Google and Mozilla are working on iOS browsers that aren't based on WebKit
theregister.com
theregister.com
Mozilla should never have gotten into a situation where 90% of their funding comes from their biggest competitor.
Firefox has already lost years ago and is so useless to counter Chrome that they have to be funded by Google in order to survive. Mozilla's competitiveness for Firefox is close to zero.
The EU Digital Markets Act will just further solidify Chrome's dominance.
Safari isn't available on platforms other than Apple's (which have a minority share of computing devices on the market), so it's obviously not an actual competitor to Chromium based browsers.
Firefox Focus on Android works much better, but it's also a simpler browser. I haven't used the full Firefox on Android, so can't comment on that.
I use it as my main browser and only had to go Chrome to open some trash sites (litteral “let me load a bitcoin miner in an invisible element” kind of trash)
Why do you think this will happen? The landing page for firefox.com above the fold only makes one claim about "a lightning fast browser", with their selling points being privacy, Firefox View, editing PDFs in-browser, and total cookie protection, all of which are possible in the current WebKit experience. Either Mozilla really doesn't know how to market Firefox, or less people download Firefox if their CTA is "our browser engine is better than Chrome".
Another case for Chrome for me is full page translation. It is very neat and mostly of decent quality.
It's a game changer!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse...
Hah, so I’m not the only one doing that :D On Desktop I’m fine to fiddle, but on mobile those issues just make me start Chrome
So instead, I use Firefox Nightly on Android. It supports any extension I want to install, not just those approved by Mozilla for the Android browser. I would have a very hard time without translation.
Like, maybe they had to "start from scratch" there with new code and couldn't use all their previous magic (UI, UX) from the Desktop codebase.
It was added to desktop Safari. iOS Safari supports VP9 only in WebRTC. It may have changed, but I can't find any evidence that it has.
If you see it working somewhere, it is almost definitely using the polyfill[1].
edit: on MacOS (not iOS)
Android is a very different thing.
But it is a bit janky and it is strictly worse than the android version, and that's because it's layered on top of the wrong engine and there's only so much customisation they can do to make it more firefoxy.
I really welcome a full-fat fox on iOS, not least because it implies extensions like ublock origin, and adblocking on iOS is just not as good compared to UBO on android or the desktop.
You don't actually know that, though, it's entirely possible that these issues are caused by having purposely limited ways to hook into the engine and system as 3rd party browser.
A couple off the top of my head...
If you do something to trigger a page load, like open the app after it has been suspended, and while the page is still loading you touch the address bar to enter an address or pick one of your "recently visited" or whatever, you will be surprised when the page finishes loading and replaces the view. It replaces the view, but you're still in the "navigation bar selected" state, so you can get them back without hitting the tiny back chevron and tapping the address bar again. I doubt this has anything to do with how they are forced to hook into WebView. It's just sloppy handling of async code.
Speaking of that same view, the top four links shown there as favicons are in a constant state of flux. Generally, it's HN, Reddit, Google News and whatever else I frequently visit, but sometimes for reasons I don't understand they get completely jumbled into something else. The icons are constantly disappearing and reappearing. It's not a big deal, but it feels unstable. I'm not sure why they don't just let me pick bookmarks to save on this view instead of automatically picking them for me. There are many things I would like to have available at a single tap, but I don't visit frequently enough to make it into my top four. Like trash pickup schedule. I don't read that several times a day, but when it's time for the trash truck to come and I forgot if today is plastic or paper recyclables, I'd like to have that link bookmarked for quick access.
what's a URL of a page that renders poorly in webkit?
Sure, this ultimately means that everything Just Works on Apple devices... but it's not because their browser is up to standards. It's just that I'm forced to make it work.
To me, this is very reminiscent of the Internet Explorer situation, where I end up baking a bunch of hacks into my code just to ensure it works for the majority.
The problem is two-fold: we have a specific browser engine that lags way behind the standards, and this same engine is literally the only choice for an operating system that runs on over 1 billion[0] devices.
When I say "lags way behind the standards", I'm not talking about unsupported features, but rather, well-established features that are supposedly functional but are simply buggy. And they're not niche features: I have personally seen bugs in features like the CSS filter property, Web Audio, and SVG rendering, that are unsolved to this date.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/27/22253162/iphone-users-tot...
I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari. Nobody in a suit can make a business case for not supporting iOS Safari, given its market share, and also given the fact that the entire C-Suite and senior management team at any given company are using Safari on their iPhone and iPad. A page not working on iOS Safari is a serious business problem that people will take seriously, today.
If it gets displaced by Chrome on iOS, with a tiny sliver of us using Firefox, I worry "works on Chrome" will be the only thing that gets solved for.
Firefox is my daily driver, and I use their WebKit wrapper on iOS, and I have to agree. I'm not looking forward to a Blink monopoly in the browser space. The upshot is that we might have closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS.
What is native? If a website is explicitly testing for Firefox compatibility, they're probably also testing for Safari compatibility due to its increased market share.
Strange. Android is 70% market share. Chrome is something like 80% market share (all playforms). Where are these glorious "closer to native web apps" we keep hearing about?
Google don't want to undermine the Play Store, but they might want to undermine the App Store.
I’ll buy that, but it doesn’t seem like a reason to be optimistic about the way things might go.
I think I illustrated that the incentives are different
> doesn’t seem like a reason to be optimistic
I did say "we might have closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS" (emphasis added) in my OP. Only because it would become possible, not because it would be likely
Again. "If", and "might help", and something else.
Question is: you have Android with 70% market share and all those capabilities you so crave for. Have all these nice hypotheticals happened there, or not?
Edit: things devs think "native-like web apps need" vs what they actually need: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34517503
So. Again and again I ask the same simple question: have all the things you're talking about happened there?
So, given that Android exists, and we see literally nothing come out of it as far as web apps are concerned, what are basing your speculations on?
I doubt Safari will actually die on iOS. The truth is, Safari on iOS is kinda good. That said, honestly this whole line of thinking has gotten pretty tiring. I'm not really sure that an Apple/Google duopoly on browsers is really that much better than the seemingly inevitable Google monopoly. It's not like either of them are particularly good citizens, but Apple's relatively small influence has been very negative in a lot of ways. I'm not even a huge fan of using regulations to solve every problem, but even I must admit that EU regulations have done far more to start to reel in Google than Apple ever could, anyways. As for poor WebM support and pushing wgsl into the WebGPU spec, good riddance.
It's really sad that Google can't be trusted more. There's a lot of people there who are doing good work on Chromium and other web-related projects, and it's besmirched by greedy decisions at worst and optically blind decisions at best. When I was at Google, I did spend a bit of my time trying to make some intranet stuff work better in Firefox... It's probably a token gesture at best, but oh well.
You know we're at a weird point when the underdog competition in browsers is Apple, one of the richest and most resourceful companies of all time.
Slack refuses to work properly on Firefox. I don't think they care that we are being loud about it.
I hadn't tried the user agent trick, I was just frustrated enough at being on my personal laptop and having to join a call then finding Slack was being terrible.
And for no apparent good reason other than bad quality software.
I only brought it up because it is high profile web application that has an arbitrary Firefox limitation, and as a Firefox user I will name and shame bad applications.
I'm using slack on Firefox daily. Prefer it over loading that slow and resource hungry desktop app, if only for speed alone. But haven't encountered stuff that works on the desktop app, but not in the browser.
Are you user-agent spoofing?
That's what I had issues with, and what has been confirmed by multiple other people in this thread unless you spoof your user agent.
For the rest, slack works well enough on FF. Often faster than the desktop app because the latter is so resource hungry, it becomes slow.
Microsoft Teams doesn't make calls on Firefox, and their poor excuse of a desktop client for Linux forces me to use the web app on Chromium on my work computer.
Big shout out to Webex Teams, who's web app works flawlessly on both Chromium and Firefox but actually provides a better experience on Firefox because it's easier to make video calls Fullscreen
</rant>
It's not so weird considering the following:
1. Safari only works on Apple operating systems
2. Safari development has been seriously underfunded by Apple, since Apple wants to keep people in their walled garden app store, and web apps, by their very nature, can't be controlled by them.
I constantly report bugs and issues (with video and descriptive written copy) but some have persisted for months.
There's one where the CSS breaks if you open a lightbox modal and you can no longer click any buttons. Only way to fix it is to refresh the page.
They really don't seem to care at all.
Let me know when safari has 80% of the browser market share.
Even across mobile devices.
EDIT: Guess Chrome has the same marketshare as IE had in 2009 (if not a little more), iOS has 18%, everything else is a footnote.
However, for Chrome, it is possible without the walled garden (not to defend it or anything, but it is what it is).
On the iOS side, Apple had the default + locked browser choice. Now they can try to outspend each other with Google there.
The problem was that MS declared victory and stop developing IE, expecting to use their OS leverage to keep others out.
Google doesn't have that incentive, it has the incentive to make the browser as shiny as possible to keep the loyalty of web developers, so that they won't campaign in a way that will make fewer people download their ads delivery platform. They want people to use Chrome
If MS doesn't have the capability of maintaining their own browser, the chances of someone else entering the market is basically nil.
in other words, the chrome share of the iOS market would remain small.
So a product manager cannot just say that it works on chrome and forget about safari. Unless, somehow, google manages to boost chrome's iOS marketshare up and above safaris'!
Until they get large banners of "Please install the Chrome App to visit this web page"
A lot of sites already try to push you to use their app by using the same banner, unfortunately. Time will tell if this tactic will be successful.
Currently they just accept that "iPhone" browsers don't behave exactly like computer browsers, but if Google started a campaign saying "now you can get exactly the same behaviour on your phone" I'm sure it would influence them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32350109
Is the user, just some ordinary joe who isnt especially technical, going to switch banks to continue using FF or is he going to switch to Chrome and carry on his day? When google search, youtube, maps, and a bunch of third party sites all start recommending Chrome as well, what happens then?
Most websites have financial incentives to only support one browser, if they can get rid of WebKit they will, standards be damned.
I remember back when their enthusiasts here, on HN, urged Firefox users to keep an open mind that Google products breaking on Gecko regularly was just because they were so busy making the web awesome! It was strange back then, but also the product of another era of the Orange Site, you saw more of that tendency to identify with businesses such as Google than with other individual people.
Safari is different from Firefox for one simple reason: it's bundled to Apple products, which, regardless of their actual quality, are perceived as "luxury software" socially, and its userbase reflects that. And it's large enough that, for most companies actually trying to sell something, it makes sense to cater to.
Unless web admins take action and e.g. show an annoying popup about web freedom on iOS and Chrome.
It's not really a good argument. It should be about user choice. If Chrome is better than Safari, and I prefer it, I should be able to install it. OS locked down browsers is 1990s era MS anti-trust behaviour that significantly reduces overall competition.
Mobile is king - if Safari/webkit wasn't so locked down on iOS, we may have gotten even a completely different player who made a really good mobile browser. Apple's behaviour is nothing short of monopolistic and there is no good defence of it imo.
I would restrict my site to work with even simple browsers like Links.
What if we have a straightforward choice between an Apple monopoly and a Chrome monopoly?
I've seen major online shopping websites deploy code that meant firefox users couldn't add items to their shopping baskets, and then classify it as a low priority bug because there was a workaround - using chrome.
Whether Chrome is better or not is moot if developers design to only support it or offer a subpar experience when using other browsers
As the person you’re replying to said:
> I worry "works on Chrome" will be the only thing that gets solved for.
In other words: with the choice of using other browser engines on iOS there is a real possibility an even larger percentage of websites will work only on Chrome, meaning in the end user choice will be reduced because either you use Chromium (on mobile and desktop) or you cannot use anything.
Both situations suck. If Chrome weren’t so dominant then it would be a no brainer to advocate for more openness in iOS browser rendering engines, but as it stands it may be the case that not allowing the diversity on iOS promotes it in the aggregate. Apple’s approach, despite being done for the wrong reasons, might be what’s less detrimental for the web.
Then choose a different mobile OS.
> Apple's behaviour is nothing short of monopolistic and there is no good defence of it imo.
What do you actually propose then? Force them to release Safari for Android?
Chrome/blink has about 65% mobile market share, Safari has about 30%. If you are concerned with monopoly, how would enabling Blink on iOS do a single thing to displace the actual 600 pound gorilla in the room? Or is monopoly bad only if it's not *your* preferred choice?
Also, I think Site Isolation* doesn't work in FF Android as it does in FF Desktop. Firefox Android is categorically less secure than its Chromium counterparts.
* https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-si...
But you know what? Having AdBlock makes up for it 10 fold because I never have to see ads on mobile FF.
WebKit just has too many issues these days…
And if someday hopefully some of the anti-trust anti-competitive legal moats do get torn down, Google will be ready.
There are many ways Apple could region lock it and the source of the iPhone would probably the least likely.
They are getting billions from Google every year because Safari is the most used browser on iOS, and they will do what is necessary to make this last for as long as possible.
That's actually a good thing! If a substantial chunk of iOS users would use third-party browsers without JS JIT, then webdevs would be forced to better optimize their sites, because the perf ceiling would be lower on these browsers. This then would lead to stellar performance for those who stick with Safari which does have JIT! Kind of how using an M1 is so good today, because there's still a large number of Intel machines out there, so devs can't yet afford releasing software that's only usable on M1 from a cpu/energy point of view.
- Chrome (mind you, I don't have it installed, so this would send me to the AppStore)
- the "Google" app (again, not installed)
- Safari (which does not open Safari, rather an in-app WKWebView, so that Sundar can still milk your precious eyeballs)
- and finally at the bottom the "Default browser app" (this is what you want)
Of course, there's no setting to save this choice once and for all, so this is done each and every time you try opening a link in the YouTube app. Wait, actually, I'm 99% sure it would suddenly remember your choice if you had installed one of their browsers. From that moment they would duly open all links in Chrome/Google, without this annoying prompt.
I bet every Google app does this on iOS to get you install their crap. Disgusting practice.
To be clear, the one in GMail does have a "remember this" setting, and it doesn't work.
It's annoying, as websites always have worse UX than native apps.
Ironically the reason this dark pattern exists is because Apple refused to implement support for user-controlled URI handlers in the first place.
In 2021, Microsoft added the "no JIT" option to Edge for additional security [0], and here's the quote in their blog post:
>We see that most tests see no changes with JIT disabled. There are a few improvements and regressions, but most tests remain unchanged. Anecdotally, we find that users with JIT disabled rarely notice a difference in their daily browsing
[0] https://microsoftedge.github.io/edgevr/posts/Super-Duper-Sec...
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/07/apple-expands-commitm...
For example, I use Firefox as my main browser, and the lack of e.g. proper WebAuthN support on macOS has a much, much higher impact to me (and is making me consider switching), whereas I couldn't care less about e.g. WebUSB (which I do occasionally use, but I'm fine switching to Chrome for that use case).
To get an accurate picture, you'd have to somehow weigh all of these various standards and features in a way that not only accurately presents actual users, but also their relative importance (i.e. do websites trying to use something fail gracefully, or do I effectively have to use another browser to get achieve what I'm there for).
Some apps work around this by running JavaScript in an invisible WebKit view, but that approach has IPC overhead, so is probably only worth it for processes that interact with the UI and rest of the app infrequently (which is the opposite of what you‘d want from a JS engine interacting with the DOM).
a-Shell uses it for performant WASM execution of CLI executables, for example.
It'd be a mean spirited system to simply mark everything no-execute, always forever in any env. But that'd be distinct Apple flavored. Think Different, R.I.P..
Android is 70% worldwide market share. Chrome is 80%.
What's stopping you from showing us this good future? Where are these glorious web apps?
I've seen some reports of it also becoming available for iOS, but it seems to come and go between minor version upgrades and I'm not sure what the current status is.
Might have been a bug; might have been a feature available earlier than planned.
I know a blind guy who uses iPhones exclusively. How he manages to understand speech that fast is beyond me, but dedicating resources to accessibility when it's such a tiny market share is nice of them. But now that I think about it, are they being mandated under ADA? I honestly don't know.
But at least it was there.
Foreground window untitled notepad Editible text soi soi soi soi soi
"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI (...) The company does a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Active_Accessibility
It may well be that Apple is special, but in general, large software companies are motivated to care about accessibility primarily by the prospect of lucrative government contracts, for which there are usually mandated (by law) accessibility requirements. The problem for smaller companies is that accessibility doesn't scale down well - you need a lot of upfront investment (education, processes, testing etc) to get anywhere at all at first, but then all that remains useful for many more projects to come.
https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/5186#issuecomment-20...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381888
https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/pull/9933
I read somewhere that screen readers look for a flashing vertical line, to detect the caret position in systems that don't expose it via the OS's APIs. I can't find a reference for that right now, though.
I'd argue that accessibility helps everyone, and is thus a positive to ROI. You know those low contrast text/background sites everyone here complains about? Yep, those are not accessible, and probably end up with less readers as a result.
Firefox is barely alive because of mismanagement and Google’s dirty tactics. If one could give access to Firefox while blocking Chrome that would be ideal.
But then you've stooped to their level.
There are plenty of Chrome based alternatives that are not spyware of you are bothered by that.
Firefox won from IE. it successfully broke the IE monopoly and gained significant market share. Then, years later, chrome entered the stage and conquered both.
Then came Chrome.
Yes, Firefox usage peaked at about 20%: surely not negligible (didn't know anybody myself using it !). As for geographical distribution, I could only find this: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009... The data goes back up to 2009, which was quite a peak period for FF...
Sure FF has played an important role in the browsers war, but it hardly broke the monopoly, or at least it did not do it alone (Safari and Opera started to gain a significative share at the same time).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Browser_...
Firefox was growing constantly before Chrome started taking over.
Those people using Firefox weren't a small minority, and they weren't techies only.
You're trying to rewrite history from your small bubble.
Same on macos. Cannot use Firefox, because it does not work with Macpass.app [0] autotype - to my understanding because Firefox does not support (some) macos accessibility settings/features. For me the UX with Firefox is just the worst compared to competition. It's noticeably slower, uses much more CPU - thus makes the laptop hot, fans constantly kick in and drains battery. A lot of (all of it?) non-native GUI components makes the experience not good.
Arguably this could be old information, because my gripes are from many years ago, though I try it every year or so - but the situation is still way behind everyone else.
I support the Firefox's message, even donated to them couple of times, even though don't use their product, but at least on macos - experience is too bad for me to use it.
Personally, I am really happy with Safari but I am not convinced Firefox make a big dent.
Don't get me wrong, a really well-written PWA with fully cached assets is often almost at a native app experience level, but that's not usually the case with most mWeb implementations.
One thing I noticed about both Google and Facebook’s apps before deleting them was that in addition to using more battery, both were slower in their apps than using the web site. That was surprising but consistent & a large part of why I ditched them.
Well, I believe you can do that if you pay for YouTube Extortion Edition or whatever it's called. Which I used to do, until too many ads still came through and I got pissed off.
(Though note: if I got to a YouTube link through anything other than going directly to the site and searching, then it would open in the app. Which would then pause when I turned off the screen. Which was irritating. Fixed by disabling the YouTube app entirely. Life is much better now.)
Which performance concerns?
A lot of the examples I’ve seen were unexpected situations: e.g. if you look at every <img> with a poorly-tuned regex and someone uses data: URLs, it might be backtracking pathologically on orders of magnitude longer strings. There used to be an issue with each injected CSS file being stored separately - it was fixed years ago but there was a multi-year period where people would complain about Firefox being slow, you’d ask if they had AdBlock Plus installed, and the performance issue cleared up as soon as they disabled it – the problem was an extremely large style sheet multiplied by every open tab and iframe. It was bad enough that they officially called it out on the Mozilla blog:
https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...
The other thing to remember is that a browser developer has to support every user, not just the savvy ones. You might know to stick to certain more-trusted extension but the Safari developer’s threat model has to include someone’s grandfather installing McEaglePatriotGuardElite and blaming Apple when their iPad is slow or that injected code is exploitable. Apple characteristically chose to respond to that by reducing flexibility, which is certainly a valid decision but also one people can reasonably disagree with.
And what would those be? When this question is asked, people inevitably bring up Twitter as the shining example. And it's just horrendously bad.
Also, very simple ;) I mean, UI-wise and interaction-wise
Sounds amazing.
I think that within a more tech-aware demographic, they'll see more people use Chrome.
edit: and I'm at 13% remaining (blame TikTok), so not like I just woke up with a full charge.
I can't count how many times I just wanted to scroll up and ended up refreshing the page.
(I'm not aiming that comment at you, but rather at developers making software less and less configurable)
Not that I would want it, myself, since my current counter is 48 tabs and I don't want a bunch more hit regions when I'm thumb-browsing.
Since this is open source, everybody should be able to adjust the UI to their liking. However, there are too many obstacles for this to be a valid option. What would be needed to make this possible? I think Firefox could become much more popular if the users could collaborate easily on designing the interface.
What you could maybe do is do reproducible builds, staple the notarised x509 on it afterwards. Then you can 'prove' it is the same app, but still have the signed version in distribution.
It is not widely used, but it's quite impressive. I feel this is the time for a better browser for the masses. I am not sure Google + Mozilla are the right actors to bring it alive.
Firefox, I can see them having one in a somewhat working state but probably not completely ready without needing some work to polish it.
Ugh, imagine being an engineer on the project if it's the latter. At a company strategy level, it may be wise to put resources into having this ready to go. [1] At an individual level, putting tons of effort into something like this with less than average hopes of launching seems extremely demotivating (and doesn't look so hot for "impact" in perf either).
I wonder how much effort it is combine the iOS UI layer and the non-iOS blink layer. I'm terrible at estimating effort even for my own projects so it's hard to speculate.
[1] A bit less wise to do speculative projects while simultaneously laying off 12,000 people with no warning.
OTOH, no users means no bugs.
It would be more motivating for me if in the 95% event that Apple rejects it from the app store, a PR disaster can be launched against Apple for it, and instructions are published to install it on a jailbroken phone.
Is your hope that the exploit for the jailbreak is the one and only flaw? :)
Sideloading isn't a solution because Apple artificially crippled it to make it only useful for demoing and testing apps, not as a secondary install method.
I mean, i could understand if you were working on some sort of research prototype that might fail, or otherwise something new and unique, but just porting an existing browser engine hardly seems to be instrinsically exciting in and of itself, so what would the motivation be?
Have you ever put 6-18 months of your life into a project that got canned? If you haven't, I'm not sure you should make that kind of statement without having actual experience knowing what that's like.
On a less cynical tone, 6-18 months on a project, then we change company, or get fired, or the company shuts down for good. Some of my startup customers pivoted or shut down. I got paid, not my problem.
Anyway, it's better to work on successful projects. They expand the business.
It’s a balance. I more-or-less learned the first time that I needed to be getting more out of it than the “release success”; nowadays I’d codify a specific part of that as “always carve out the time to improve your skills as part of the project.”
I’m teaching the computer how to do something, at the same time I’m teaching myself how to do it.
That said, when that’s not possible - At least one project had at least a few weeks (it’s been awhile) of stupid wrestling with undocumented Xcode CLI internals. That was nearly completely wasted time. It sucked then, and it (dilutedly) sucks now.
A project I put years of my life into got killed off in a merger and it’s still the most demoralizing event of my career.
Careful not to imply that other's don't. I'm pretty passionate about what I build, but cancellation is a fact of life. Doesn't mean it wasn't fun to do the building. One of my projects at Microsoft was something that was always destined to actually be sold by hardware partners, and the hardware partners released devices that were far, far too expensive so it flopped and the whole thing was canned. But we made an excellent product that won some awards, and frankly, knowing we killed it on the software side is good enough for me.
Kind of a stretch, but all of my hobby projects are like this. I have spent years on a TUI library for Swift, without any intention of releasing it. I do it to understand how terminals and layout systems work. In this case I am more motivated by the knowledge gain and experimentation than actually having others use the product.
I know that's the result of multiple app stores if a trusted entity can't/won't police them.
I just know the idiots like Verizon will start preloading their own App Store on the phone and make a mess of things with all kinds of garbage.
I’m shocked at the crap that is preloaded onto android phones whenever I see one.
These browsers all compile and work on macOS. Getting them to work on iOS involves lots of fiddly details like forcing the browsers into single-process mode, integrating it with their existing mobile UI, etc
but core technologies like rendering won't be much different
I'd even say that shipped projects usually are less interesting because they're filled with mundane but necessary tasks and bugs, dragged by compatibility.
Google releases Chrome in order to show you ads.
I think this is a small share
Either way, monopoly or oligopoly can also have salutary effects. Flash was a complete blight on the Web and all it took was Apple saying “no, we aren’t going to support that” and it disappeared practically overnight. Chrome’s been similarly effective in pushing forward some basic security measures. Hard to imagine this happening in a world of 50 different browsers with roughly equal market share.
That could happen, but alternatively we could get Browser War III¹, in which Apple reintroduces an extremely competitive Safari for Windows in order to counteract the Blink (Chrome, Edge) hegemony. That would not be great news for Firefox, though.
I'd love to see "Cross-platform Software Dev"-era Apple throw their hat back into the ring, but putting Safari on other platforms is a big commitment if you want to take it seriously.
When Safari for Windows was still a thing, Apple actually ported a good chunk of Cocoa along with it to support it, including text rendering. This meant that while it was still supported, Safari for Windows had some of the nicest looking text of any Windows web browser.
Based on Apple's more recent Windows releases which are built around WinUI, if they were to bring back Safari for Windows they'd probably take a more native approach, though.
And they are going to compete against Google's search, gmail, youtube (and their respective apps forcing chrome) exactly how?
But Apple has been quietly working on a search backup plan for many years, and they've been in the email business for longer than Google's existed. (I migrated a couple decades worth of email from Google Workspace last year, and I haven't regretted it so far.) I don't think building a YouTube competitor would be interesting for them.
Which remains there when people switch to Chrome
> But Apple has been quietly working on a search backup plan for many years, and they've been in the email business for longer than Google's existed
Ah yes. They will just flip on the non-existent rumored Google-level search and the non-existent public email service to take on Google monopoly in search and email.
Fewer than 5% of iOS users will switch to Chrome as their dedicated browser. (In-app browsers will continue to be WebKit.)
> They will just flip on the non-existent rumored Google-level search…
Just like the flipped on the M1 after a long gestation period, exactly. It was 2015 when Applebot was first noticed crawling the web. A couple hundred employees with Apple's resources can do a lot in 7 years.
> …and the non-existent public email service…
iCloud Mail is Apple's public email services, and very few companies hosting email at Apple scale — iCloud has over a billion active users. If you have access to a Mac or Windows PC (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283), you can set it up today. iCloud+ adds support for custom email domains.
Back then the decrease in quality was by way of not developing new features, or developing them in a quirky way, that was all well form them because they didn't want web applications to displace native Windows applications.
The decrease in quality you may see from Google may come in privacy, they'll be able to tighten the surveillance as much as they want once no website you care about works outside of Chrome and you can't switch.
Imagine now the network effects and a browser that actually keeps up to date, they'll just have won, period.
Releasing it on iOS would be huge. No more almost-functional Safari ad blockers with multiple pricing tiers! No more all-or-nothing JavaScript toggle button!
Honestly, the only thing keeping me from iOS is its inability to run a browser with a decent extensions ecosystem.
(Some obviously work better than others)
But on the other hand, if you care about your privacy, why would you trust a third party to intercept all of your web traffic?
uBlock Origin is free and open source, and its code is thoroughly reviewed by many contributors every release. I trust uBlock Origin over a filtering mechanism built into a closed source browser such as Safari.
But did you personally download the open source version review the code and install it?
Yes, I have personally downloaded the uBlock Origin source code. I have also reviewed the code and suggested improvements. However, I don't even need to download the code to realize the benefits of uBlock Origin being free and open source. Even if I hadn't downloaded the code, there are many other users and contributors who have reviewed the code, and you can confirm this by taking a simple look at the activity in the GitHub repos.
What are you talking about? You are the one who accused other developers of that. Let me quote you again:
> But on the other hand, if you care about your privacy, why would you trust a third party to intercept all of your web traffic?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34699213
My point is that because uBlock Origin is free and open source, anyone can see that it is not tracking users maliciously. On the other hand, Safari is closed source, so your FUD would be more applicable to Safari. There is no easy way for users to verify how a closed source browser such as Safari implements its content blocking. In terms of transparency, uBlock Origin is strictly superior to Safari.
Until you use an app with a web view…
But tell me what can’t I block in your experience with 1Blocker on Safari?
If we are comparing ad blocking extensions. We know that there is no possible method for a third party ad blocker on iOS to intercept your traffic.
You’re comparing an ad blocker to a browser.
The fact is that your ad blocking extension won’t work at all within embedded web views.
We know for a fact that a third party ad blocking extension can not intercept your web browsing history on iOS whether it is open source or closed sourced. It has no access to your web browsing history.
Your assurance comes from open source, mine comes from knowing that my third party as blocker doesn’t have any access to my web browsing.
You have been spreading FUD about fully-featured content blocking extensions like uBlock Origin, which is not a very good argument because Safari itself is closed source and its behavior is opaque. A combination of Firefox + uBlock Origin is fully free and open source, and its behavior is fully and easily verifiable. It is absurd for you to criticize combinations such as Firefox + uBlock Origin when the combination of Safari + a Safari-compatible content blocking extension is clearly less transparent due to Safari being closed source.
Apple's anti-competitive App Store restrictions are preventing the superior combination of Firefox + uBlock Origin from existing on iOS. Fortunately, regulations will soon make some of Apple's anti-competitive restrictions illegal in some major markets.
uBlock Origin not being able to protect web views on iOS is yet another restriction imposed by Apple. If browsers on iOS were able to supply web views to other apps and activate extensions in those apps, as the Custom Tabs feature works on Android, uBlock Origin would have no issues blocking content in iOS web views. Don't blame uBlock Origin for a restriction that Apple created.
What you meant to say: Chrome implements its own non-standards against strenuous objections if both Firefox and Safari.
I guess in your world "every other browser" is Chrome. And, sure enough, there are some parts of the API that are only implemented by Chromium-only browsers, and are not implemented by either Safari or Firefox.
So, what other untruths you're going to tell us?
Viewport units have been around for a decade now, and Safari still can't get them right.
For example:
Let's say we want to make a chat window, where a user can type in an input field at the bottom and little message bubbles appear above. Sounds like a job for flexbox and viewport units.
Okay, we'll have one flexbox div container with it's children being the chat messages and the input which get aligned to the bottom. Now we'll position the container so it takes up the full page using viewport units (e.g. take up 100% of the viewport's width, and take up 100% of the viewport's height).
Oh no! When the user scrolled through the messages, the browser's tab bar appeared and instead of calculating that 100% of the viewport is 100% of the viewport, the viewport isn't being updated, and now the input field has been scrolled out of the page.
That's okay, we'll just use the new dynamic viewport units which specifically account for the problem that Safari had invented, and which only took 8 years to come out.
Okay looks good, time to send a message.
Oh no! When tapping on the field input, now the keyboard covers up field so we can't see what we're typing.
>_<
Good work Safari... Real good work...
When I say I want something to take up 100% of the viewport, I mean 100% of the viewport.
It's far from just the render engine that's being constrained. The whole virtual machine is restricted. The DOM, the js engine, the wasm engine, anything at all running or touching web code is locked the heck down.
There's a couple places browsers can add or supplant web platform features, but it largely prevents browsers from doing much at all to add to the web platform in any way.
In the rendering case, there's always work on css features & especially tuning that the browsers are up to. Just being faster, lighter weight, having more or better tuning is a great capability, a place where more than one small in-group should be able to experiment & improve & explore.
It is unclear whether this would still even be the case.
My understanding is that it's a _policy_ limitation preventing third party browsers on iOS. But there's also iOS security policies preventing JIT to have a fast browser.
I cannot imagine Apple opening up JIT-capabilities to all developers on the app store. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't relax this at all. Perhaps they will they grant entitlements for JIT to a select few.
The security argument to not allow a JIT is that mapping code segments as executable+writeable opens up a lot of interesting attack vectors, and therefore allowing JIT weakens security. This is true of course, but the argument is a bit dubious for a few reasons. The first of which is that the OS is supposed to have sandboxing mechanisms that don't allow escape from the sandbox even if something goes wrong, and therefore prohibiting a JIT shouldn't be required in the first place. Furthermore WebKit itself has a JIT (whatever Apple calls their JS implementation), so iOS is already vulnerable to these kinds of issues in some sense. Finally, in general you can write and link in arbitrary code into your program (in read-only sections of memory), so attackers can already write exploits in C/C++/asm/whatever.
Obviously Apple needs special consideration for WebKit itself since the WebKit rendering engine is linked into a ton of applications, so a security issue in WebKit is a major problem because it affects many programs on the phone, including a lot of first party applications. But this wouldn't be the case with a third-party iOS browser, since even if Apple allows you to install a third party browser, they're not going to allow you to replace the system webview implementation with a third party one. Therefore a bug or security problem in Firefox/Chrome/whatever should be limited to just that app, and wouldn't have the same scope as a WebKit vulnerability.
Apple is notoriously restrictive so maybe they won't change their policies. On the other hand I think the current technical argument for not allowing third party programs to have JIT code is pretty weak, so I could definitely see a different decision being made at some point in time, especially if there was pressure from the legal team (e.g. due to things like EU anti-trust regulations).
Edit: in fact, you can’t even use the in-process UIWebView any more - App Store doesn’t accept submissions with them since 2020 https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=edwud51q
The replacement WKWebView enables JIT because it’s in a separate process, with the view painted back into your app.
I don't want to be slanted in only one direction, so let me share the other side of the coin: in the new Web Extensions spec that Google has built from the ground-up by fiat (mv3), they too ban dynamic code of any kind: all code must be built in to the extension. And the extension can't be any kind of virtual machine, can't execute any kind of programmatic system within itself. Because Google too is a murderous shitty coward that hates the world, that hates potential, that wants to limit freedom, that curbs what is possible, under exactly the same premises of being for our security, but which also obstructs massive classes of very basic very simple very generic software that poses a threat to these sizable corporations ability to stay in absolute control. Generally I'm pretty ok with Google's behavior, but this particular vicious turn of events deeply deeply against the web & possibility makes me lower them to the same low dog piece-of-shit fuckwad coward shitsmear con-man that I have long seen as a fairly distinclty Apple low lying cowardice. For your protection is a vicious piece of shit lie, and end of basic liberty. Shame, you vicious piece of shit fucks, shame!! You call it security, but you are just not willing to actually do the work to understand or look at & investigate: you make an easy fiat rule that excludes countless valid & good uses, because it makes your life easy & benefits your systems of control, lowers user-agency. It's directly agains the end-user, and yet they say it's for our benefit: this is the worst kind of lie.
- Push notifications
- Offline storage that doesn't disappear after 7 days.
In other words it could actually make "PWAs" viable for a lot of use cases.
If you personally don't want to use a feature, that's fine, but you're putting out a statement like that as if no one should be allowed to use that feature because some devs tend to use it for spam. It just takes like 2 or 3 clicks to remove rights of notification from a specific app, so it's not a big deal either way.
- Web USB
- Web NFC
- Web Notifications
- Web Midi
- Offline Storage
- Gryo, Accelerometer, Magneto, Proximity
- Vibration feedback
If all you want is an app for your users to use, you won't pay a dime outside of the developer fee. If you want people to discover your app in the app store, download it, and then pay you then it's a 30% cut.
Anyway nowadays apps are even built with web technologies (such as React Native), would just be simpler to have only the web version, a single codebase that can be used with an iOS device, an Android device, a PC, a smartwatch, a TV, whatever. Distributing an app is a pain, especially for iOS, you have to submit it for review, Apple has to approve it, you cannot do certain things, why? I get that on Android is simpler, just install the APK and done, but unfortunately there are a ton of iOS devices out there.
Oh. And Web Midi? The moment Firefox implemented it they discovered its used for fingerprinting, and Chrome allows it by default: https://twitter.com/denschub/status/1582730985778556931
WebGPU is key. Apple has been dragging their feet here while their AR / ML teams catch up to the rest of the industry.
8thwall (https://www.8thwall.com/projects) has some pretty good demos of completely cross-platform AR/VR stuff. All this gets a ton better if iOS somehow supports WebGPU.
And then there is user fingerprinting and ads stuff. A ton of fingerprints today are from CSS quirks and the like. Renderers can favor or disfavor these things.
Basically anything that Apple tries to ban for anti-competitive reasons. Once this blocker is removed, no one will care about Apple bans anymore.
Opus support:
Firefox: 2012
Chrome: 2014
Safari: Unsupported
Firefox: Oct 2021
Chrome: Aug 2022
Safari: Oct 2022 (but incomplete and buggy)
Firefox: 2019
Chrome: 2018
Safari: Unsupported
Firefox: 2019
Chrome: 2014
Safari: 2022
Firefox: 2014
Chrome: 2013
Safari: 2022
Firefox: 2009
Chrome: 2010
Safari: Unsupported
Firefox: 2017
Chrome: 2017
Safari: 2019
I agree it's annoying on occasion.
This is provably false though. For example, they support Opus bitstreams either through WebRTC (because it's required) or inside their own buggy special-snowflake .caf container (so they do support the more "expensive" encoding/decoding part of Opus that could benefit from hardware acceleration), but they don't support Opus audio files (that is, the '.opus' Vorbis container which everyone uses to hold Opus audio, which is the "easy" part of supporting Opus and doesn't benefit from having hardware acceleration because there's nothing to accelerate there).
And they control their own hardware for how many years now? Their A4 silicon first appeared in 2010; they could have easily added whatever hardware acceleration they want to, but they chose not to.
Frankly I'm not sure what their motivations are. I guess they just don't care?
That includes chat service interoperability, allowing app side loading and alternative app stores, .... and a mandate to not restrict any significant functionality to first party only solutions, like JITs on iOS.
So this will become reality soon, at least in the EU.
The interesting thing will be if Apple opens up globally, or if they restrict this regionally.
ps: companies will definitely delay and fight opening up however they can, but the regulation at least avoids many problems that GDPR had and should be easier to enforce.
I don't think that was table stakes for SMS, iMessage or RCS. "Encryption", with the caveat that all first-world law enforcement can peek inside if they want, is not meaningful. Sorry.
Most of the code needed is still in Gecko's repo at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/uikit but probably doesn't build anymore. Would not be surprising if someone had an up to date branch in a private tree somewhere though...
[0] https://techhq.com/2022/12/apple-bows-to-eu-demands-with-pla...
Payments is going to be a key enabler - web2 or web3.
why is that a feature and not a drawback?
its not meant for you. its meant for mobile-only, non-tech-savvy people. Think Asia or even the American Midwest.
Not for the HN crowd TBH.
God damnit it's my device.
It's not cheap to swap ecosystems
I mean the devices change year to year but are people seriously finding themselves surprised by what iPhone can do but Android can't or vice versa?
If we were talking about a college tuition loan or a mortgage then yeah I'd say `not able to make a truly informed decision about this at the time` but this is like the lowest stakes decision possible no?
> It's not cheap to swap ecosystems
Is that true? Seems like there is always a nearly free phone deal out there and your network will probably migrate everything for you anyway.
Most of the studios participate in MoviesAnywhere meaning a movie purchased on iTunes automatically shows up in your Amazon, Google, Vudu, etc library.
How many apps that you purchased that have an Android equivalent aren’t based on cross platform subscriptions?
If I were to move to iPhone now, I'd have to spend at least a hundred bucks finding and buying alternative apps.
Why are you giving examples where all of the terms are explained completely, up front, by law?
Most users aren’t complaining about any “walled garden”
The bottom line is that there is no open phone platform out there that even remotely provides feature parity with Android or iOS. Anything you do is going to be a trade off, and for some people, there is no way to satisfy 100% of their needs and wants. That doesn't mean we aren't allowed to complain about the bits that can't be satisfied.
If you don't know by now that on iOS devices all the browsers are running the same engine under the hood, especially on a tech site like HN, then there isn't much hope for you.
For example, my Pixel 4 just fell out of Google's 3-year support period, so I no longer get security updates. I would be completely happy to run LineageOS or some other alternative that would extend the life of the phone with regular updates, but I can't if I still want to be able to use Google Pay and other apps that require the phone to pass SafetyNet. Those sorts of apps are a part of my day-to-day, so being unable to use them would be a showstopper. (I've read various things about tricking apps into believing the phone passes SafetyNet, but none of the methods seem particularly reliable, and for every user who says it works, there's another person who couldn't get it to work.)
So sure, it is technically possible for me to treat the phone as "open" and run whatever OS image on it I want, but then I become restricted in other ways as to what I can do on it. Maybe you don't care about being able to pay for things using your phone (etc.); that's fine. But I do, and I consider it a critical feature these days.
They don't have to do that though.
Instead, they can wait for the EU laws to force Apple to allow them to do what they want, with their device that they own.
Just imagine that type of reasoning applied to other parts of life, like politics, work, interpersonal relationships... "Love it, change it, or leave it" has three components, not two.
Clearly, then, there is some line that we must draw where people are buying something they think they want and yet should still get to have full access to, and I don't see why it would correlate with Apple vs. Google.
In my case, I barely wanted a phone: I want a good camera attached to a good touch screen; I have requirements past that largely dictated by size, weight, and durability. That's the device I am looking for.
The devices which satisfy my needs are mostly from Apple or Samsung, both of whom lock down their devices. (Can I install an alternative browser on a Samsung Android device? Sure. But is it my device? No. No it is not and it has never been, by far. Samsung is only ever so slightly better than Apple with respect to that shit.)
The reality is: every device should be open. It shouldn't be some trade-off in the space where you don't get to have a device with any of the other key properties you want just because it is always a better business model to build a walled garden and then shill your services, charge a usage tax, or run advertisements.
That said, in a world where it is allowed to build closed devices, and it is some random set of tradeoffs that we all have to tolerate, we have to get to complain about it, because then it is just yet another property of the device, and we get to complain about all of the shitty decisions we had to put up with, whether that's the pricing, the functionality, the quality, the experience, the "tactile feel"... or whether it is open or not.
So like, I don't really see the framework in which this one axis is something where people don't get to complain because "they should have gotten some other random shitty device that isn't at all what you wanted but was open"... this seems to just be some broken narrative--mostly pitched by people who clearly aren't also tracking the anti-trust work against Google and haven't been a part of the fight to jailbreak all of the random locked down Android devices--pitched by people who seem to just like locked down stuff and Apple's puritanical control over morality :(.
I just wish their shitty decisions didn't affect me. Unfortunately they do.
This whole thing feels like a lobbying push, and to be frank, I am more worried about the monied interests who might have bought this kind of lawmaking and what their end game is.
As an aside, for anyone interested in WebAssembly and the future of gaming in the browser - my team and I at Wonder Interactive are bringing the full power of native gaming to the web. We're building out a platform and suite of tools that allows developers to publish, host, share, and monetize their games directly to their players online, without any middlemen.
The current focus is on the Unreal Engine (4.24, 4.27) and UE5 support which is coming later this year. Other engines will follow such as Unity, Godot, Open 3D Engine, and custom engines we can provide porting for on our paid plans. We're building out a WebGPU backend for UE5, to really enable high end desktop and console quality games in HTML5. The goal is to free developers from storefronts that charge a 30% tax on distribution.
Further reading, with demos attached:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/14/apple-will-reportedly-allo...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-appl...
> To help protect against unsafe apps, Apple is discussing the idea of mandating certain security requirements even if software is distributed outside its store. Such apps also may need to be verified by Apple — a process that could carry a fee. Within the App Store, Apple takes a 15% to 30% cut of revenue.
Where you're getting these numbers from? Doesn't sound right to me, but maybe I just have a biased sample. I'd guesstimate that 50% if not more of my friends with macOS run Chrome, small percentage (2 or 3) runs Firefox and the rest Safari.
Most people I know with Macs have at least two browsers installed, but then most people with Macs I know are fairly tech savvy.
I mean, that's a huge draw in the consumer space for mac/ios. Remember the scale were at here. Something like 250,000,000 ios devices a YEAR.
Once other browsers are allowed on iOS, it's possible more users will migrate on both desktop & mobile to Chrome/FF.
As an example, Safari is the only choice if you don’t want to give more marketshare to Chromium but also need to programatically control or retrieve information from your browser. Firefox has no AppleScript support, which disqualifies it immediately.
When it was available for Windows, nobody used it, except web developers who wanted their website to work on Macs, but didn't have a Mac to test with.
These days with hidpi screens the difference between font rendering between windows and Mac is negligible though. So that's not a factor anymore.
You mean like all of the developers who aren’t creating native apps on Android and are creating PWAs?
There are just three issues with this narrative:
1. It came out in the Epic trial that 80% of all app revenue is coming from games.
2. Most of the other revenue derived from the App Store is coming from services where no one pays through the App Store
3. Large companies have already abandoned in app purchases like Spotify and Netflix
I'm not sure I understand your wording right... Are you saying that devs creating PWAs are "free?" Because it's well-known that PWAs has been stunted by Apple and Google. The technology is well behind its potential. PWAs could do significantly more if they had better access to system APIs.
In the history of computing there has never been a cross platform general purpose GUI framework that didn’t suck.
Not to mention most Android devices in the wild are low end and don’t handle complex web pages well
What conspiracy?
They have huge economic disincentives to further PWAs - there is no need for any conspiracy.
In the first presentation of the iPhone, Steve Jobs laid out a vision where the smartphone would run web apps, using fundamental web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS). He quickly backtracked when he realised Apple could impose a 30% tax on transactions in the platform.
> Maybe web technologies just aren’t as good as native?
No one said they are, but that's no excuse to drag your feet in implementing simple things like push notifications.
> In the history of computing there has never been a cross platform general purpose GUI framework that didn’t suck.
What GUI framework? I barely even know what we are talking about anymore. You don't need one with PWA - again, you're using fundamental web technologies, and enabling them to make system calls.
> Not to mention most Android devices in the wild are low end and don’t handle complex web pages well
So that's another excuse to not further PWAs, huh?
Let me ask you this then. Name one cross platform framework that wasn’t meant to build command line tools that hasn’t sucked?
QT? Java Spring? React Native? Electron?
> In the first presentation of the iPhone, Steve Jobs laid out a vision where the smartphone would run web apps, using fundamental web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS). He quickly backtracked when he realised Apple could impose a 30% tax on transactions in the platform.
He “backtracked” because his “sweet solution” wasn’t good and everyone wanted native apps and web apps were called “a shit sandwich” by developers.
Do you know the history of creating “applications” using “web technologies”? They failed for RIM, Microsoft, and Palm. Web apps suck not to mention the clusterfuck of the front end ecosystem.
Every single platform that went down the “we can do great web apps” backtracked. They have never been good enough.
> So that's another excuse to not further PWAs, huh?
You mean making an app that’s actually performant on the majority of phones out there?
Sure, the 30% cut of all sales was just a sweet coincidence.
> You mean making an app that’s actually performant on the majority of phones out there?
Twitter and Uber have PWAs for countries where low-end devices are the majority of phones.
> They have never been good enough.
Complete bollocks, there are plenty of excellent web apps out there, and it's one of the most important mechanisms for software delivery nowadays, in both the enterprise and consumer spaces. You are a fundamentalist and there is no point discussing anything here anymore
Besides that, most of the biggest players like Netflix and Spotify don’t even allow in app purchases.
Where are all of the great web apps for mobile? Have you tried using any of these web apps on Firefox for Android or is Firefox also involved in the conspiracy?
No one is clamoring for cross platform web apps accept web developers who want to foster a shitty Electron like experience on mobile.
And look at all of the server side work that Uber had to do.
https://www.uber.com/blog/m-uber/
And this wasn’t done to avoid the “30% tax” since Uber doesn’t use in app purchases. You do have Apple Pay as an option. But that’s a standard credit card transaction.
It is not well-known. It is well-believed.
I don't believe Apple has intentionally crippled Safari just to prop up their native platform. Google are the ones who invented the PWA buzzword and spend all their devrel effort on pushing. It's hard to believe they would also try and hamper that.
Once you deny it access, you have to go into settings to change it - just like any other app.
How much money do you think Apple makes when the same probably free website is a free app?
Not every website I visit needs to know my location.
Not every website with a map needs access to my location.
Only websites I specifically allow to access my location should have access.
On the iPhone and specifically safari I've never had an issue or a steep learning curve to showing someone how to long press the reader view (AA) in the url then select _allow location_ or whatever.
I wonder if you sample all had something in common. Did they not regularly use this web app? Was this an event specific web app? If so it would be nice if the web app detected mobile browser by user agent and displayed instructions for activating location. Might help reduce confusion.
There’s pretty much no reason why 99.999% of any apps in existence need my precise location.
It’s not broken at all.
I think any complaint directed towards Apple's development on Safari can also be directed towards their actual native platform. Terrible/non-existent documentation, frequently breaking APIs, and a completely hostile app store and bug reporting/feedback process.
Just look at how reviled Electron is compared to native applications.
A couple of years ago I worked on an app that ran on 5 platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, ChromeOS). Initially we used Phonegap and Electron but then we created our own native wrapper that used the OS webview.
Our macOS app went from 100MB to 5MB of download size and the memory usage also went down considerably. IIRC correctly it consumed like 15MB of memory.
It certainly didn't look native but for our use case (education) that was not an issue. We were able to target 5 platforms with a very small team and the GUI was a single codebase made with InfernoJS and MobX.
https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/
Facebook moved away from cross platform web based frameworks for its apps years ago.
Microsoft’s mobile and desktop apps (besides Teams which also sucks and VSCode which is pretty good) are not using web frameworks.
And most apps that would be suitable for PWAs are in fact free. How would Apple or Google benefit financially?
Besides most of the App Stores’s revenue comes from games
What happens when either Apple or Google introduce a new feature to their native platform?
I would definitely not use the ElectronJS Slack app if I had a choice.
People prefer Electron because it gives them a consistent environment across operating systems, OS versions/update patch numbers, browser versions etc.
If you write your app to work in all possible combinations of the above - like you'd write a web page - you can use OS web view.
But not everybody wants to do that because it's not as straight forward as just writing your app and being able to fully rely on your environment. Perhaps you actually need features that aren't universally available in the OS web view yet, and performance degradation because of polyfills is not acceptable.
Also, OS web view is usually locked down more than Electron. It's basically a browser without the UI around it. Then you need to hack your own native bridge instead of just using whatever Electron made. I guarantee your version is going to be worse, you simply don't have the combined resources of the Electron open source project.
People don’t prefer an application that takes up more memory, drains battery life and that’s not consistent with their other apps. Developers may prefer it.
How many users are switching back and forth between Windows and Macs?
The same applies in the other direction. When I was a Windows user, I hated the iTunes interface because it felt like a bad Mac port. I was a former Mac (and current) Mac user so I could tell.
Even before that, the Windows QuickTime Player felt like a bad port.
Software development is not just about the users. Many Electron apps are single dev ventures. It's not easy to maintain multiple different platform specific apps even for a large enterprise. The larger the app the more difficult it becomes.
And this says a lot about why people prefer commercial alternatives.
Except for all those popular Electron apps with lock-in effects, like Discord and Slack.
There are no alternatives to the Slack ElectronJS Desktop app. That's the whole point: they don't want to maintain native apps. And they don't open their API to let others do it, I guess because that may hurt their lock-in benefits.
I don't notice any issues with Obsidian which I use every day.
Isn't the whole point of PWAs that they're easy because they're just web apps? If you start using system/OS specific APIs you lose all of the benefits except for the instant install time.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...
As the article implies, very likely due to regulatory pressure building up. And that tells you everything you need to know about Apple's stance on the web: they hate it, as they hate anything that is interoperable and uncontrollable. They'll starve the web to the maximum they can get away with and now that maximum is reducing, hopefully.
As for Firefox, as much as I sentimentally align with it and still use it, it's a dead browser. I have access to some analytics of websites with a billion+ views/year and it doesn't even show up. It has like 0.5% market share on mobile.
They're irrelevant in this iteration of the browser wars.
User-Agent headers are mandatory; and it would be counterproductive for everybody, including Mozilla, if Firefox were sending invalid User-Agent headers.
UA switcher is a pretty popular addon in the Mozilla ecosystem. So it may well be more popular than UA stats alone can surmise. (Though probably not enough to matter to businesses too lazy to test anything besides the top two.)
I didn't think that that blocked the user-agent header. But I guess I could be wrong.
No idea how this wasn’t immediately quashed by regulation. It’s a 15 year long version of the M$ antitrust lawsuit.
The reason it’s not blocked is probably because Apple browser seems close enough to “the web” as we know it.
The web should be a lot more advanced today than it is, and Apple is to blame for that. Blocking progress for over a decade.
And I get it, most of us don't like push notifications, and on the web even more so. But lack of push notification support is the one thing that was forcing a lot of developers from just doing a decent progressive web app and instead forcing them into the App Store. I'm interested to see the growth in PWAs once iOS finally supports web push.
And just to try to head off the "but native apps are better" arguments in advance: yes, they can be, but I hate having to download apps from a company that I'll have a very short-term relationship with (or sometimes even a longer relationship). E.g. I recall.going to a charity event and having to download a (pretty poor) app for their silent auction. Only reason it needed to be an app instead of a website was to send pushes about being outbid, the auction ending, etc
The choice isn't Apple's walled garden OR Google's web dominance.
The choice is: Apple makes a broken browser with no available substitutes to make more money off the app store, OR they will need to actually invest in their browser and compete with Google.
The EU has wisely decided that Apple forcing people to use a broken browser is anti-consumer.
So now, Apple will need to compete in the browser space as well.
It's amazing how fast Apple has started to fix it's many problems in Safari all of a sudden, <sarcasm>I wonder what the reason could be...</sarcasm>
The mistake here is seeing only one company abusing its market position when it’s really two. While I don’t like how Apple handled this — Firefox deserved better — it’s also the case that Google used their dominant positions in search, email, maps, and video to promote Chrome. I’d be a lot more comfortable allowing Chrome on iOS if it was accompanied by regulatory action banning that and requiring Google to do real QA on other browsers and not use proprietary Chrome APIs on their production sites, which held back Firefox and Safari performance on YouTube for ages because they were using the web components standard instead.
All the browsers bar Safari.
> you’ll see a significant performance or battery life win by dropping Chrome, which the average user will appreciate a lot more than not having WebMIDI or sites nagging them to enable push notifications.
I think the average user would much rather have a browser that follows web standards.
Why?
Because 90% of the apps on the app store could just be websites instead.
And what difference does that make?
Apple can't take a 30% cut off a website.
> I’d be a lot more comfortable allowing Chrome on iOS if it was accompanied by regulatory action banning that and requiring Google to do real QA on other browsers and not use proprietary Chrome APIs on their production sites, which held back Firefox and Safari performance on YouTube for ages because they were using the web components standard instead.
This has nothing to do with Chrome, or allowing Chrome on Safari. It has everything to do with the developers at youtube not updating their own service. Any regulations/QA would need to lie with the youtube team, not the chrome team. iOS users shouldn't have to suffer being locked to a historically bad browser because of it.
> I think the average user would much rather have a browser that follows web standards.
Which specific unimplemented standards are preventing your work? I’ve opened plenty of bugs in all of the major browsers and it’s decidedly not the case that they’re mostly Safari.
Last year’s interoperability push ended with a noticeable lag for Chrome:
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable
> This has nothing to do with Chrome, or allowing Chrome on Safari. It has everything to do with the developers at youtube not updating their own service.
Yes, we know. Now think about whether it’s possible that working at the same company might make them less quick to prioritize work which undercuts a key selling point their company spent billions marketing. It’s not like the YouTube developers didn’t notice the big effort to put Chrome banners all over the site was a management priority.
Anyone who remembers how Microsoft products used to have weird bugs when used in non-IE browsers knows how that could end.
Still no proper Opus support, where it was available in Firefox 10 years ago.
Also bugs. My experience is that it's a common occurrence that I make a change, and it works correctly in Firefox and Chrome, but it breaks in Safari and I need a workaround just for it.
This will just cement the Chromium dominance and the EU has made that worse.
Firefox is no where near competitive enough to unseat Chrome or Safari.
Not necessarily.
Just look at how well Safari has started doing all of a sudden in the Interop 2022 report: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022
Safari went from worst to best in cross-browser issues.
The fact of the matter is, the year that Apple realised that they weren't going to be able to escape or hold up the EU's coming regulations to open iOS to other browsers, Safari suddenly became important again.
Why would they do this if they were just going to concede the web to Google?
The whole thing - web browsers, web servers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc - is so incredibly stupid, from a regular person's point of view. Programmers love all this shit, because Programmers just want to sit in a cave and play with their legos. But normal humans just want to do something. They just want to compute X, or move Y, or talk to Z. They don't want to hear excuses from Programmers about how hand-crafting 15 bazillion frameworks in googledy-gook languages is The Future. They do not care. They just want their life to be easier. And it takes a metric shit-ton of bullshit to make the Web useful enough to just get shit done.
Start a server. Install an operating system. Install a web server. Install an application. Design an HTML, CSS, and JavaScript web application user interface. Design a server-side application processor. Handle the storage, indexing, retrieval, transformation, authentication, authorization, encryption, deployment, backup, load balancing, and everything else. Learn 30 different tools and systems and frameworks and 10 different languages and 500 different paradigms and make something so complex that Leonardo would call you a genius if you could somehow explain it all.
All for little Jimmy to tell his teacher he's got the measles and is staying home from school. Or Margaret to order a replacement driver's license from the DMV. Or Kumar to order a pizza.
There are much better ways we could be using technology to solve people's problems than the jumble of bullshit we have today. But the jumble is propped up by trillions of dollars, hundreds of millions of jobs, and entire nations worth of infrastructure. Until one player dominates it all and controls it, nobody has a reason to upset the apple cart.
I hope Google does become the evil empire, so the rebels will see the chains on their hands and finally begin the fight.
Chrome and Firefox might certainly implement it into their browsers, but can we expect Facebook, for instance, to do it in their in-app browsers?
If you want to opt-in to Apple's protective blanket, do so. It's not an excuse to weld over the safety hatch for the rest of us.
Some sources have it even more skewed. And when you throw in Edge, it's definitely more skewed.
"If anything this helps prevent that"
How?
"Lots of people like to complain about the lack of having 100 different browsers"
I've never heard one of them. Regardless, what's your point?
Its not like anyone can just make an iphone, it's not like the PC market, it's not even like the macOS market.
If people (consumers) in general gave a rats ass about it they would pick an alternative. It's not even on their radar. Price is 95% of why androids sold at all, and they had all the time in the world to make something better.
I personally love the idea, but professionally hate it. IT shops chose apple for it being locked down, and burdening 3rd parties with extra support costs if the platform is wide open is a crappy thing to do.
Guess we'll find out!
Not the Google Chrome app. The Google app. :facepalm:
I’ve tried to explain why this isn’t necessary but as far as she knows, google is the internet. And I cannot say anything to convince her otherwise. After all, every search in safari will re-advertise to her “hey you should be doing this in the google app” and she will click the button without even thinking.
A hundred years ago, we'd be worried about getting knifed by strangers, bear maulings, starving to death, being homeless, eating food laced with botulism and lead, influenza, tuberculosis, diphtheria ...
Things are pretty good.
But yes, most likely this will result in a Chrome monopoly.
Well that's because the phones don't belong to Apple.
Instead, once a consumer purchases it, the phones belong to the user, who should be allowed to do what they want with their own property.
Oh wait. That’s not happening at all.
Don't forget about Google search which will push Chrome every chance it has. And Youtube.
Which cannot be said about Windows.
In Android, the app just throws an intent to open something, the OS opens the list of app capable of handling it, the user picks the wanted one (either 'only this time' or 'use this as default next time'). The OS, not the app, then remembers the choice.
I don't think they are responsible, but you can invoke a specific app if you need. Google's apps keep showing this sheet with "browser choice" quite often, conveniently forgetting that the user keeps setting "don't ask me again".
The choices are: Chrome, Google, Safari, Default system browser.
On macOS, Chrome is dominant by far, with 66.22% as of January 2023.
Safari is 2nd place with 27.72%.
https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options...
Currently I’m seeing Safari and Chrome at roughly 50:50 and 60:40 for visitors across some large public sites. That’s the reverse of what NetMarketShare has, but agains I don’t think that’s malice or error as much as different perspective.
This one is scary. People who don't know history like to think that IE was a backward browser and MS forced it upon people but what actually happened is that IE was very innovative until Microsoft diverged from the standards and lock people into it. When the ecosystem(websites) integrates enough that your platform(the browser) is the only way to run all that(through Google services for Chrome?), they stop innovating and start monetising.
"Works with Chrome" is the new IE, not Safari.
If Google is indeed leveraging their market position in an anticompetitive way to push Chrome, then they should be stopped from doing that.
Which isn't to say that Safari and especially Firefox aren't important drivers of competition. But the situation is nothing like the situation with IE.
Why would websites support this? Well, it can provide good rankings in search or some other goodie like speeding up the loading times through Google CDN or something and works for %90 of the people(because they use Chrome). Once enough websites integrate this, it's over.
In my experience, Apple haven't exactly been very open-source friendly - I know working with them there's a rejection of any GPL dependencies, even if well separated and unmodified, or even just tools used in the build process if they're GPL3+.
I don't doubt if Apple developed a html engine from scratch it would use a different license, and the entire landscape of browsers would look very different today.
It may be open source but no individuals or small teams would be able to manage a competing product, you’d need huge investment to compete. There’s a barrier to entry all the same.
Plus keeping up with the constant updates while trying to build a competitor…
The standards and functionality that are required in a modern browser are already far beyond what "an individual or small team" could build from scratch.
The existence of Chromium absolutely makes it much, much more feasible to launch a Chrome competitor than if Chrome was entirely closed source.
I imagine even this already very unlikely outcome would also depend on said fork having a big slice of market share before they even try to drift away from Chromium, otherwise it won't have any effect and will likely die exactly because of said differences.
Additionally, nothing forces a company/group to merge that "firehose of changes". If google ever oversteps sufficiently, there is always the possibility that companies that are maintaining forks will stop integrating those changes.
Very few of the changes in even the most diverged of Chromium forks change anything significant about Blink, which is really what matters. The bulk of differences are tied up in the bits wrapping the engine.
If forks don't keep up with Google's changes they're putting their users at risk of getting hit by 0days and other vulnerabilities.
That’s because they don’t need to because there’s nothing wrong with chromium. In the hypothetical situation where Google goes rogue and messes with chrome to the point that forking is required, this would be done differently.
Firefox is a clear example that a smaller organization can manage the complexity of a modern browser.
There's plenty of other examples too - like linux - which show hugely complex open source projects are possible.
A new organization coming in fresh and thinking, "hey I know what, let's fork Chromium", does not seem like a very long lived effort. I also don't see any new operating systems coming out from an unknown team anytime soon.
The open source projects you use as examples are entrenched, and it's going to take a major shakeup and/or cracks in the large organizations for something new in the browser or operating system space to emerge.
The situation is different from IE, but there's still a lot of similarities and open source isn't necessarily the balm it appears to be. They code may still "be there", but code still needs people to believe in it/trust it/work on it.
Google isn't trying to kill the web and grow desktop App development, so yes it's different. And also people weren't complaining about Internet Explorer while it was innovative and competing against Netscape Navigator with annual releases. It was after 5 years of stagnation, not supporting new W3C standards, and unfixed bugs.
Google learned from Microsoft's mistakes. They participated in standards, they update often, and resolve bugs quickly. Everything Microsoft didn't do.
They also implement new features outside of standards but just as temporary experiments mind you. If developers happen to adopt them and implement them on their sites, well Google's hands are tied and y'all might as well make them standards (e.g. SPDY, QUIC).
Or, because the control the standards process they can propose a change to a private list, push it to WHATWG and get representatives from Apple and Firefox to pull it into the "living" standard without any public discourse or feedback (e.g. removing alert();).
This isn't to say everything they're doing is bad, but that doesn't mean they aren't working in their own self interest.
"just"
Will they also "just" fork search monopoly, and web's most visited properties like youtube?
> Indeed we already have Edge as a well-maintained fork.
Indeed we have a Chrome re-skin with very few differences because even Microsoft couldn't maintain a browser.
We remember things very differently, then.
IE was hardly innovative, unless you count things like the <blink> and <marquee> tags, and the ActiveX which their blatant attempt to tie the web to Windows.
The other thing IE was known for was missing, incomplete, or out-right broken support for extremely basic HTML, CSS, and Javascript functionality that other browsers had no issues with. Leaving web developers to scatter their code/markup with IE-specific workarounds. Compounding this problem was lack of regular releases and updates. Except for security fixes, Microsoft considered IE to be part of the OS and refused to issue updates for it between OS releases, for the most part, which is why IE stuck around so long.
Nobody _wanted_ IE. It was just there as part of the OS at the same point in history that Internet access became a mainstream thing.
But if one window crashed, the whole IE crashed. Then Firefox tabbed browsing took over hungry for system resource. But at least it didn’t crash, right?
I remember IE research pane. Innovation in the browser became from a toolbar thing. Remember google toolbar? It was the number one bar in many countries.
But then Firefox extensions took over hungry for system resource, but not like Chrome hungry.
IE had addons. Some of them slowed the browser. And it had plug-ins.
It had everything independent innovation needed to thrive. It just didn’t have any vision for the “open web”. No one understood what that was then anyways.
And where ie could not innovate on the web, they used active X plug-ins. This was the Microsoft way. You can’t blame them for being themselves.
"It had everything independent innovation needed to thrive. It just didn’t have any vision for the “open web”."
But it didn't had an open source core and was windows only. The vision was microsoft only (forever).
"This was the Microsoft way. You can’t blame them for being themselves. "
So the argument is, "yeah, Microsoft is a big monopolist who do everything they can, to lock people on their system, you cannot blame them for it, this is just the way they are"?
Either way, in this case luckily their monopol strategy failed and IE died because of it.
Right. I never would have understood the love for open source if Microsoft hadnt left so much thirst for deeper complex innovation in my mouth.
After IE 6, things when downhill fast with the stagnation, but before that point, IE was a good browser.
That particularly became a problem because the time gap between XP and Vista was huge (and a lot of people skipped it and went to 7/8/10). In the meantime firefox and chrome came up and started innovating rapidly. Chrome started it with the evergreen model and FF quickly adopted that model.
"You need to download Chrome" is the scariest thing these days, especially if you see it in Firefox.
Did you live through the IE5 and IE6 days? Does the term “quirks mode” mean anything to you? Do you remember how Mac IE was completely different from Windows IE? Internet Explorer, back in the early 2000s, was a serious support burden for anyone doing web development at the time. Around 2010, Google dropped support for IE6 (in apps like GMail + Youtube) and a ton of other sites followed suit. It made a big splash across all the news sites and all the web developers breathed a sigh of relief, because they could say “we’re dropping IE6 support because Google did.”
Meanwhile, there was a parallel world of IE-only sites. Some of them were built on future widespread web technologies like DHTML, others were built on stuff like ActiveX. ActiveX ended up in the trash bin (where it belongs) and DHTML became normalized. It was… common, and annoying, to deal with corporate sites that only worked in IE, and then build your own site and fight to get it working in IE. It was not a fun time to be a web developer.
Maybe 6 or 7 years ago, I remember that Safari was missing some of the newer features that Chrome or Firefox had, but when I investigated, it usually turned out that I was using some future/experimental feature in Chrome or Firefox, and it wasn’t a problem with the standards-compliance of Safari per se. Or sometimes I was relying on behavior that was not part of the standard at all). Nowadays, my sense is that Chrome tends to have more experimental stuff available and a better set of dev tools, but otherwise, most stuff works in Safari or Firefox with little to no modification.
If Apple keeps their browser compatible, I doubt they have much to fear. Linking users to the app store because your site doesn't work is a great way to drive them away from your website, I doubt there will be much push for installing Chrome.
Currently, Chrome for iOS has a slither of the market share that Safari has. Most people don't even know you can install another browser at all. Unless Apple makes/keeps their browser uncompetitive, they won't lose a serious amount of market share.
If I recall correctly, Google was paying 1$ per install, so everyone was promoting Chrome and Chrome was actually better than Firefox.
Firefox then made a lot of missteps, tried to make a push open video and audio codecs for idealistic reasons and lost. They also failed to catch on Chrome's performance for quite a long time. They spent a lot of resources into experiments that went nowhere.
The thing people are worried about is being forced to use Chrome and Chrome being a worse experience than Safari. If web developers en masse say "oh thank god finally we can drop support for Safari" then we're in a worse situation for everyone involved. We've done nothing but trade a lack of choice for a different lack of choice and ensured that the already dim situation for web apps being ported to non-Chrome browsers will get even worse.
I agree in general regarding it being better if multiple engines are available. On the other hand, when I build something, and I'm developing it on Firefox, it usually just works on chromium-based Browsers. Safari tends to be the odd one out that has some weird behavior, although it's much less common and much less bad than it was in the IE days.
Also: not having to buy a Mac every few years just so I can test things in Safari sounds sweet, too.
Web developers wouldn't drop support for Safari as long as a significant amount of users use it (and especially not if those users are premium users, which they tend to be: higher disposable income, better trained to pay for things etc), so I don't think that's an actual risk. At least for anything I'm involved with: we'll drop Firefox before we drop Safari, and we pretty much keep Firefox only because some developers and some PMs are using it.
Yes, probably. WebKit browsers on other platforms like GNOME Web/Epiphany on Linux is easier on battery than Chrome or Firefox. WebKit is generally speaking more efficient than Blink and Gecko.
I have used Arc browser for a bit. It's Chromium-based. It didn't seem to have a bad effect on the battery.
I haven't used Chrome in a few years now, but it used to be a major CPU, memory and battery hog. I don't know how it fares these days.
Not many Apple fans have ever defended Apple's exclusivity on the browser engine. It's long been an annoyance, honestly.
But it also has never had anything to do with scamming grandmothers. That's always been an argument for not allowing arbitrary untrusted app downloads and/or 3rd party app stores. Nothing to do with browser engines, where Apple's (weak) argument has always been about the risk of unknown browser vulnerabilities allowing malicious code to escape the app sandbox.
And if iOS browser share winds up mirroring macOS browser share, then it'll go to about 2/3 Chrome.
One to go until the next IE.
I understand not being fond of the its ubiquity, especially with many Websites now requiring Chrome. And Google is allegedly abusing their dominant position. But banning it? Why?
I've been using Arc browser since December and it's... strange? But good. Lots of interesting ideas.
If it's not possible to do a particular Apple-specific authentication workflow in Firefox on iOS, then users will fall back to whatever else is already implemented for other platforms.
If users don't like how Firefox or Chrome on iOS drain their battery, then they'll stop using them and go back to Safari.
Giving people more choice doesn't hurt.
My comment might have been in wrong place, but the point was that it is difficult to be competitive with Firefox or Chrome on iOS if Safari integrates better on Apple systems. And what if implementing these impacts other platforms.
Or it could make things better when everyone starts ignoring mobile Safari /s
If we aren't there already, we are at a real risk of Blink having a complete monopoly like IE had in the early 2000s.
It's good that web developers need to think about other browsers and not just target Chrome.
Neither Google, nor Microsoft, nor Apple seem to care much about re-engineering third party cookies. Until that changes, any attempts from Mozilla to change the standards is a waste of time and effort, really.
It's hard to change them without breaking most of the web.
Yes, sorry about that. It's privacy.firstparty.isolate
Right now web developers are forced to support webkit because they can't tell iOS users to install Chrome for better experience.
If they could, they would drop webkit and provide blink-only experience. Many websites do that to Firefox nowadays.
And if webkit can't render website, Apple would replace it with blink. So Safari would become another Chromium reskin and Web would finally settle on a single engine.
You say that like it's a desirable thing? Being a spec with multiple implementations is a feature of a good platform, not a bug. It pushes the Web towards consensus-driven evolution rather than design by one actor (in the past, Microsoft; now, Google).
It's better than IE situation, that's for sure.
How many page views are by web developers?
How many by users?
So, wrong definition of good. Good isn't for the tiny amount of time something is being made, it's for the most of its life it's being used.
Beyond that, if you have no idea, perhaps you haven't viscerally experienced the IE and Netscape eras, and the awfulness of a single engine.
Blink/Chromium is objectively worse on a number of dimensions I care about, important dimensions "good" for users.
> Blink is open source and could be forked by anyone
As is WebKit, and Blink is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit, which was originally a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.
Other browsers can still leverage WebKit, see Orion which also runs Chrome and Firefox extensions. It uses WebKit features ahead of Safari:
What I really like to see next to this is the requirement that when I tap a link in an app that it opens in the default browser.
Too many apps, such as Reddit open with the WebView of Safari, which sucks. I'm not signed in there, it doesn't add to my history, and most importantly, they get to inject a whole bunch of tracks that I don't want. See [0].