel like this is where they are going to weasel their way out of trouble in court - "Oh look if you do this <performs elaborate ceremony no rational person could conceive> then you can actually achieve an open application ecosystem on apple devices".
Are there resources you can recommend to other PWA developers? It sounds like there are many people in this thread that haven't pieced it together like you've been able to.
You can see the experience yourself - Grab an iOS device and navigate to app.starbucks.com. Add it to your Home Screen. Open the new shortcut. Observe this desired behavior. Dev tools will explain how to get there. I'd pay special attention to the meta tags.
Any company, individual, or government will discourage investigation. Sometimes, because they have something to hide, sometimes, because they want to avoid precedent, and sometimes, just because it's a big fat pain in the butt, and they have the resources to interfere.
I'm not saying that Apple is right or wrong, here; just that this particular thing isn't really something to get all worked up over. The people pushing this, have an agenda (as does Apple, or any corporation). They are framing the matter in terms that will fit their perspective.
This tweet thread is unnecessarily confusing the two. How does restricting browser engine to webkit decide what browser engines they use?
By: 1. Eliminating browsers ability to differentiate itself 2. Forcing additional costs on the browser vendors to have to develop a second browser specifically for iOS 3. By reserving functionality exclusively for Safari 4. By eroding third party browsers market share by self-preferencing Safari (default install, couldn't set another default browser until recently etc etc)
But Chrome is not controlled by an independent company. It's controlled by the largest company in the search, video, and advertising markets, and has repeatedly abused that power to degrade functionality for non-Chromium browsers, all while extending Chrome in non-standard non-secure ways.
And this:
> In addition, Apple has been underfunding Safari for the past decade leading to missing critical functionality and a buggy experience for Web App developers thus ensuring that Native Apps, another Apple revenue source, are the only viable solution.
That just seems like nonsense. The Safari team seems to be well-funded, they just have different ideas from Google about what PWAs should be allowed to do. This caused Google to fork the webkit project, and is why things like push notifications are not supported today. It's not that they can't, it's that they won't.
Meh. Safari is owned by Apple, the richest company in the world and they're beaten by a non-profit(!) who spends ~500 million / yr?
Apple only started properly funding Safari and catching up with Firefox and Chrome when regulators started looking into their practices.
How can one of the richest men in the world eat peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, as Bill Gates did while being interviewed for My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman? Shouldn't he be eating something with truffle oil, or caviar? To me, Apple having the highest market value of any company doesn't seem like it should be related to the quality of their free web browser at all. I've never heard them answer a question about Safari with "we don't have the money for that," which would make the relationship relevant.
It seems like the same sort of reasoning as: "Apple is the richest company in the world and their company sweatshirts aren't even as good as this sweatshirt company's?" I mean, yeah, a company devoted to the sole purpose of a single thing, with no shareholders even, should expect to be number one at that single thing. I guess it's pretty embarrassing for the Firefox team that they're considered a number two to Google.
As I said in my first comment, Apple disagrees with some others on what should and shouldn't be in a web browser. They haven't implemented push notification because they disagree with their inclusion, not because they can't afford to do it.
> Apple only started properly funding Safari and catching up with Firefox and Chrome when regulators started looking into their practices.
I'm not sure what you're basing this on. Safari was the first browser to achieve 100% Acid3 compliance back in 2008, which was a thing they seemed to care about more than anyone else, although the rest of the browsers caught up soon after. Again, and it doesn't seem I can say this enough: Apple has different priorities than Google or Mozilla do. Those priorities change over time, which might lead you to think they're either pulling ahead of falling behind in the areas on which you're focusing, but they've been pretty steadily developing Safari while keeping memory usage and energy usage low and avoiding what they see as security pitfalls.
They don't deliver the same PWA functionality that Chrome does on purpose, not due to lack of funds or effort.
Additionally while Safari remains underfunded and full of bugs it's not placing little competitive pressure on Chrome while ensuring that browsers that actually compete like Firefox are starved of search engine revenue.
Apple's position is bad for the Web, bad for Web Apps and bad for Safari. If they have competition then Apple will be forced to fund Safari/Webkit properly and deliver a reliable/feature rich browser.
There will be no consequences.
I've come to the conclusion that competition is the only way to solve the issues around Safari not supporting all PWA features. Even if that result is a greater move to a Blink as the dominant engine.
For there to be effective competition, there needs to be WebKit based browsers on all platforms (Windows, Android, macOS, Linux, iOS). Otherwise, it's a non-starter.
This won't happen. The platform default is one of the most decisive factor for the market share and Apple has a full control here. Unless they do a critical mistake at IE6 level, Chrome won't likely have above 10% iOS market share.
That statement is much, much less true than it once was -- some quick searching puts Chrome at about 66% of desktop market share (despite neither of the two dominant desktop OSes shipping Chrome as a default), and the two default options (Chromium-based Edge and Safari) combining for about 25% of desktop market share.
Apple did learn from this mistake and kept a minimal level of investment as well as prohibited competition via full control of App Store, which effectively forced most websites to support WebKit. Even though they did not invest that much on Safari over a similar length of period through these ways and still maintains the lead on MacOS. Which in fact proves my point.
I don't understand why in this world of Google's near monopoly on the web, people are more focused on government intervention to prevent Apple's pithy 9% marketshare for holding back poor Google.
Many other browsers are available for iOS too. (Not to be confused with rendering engines, of course.)
And also making it the default web browser.
The point is though, you can't install an alternative browser engine on iOS, you could on windows. So it's a bit of an Apples to Oranges of a comparison (no pun intended).
There is clear anti-competitive behaviour, even if they aren't a "true monopoly".
> While Apple is not considered a monopoly and did not engage in antitrust behavior on nine of ten counts, Apple’s conduct in enforcing anti-steering restrictions is anticompetitive.
> A coalition of 35 states, Microsoft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and several other groups filed amicus briefs in support of Epic's position, arguing that Apple held a monopoly and thus that Epic should prevail in its lawsuit.
The judge also did not suggest Apple was on the road to monopoly. She correctly pointed out one anticompetitive practice and forced Apple to change that policy. Which they have.
Apple has strong proposition in many ways, but if you want more freedom that's definitely not the company you should be buying products from, not now nor in near future.
The Mac and other platforms at that time was tiny, its not like today where its more of a duopoly with iOS and android.
Then do not use it. I have it only for testing. My default browser is Brave.
… which is open source and therefore forkable. Google forked Blink from Webkit. What makes you think that Brave and Microsoft can’t do the same?
Unless you have the resources of FAANG, forking Blink is a pipedream. Brave doesn't have the resources, and Microsoft already gave up that dream. Web Browsers are insanely complex and fast moving; and maintaining a "living" fork of Blink is difficult as upstream doesn't make it particularly easy to downstream changes after you've made any sort of modifications.
Which ironically, if say a major platform that everyone had to support slowed down their pace of development to be more conservative so you couldn't jump on features released two weeks ago that would be better for the browser landscape as a whole.
Do we know which browsers? Certainly not Firefox and Chrome.
Apple does not allow other browser engines or does not even allow most Safari features to other browsers...
My point is that people are really stretching the term "skin". Bookmark syncing, tab & window management, history management, security management etc. all are features of a browser, and they have a major impact on the UX of that browser. They are WHY there are still users of Firefox or Chrome on iOS! They're not "skin" features, which typically imply minor look & feel related items.
If Safari team messes up their rendering engine, then iOS update, and it is broken for every iOS browser...
My point is that users don't really care about the common rendering engine. It doesn't have much impact on the day to day UX.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34501173#34504508
Dizzying rent-seeking fees
This ensures that none of the "browsers" can compete on iOS and this obvious by comparing browser market share of the same browser between iOS and Android.
As you say, Apple only allows their own WebView to exist on iOS, which is an engine they both control entirely and is heavily locked down. Not helping matters is that WebView runs on WebKit (Safari uses WebKit as well), which is these days pretty much the equivalent of Internet Explorer in terms of browser shenanigans[0].
The result is that the only real thing you get from Firefox/Chrome/Edge on iOS is access to your synchronized bookmarks. Apple doesn't offer any form of a WebExtension implementation either to these engines (instead rolling their own version, which they confusingly also call WebExtension), and none of the previously mentioned browsers are even allowed to add the universal form of WebExtension support to WebKit. The result is that iOS also remains one of the few platforms where meaningful adblocking remains a crapshoot (entirely beneficial to Apple of course).
[0]: To be somewhat fair here, WebKit *is* very useful for more embedded/low powered devices that aren't intended to access a lot of websites to begin with. There are some uses for WebKit, IE had none near the end.
And even those exist only on sufferance of Apples reviewers.
Also, Safari has some super powers compared to the others on iOS (things the other browsers are simply not allowed or even able to do like Add to homescreen)