Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking forward to running "real" firefox on ios. If only so that there is another alternative if a page renders poorly in webkit.

View on HN

> If only so that there is another alternative if a page renders poorly in webkit

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.

> 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.

> 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.

I know a fair few solo developers that don't test Safari compatibility because they don't own Apple hardware. And Safari only runs on Apple hardware (with the exception of Hackintosh).

It's not so much Safari compatibility, but WebKit compatibility. Anyone who wants their website to work on iOS has to test against mobile WebKit, regardless if their target users are on Chrome or Firefox. If these legislative changes go into effect, Webkit market penetration will plummet quickly to only those using Safari, and Apple will have less leverage to hold back on features that don't suit their App Store profits.

> The upshot is that we might have closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS

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?

I specified on iOS. It would at least be possible on iOS if other renderers could be used, and both Firefox and Google would certainly have their own incentive to make this happen. Google don't want to undermine the Play Store, but they might want to undermine the App Store. Firefox have existential reasons for product differentiation, though web apps won't get traction without broader support by all players.

The parent was clearly alluding to “closer-to-native experiences” on Android. If Chrome will bring that to iOS, there should already be examples on Android.

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.

> If Chrome will bring that to iOS, there should already be examples on Android.

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

They are already supposedly possible on Android. So?

Better integration with OS features on iOS devices is still an upshot for people who want websites to do more useful things with their phones, if that becomes a possibility. Might not balance out the cost of having a browser hegemony, and it might not be something that’s specifically useful or interesting to you, but a small mercy nonetheless

> Better integration with OS features on iOS devices is still an upshot for people who want websites to do more useful things with their phones, if that becomes a possibility.

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

I think we need all the things you mention in that comment, and much, if not all, are dependent on the rendering engine internals to implement. e.g., Firefox iOS couldn’t fix it without changes to WebKit

Android exists. Has 70% market share. Has all those native capabilities you crave.

So. Again and again I ask the same simple question: have all the things you're talking about happened there?

It just might not be worth doing until browser vendors have a consistent renderer across all platforms (true for Firefox and Chrome) and until Apple loses its leverage. It might also be that it requires coordination and cooperation across all browser vendors to a degree that is unlikely. I’m not privy to the internal politics, so I don’t know which is the case

So the answer is: despite Android having all this, there's literally nothing to show fir this "might, if, maybe" etc. wishful thinking.

You seem very animated about some aside I made in my OP comment, that was obviously made as a speculation. Not sure why. We're both speculating FWIW, so there's no real argument to 'win' here, not even a wager I'd consider making.

Indeed it was speculation. So I asked you basically what your speculation was based on. Because we have a platform where no such speculation is necessary: Android is the dominant mobile platform, it already has all the capabilities you speculate about and so on.

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?

So many words to avoid the hard truth: web apps suck, and "we might have closer-to-native experiences" is bullshit. Because, see my comment on Android which already supposedly has these "close to native experiences".

I’m less sure about that for a few reasons. Biggest among them is that (presumably?) in app webviews will still be WKWebView, powered by WebKit. So if you want your page to load inside Facebook’s browser (and you do) you’re still going to have to care about Safari.

There is nothing stopping facebook shipping a copy of chromium. It’s around 400MB already, and they don’t seems to care

Fair point. They already do this on Android. For compatibility reasons you understand, not so that they can track absolutely everything you do, no sir.

Well, Firefox users may never make up quite as much marketshare as it used to, but it does have one advantage: we're a lot louder and more annoying than Chrome users when stuff is broken. It's a feature! (Okay, I try not to be annoying. But I'm pretty sure absolutely nobody is thrilled when I report bugs about Librewolf not working. Shoutouts to SoundCloud for eventually fixing one of said issues.)

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.

> Well, Firefox users may never make up quite as much marketshare as it used to, but it does have one advantage: we're a lot louder and more annoying than Chrome users when stuff is broken.

Slack refuses to work properly on Firefox. I don't think they care that we are being loud about it.

To be fair, I'm not even sure if Slack cares about web users at all. It just doesn't work that well, at least for me. (Though I obviously haven't tried it in a bit, so maybe it's good in Chrome now.)

I think the desktop slack app is built on electron so is built to render properly in chrome.

It's true, but the Electron app always seemed more full featured, and at least for me, I had lots of issues with bugginess and slowness in the web browser, even in Chrome. I'm not sure why it would be slower in Chrome than Electron. Neither are particularly lightweight. Maybe it's my fault somehow.

With Electron you can depend directly on native libraries for handling audio and whatnot, but I don't think that explains the whole picture.

One datapoint: I use Slack exclusively in the browser (both Firefox and Brave), and it works well. As far as I remember on Firefox there was some limitation on video calls but that was arbitrary (user-agent check or something like that).

Yes, it is just video calls.

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.

What doesn't work properly and are there issues for this where I can add my support?

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.

It refuses calls as "not supported in this browser".

Are you user-agent spoofing?

I'm also using Slack on Firefox and I'm not doing any user agent spoofing.

Calls?

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.

I've never used calls. Never even considered using it. So could be that feature isn't working.

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.

Slack doesn't work properly full stop. It's a bloated unstable mess on every platform. Discord puts it to shame.

> Slack refuses to work properly on Firefox. I don't think they care that we are being loud about it.

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

It's funny because I find if I get my sites working properly in Firefox, they work everywhere.

Yep. This is why I request (though I don’t enforce) my front end team to use Firefox at least part of the time when developing; if it works there, it works basically everywhere else without any hassle.

Microsoft teams barely even work standalone. It frustrates me whenever all the buttons stop working when I need to unmute myself during an online meeting. I then have to use my phone and hope it won't happen there too.

</rant>

> 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.

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've noticed Facebook (.com, the new one built on React), works horribly in Firefox.

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.

Agreed. While being forced into a walled garden isn't a good thing, it has the current side effect giving iOS Safari a significant market share to keep Chrome from dominating to become the new IE and have all those "works in Internet Explorer 6 with 1024x768 screen" websites again but this time for Chrome.

What if Safari is the new IE?

That simplistic a comparison is simply not worth responding to in any direct way. Safari is Safari and IE is IE. there are some clear differences between the two, in both mobile market share and total market share. That’s just the beginning.

> What if Safari is the new IE?

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.

https://i.imgur.com/WnAsXId.png

Maybe from the perspective of webdevs, from what it represents for users, that's Chrome. A Chrome monopoly may seem desirable, because they're catering to webdevs, but there's nothing they'd like more than having webdevs help them lasso all the users they can surveil and expose to ads as possible.

I get your point. However, unless mobile usage (vs desktop) gets to something like 90% and unless another 90% of that mobile is iPhone/iPad (vs anything non-Apple), Safari dominating like IE did is impossible.

However, for Chrome, it is possible without the walled garden (not to defend it or anything, but it is what it is).

Internet Explorer used to dominate the market, now it doesn't. As it was, so it will be.

Right, but the years when it did sucked

IE dominated because it was the default / only known choice for a while. Then Mozilla/FF was huge because of features (tabs). Then Chrome was huge because Google had bazillion $$$ to burn on advertising it everywhere. I'm not sure how we can move away from that local maximum this time.

On the iOS side, Apple had the default + locked browser choice. Now they can try to outspend each other with Google there.

When IE 6 came out, it was also one of the best/fastest browsers at the time. Heck, it even came with the first implementation of what we all call AJAX today.

The problem was that MS declared victory and stop developing IE, expecting to use their OS leverage to keep others out.

They lost the favor of web developers, because they thought that by pushing a crappy browser they could stall the advancement of web applications. They wanted to stifle the web and have people use IE the least as possible and have developers keep making native applications.

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

MS sat on their laurels and allowed everyone else catch up though. Through the living standard all google needs to do is keep Chrome updating at a frantic pace and no one will be able to come close.

If MS doesn't have the capability of maintaining their own browser, the chances of someone else entering the market is basically nil.

It might make Apple work harder maybe? For instance on my m1 MacBook Air, safari is vastly better for my battery life than chrome or ff for my workload. It makes a huge difference. That would make me use it over the others if that’s the same on the iPhone or iPad where battery life is even more important.

To be fair, Chrome has gotten much better, but Safari is definitely the best.

Tell the devs (any here on this thread? Please speak!) of _iPhone_ iOS Safari (which is somehow different than iPad) to support `MediaSource` and I'll sympathize. They are often behind the curve, and with the size of market share they have, I'd at least like a timeline of when very popular features will be exposed. Until then, they're the new IE to me. It's popular because it's the default and that's it.

Presumably, the people who care about web would only install firefox on their iOS devices, while the people who don't care would just keep safari.

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'!

I don't know the current iOS Chrome install base, but having everything synced is a powerful incentive I'd guess.

> Presumably, the people who care about web would only install firefox on their iOS devices, while the people who don't care would just keep safari.

Until they get large banners of "Please install the Chrome App to visit this web page"

i hope that doesn't happen. And i hope that users would rather just not visit those sites.

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.

Every time I log into a Google web app it tells me to use Chrome for a better experience. It’s happened in two, maybe three browsers in the last month. I have no hope for your hope. Google will pummel users into using Chrome, relentlessly.

I know a lot of non-technical people who use Webkit-Chrome on their iPhones because they (have to?) use Blink-Chrome on their computers.

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.

Why would Safari get displaced on iOS, though? Apple users tend to stick to first-party software even when options are available, unless third-party stuff has a significant feature gap (and keep in mind that we're talking about UX here, not how many APIs the browser supports etc). Did Chrome overtake Safari on macOS?

Consider, for example, MBNA in Canada no longer supporting Firefox.

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.

Firefox is off the beaten path. iOS Safari isn’t. Someone has to be ballsy enough to do make that first call. These kids calling it “the new IE” are being dramatic. iOS Safari as it is right now is nowhere near what IE was. Any meaningful organisation that makes the first call on not supporting iOS Safari is…to put it one way…not somewhere that I want to work. Because it sounds like the prioritises are being set by a nerd with a chip on his (yes, his) shoulder instead of what’s best for the user or for the business.

Google will pay handsomely to a good bunch of "nerds" to gain dominance on iOS with Chrome as it did in other platforms, and then it will make business sense for independent vendors to drop support for anything but Chrome.

Google can prompt you to download Chrome in every service and every app of theirs you use, and every so often "innocently" break some aspect of their services if it's being touched by another browser.

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.

And how well do you think something like that would go with the iOS target demographic?

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.

> I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari.

Unless web admins take action and e.g. show an annoying popup about web freedom on iOS and Chrome.

> the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari

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.

Anti-trust or not, the authorities are sleeping (perhaps paid well to do so). What are you going to do in response?

I would restrict my site to work with even simple browsers like Links.

I don't know, individual action has very rarely worked to meaningfully enact system change.

But at least you won't be part of the problem, forcing people to use Chromium.

> Apple's behaviour is nothing short of monopolistic and there is no good defence of it imo.

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.

Well IE was just better than the competition. IIRC Nobody prevented you from installing alternative browser back in the 90s or 2000s

Whether Chrome is better or not is moot if developers design to only support it or offer a subpar experience when using other browsers

> It should be about user choice.

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.

What does Apple have a monopoly on? Their own hardware?

> It should be about user choice.

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?

Yet you chose to buy an iPhone.

If your website only works on one of the browsers, you are probably doing something wrong. It is not like it was in the 90s, it can pretty much be expected your website will work on all browsers, if you are following the current HTML/CSS specs and best practices.

I'm not that optimistic that Mozilla is capable of building a good iOS browser. It's been a few months since I last used it, but the issues of Firefox on iPadOS were not because of the engine. Tabs would frequently lose order, closing a tab would close some other tab, broken keyboard shortcuts, cursor/selection issues in the address bar, random non-responsiveness and just janky UI. The issues were so obvious that it felt like it was built without any QA process, so I resorted to using Safari most of the time, which worked perfectly.

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.

Once the native engine is available to the general public, there will be more users. When there are more users, there will likely be more resources thrown at development.

Why hasn't this happened on Android?

Firefox is the best Android browser, for the sole reason of being able to use uBlock Origin with it.

But it hasn't resulted in "more users." The marketshare of Firefox on mobile is around half a percent.

I really wonder if that number is accurate, or if Firefox uses all just have their tracking disabled

Other browsers on android can do that too. Actually, firefox has a fairly restrictive extension policy, while browsers like Kiwi let you install any chrome extension that you want.

Firefox is pretty good on android.

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)

The issues in question aren't something you'd ignore just due to lack of a native engine - Firefox on iOS matters for market share reasons, they need to care about that stuff regardless of what's running under the hood.

> Once the native engine is available to the general public, there will be more users.

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".

Unfortunately, I had the same experience with iOS and iPadOS versions of Firefox. Very janky, lots of bugs that went on unfixed for months and years, and general lack of polish and thoughtfulness in the UI. Despite using Firefox on every other platform, I had much better experience with Safari, and kept Firefox installed only for an occasional password lookup.

Firefox is my default browser on Android for couple of years now. It supports uBlock Origin, and I cannot browse internet without it anymore. I don't have major trouble with it, except 1-2 cases per quarter, when it is faster to open Chrome than turn the ad blocking off and then back on.

Another case for Chrome for me is full page translation. It is very neat and mostly of decent quality.

I've been using Kiwi browser on Android, which allows you to install chrome extensions! (Including ublock)

It's a game changer!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowse...

How is this the first time I heard about this!? Thanks

It you go the extra mile and actually disable Chrome on Android, even Google apps will start making calls to Firefox as the browser. It makes for a much better experience, otherwise Google apps don't honor the default browser choice in many circumstances.

You don't even need to "disable" Chrome. Just set Firefox as the default browser. I haven't noticed any Google apps that wouldn't respect the setting.

Google news app insists on opening in a chrome-based webview without ad blocking. Large part of why I rooted to get adaway.

Interesting, Google News app isn't even available here. I suppose you're from the US where they can do more shady stuff.

This is called chrome custom tabs, and there are a number of reasons they are better than webview.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/android/custom-tabs/

Firefox for Android supports custom tabs and will be used if it's your default browser. The Google News app doesn't use Android custom tabs.

I don't have any Google apps with this problem (I don't use mentioned below Google News). My biggest problem so far are apps without setting "Use external browser to open links".

> hen it is faster to open Chrome than turn the ad blocking off and then back on.

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

I can't use the internet with Firefox on Android, because while is supports uBO, it doesn't support full-page translation or Bypass Paywalls Clean.

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.

I wonder how much of the Jank is attributable to FF just being a wrapper on iOS?

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.

Trying to reuse their desktop UI code on iOS would be a mistake regardless of browser engine limitations

Being able to use Fennec F-Droid was my primary motivator to switch off of iPhone. It's not perfect, but there are things it offers that iOS Safari does not that I consider to be absolute necessities for browsing the web. (uBlock Origin is certainly one of them, also WebM support.)

WebM is supported on iOS Safari now!

Since when? I’m on iOS 16.3 and it doesnt support webm

I've been told this at least three times now on HN over the years (pretty soon I'm going to start keeping a list of URLs so people know I'm not exaggerating.) Every single time it turns out that it isn't actually true.

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].

[1]: https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/

fully supported since Sept 12th, 2022 according to https://caniuse.com/webm

edit: on MacOS (not iOS)

I suspect that few Firefox developers use Firefox on iOS. Choosing iOS is usually about choosing a different set of priorities.

Android is a very different thing.

FWIW, I noticed all of the same issues when using FF on my iPad, but I stuck with it, and it actually got much better, and I haven't noticed a UI/UX bug in months now. It's been rock solid once they got the kinks worked out, and I've loved running FF on all of my devices and having everything synced between them appropriately.

I use firefox on iOS. I like it because it has integrations with firefox's password management, and it feels somewhat fire-foxy.

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.

> It's been a few months since I last used it, but the issues of Firefox on iPadOS were not because of the engine.

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.

If GP is talking about the same issues that I frequently run into, then I'd say that's almost definitely not the case. I continue to use Firefox iOS despite these issues because I like the shared history and bookmarks with my desktop, but they do annoy me on the daily.

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.

Without actually digging into the code and integrations, it's speculation on both of our parts. I've had to work with platforms that made implementing certain "easy" and "simple" features in a bug-free manner difficult to impossible.

Real Firefox is the thing I miss most when I switched from Android. Browsing the web without NoScript suuuucks.

I really hope firefox retains support for real web extensions through this manifest v3 bs.

Mozilla makes $400 million a year from Google, would they really cut off this revenue stream if Google told them to only support manifest v3 or else?

Mozilla should never have gotten into a situation where 90% of their funding comes from their biggest competitor.

Sadly, they're probably headed into a worse situation, where they lose most of that 90% of their funding since their browser marketshare is at an all time low of 3-4%. Renegotiation is this year.

Google needs Mozilla though - Firefox is the last remaining Chromium competitor Google can use as a counterargument against claims about their de facto monopoly.

That's Safari. It has way more users, and website creators actually care about providing Safari support because they want it to work on the non-technical boss's iPhone.

There's no Safari on Android.

people typically want their mobile sites to work on both major OSes

Or on Windows.

There's no significant Firefox presence on Android either. Sure there is an app, and there are 100+ million installs, corresponding to an install market share of >4%, but people almost never use Firefox. Usage wise, Firefox has a 0.5% market share.

Safari (WebKit) is the one that is the last remaining serious competitor against Chromium.

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 (WebKit) is the one that is the last remaining serious competitor against Chromium.

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.

Even if the DMA somehow results in Blink engine dominance, at least the engine is open, so alternative freedom and privacy-respecting browsers can build on it and patch out any evil features while mostly maintaining compatibility. Not a great outcome, but it'd be worth it to stamp out closed computer operating systems that don't let their users control what software they install. The current state of iOS and iPad OS is completely unacceptable.

If Chrome were a separate business entity, it would also have to be funded by Google to survive. Browsers simply cannot make money.

You can install both Firefox and Chrome plugins in the Orion browser on iOS

https://orionfeedback.org/d/2568-noscript-extension-from-fir...

That's a disappointing thread to read. "Vlad" didn't even bother looking at what NoScript actually does, and why it's better than just having a giant on/off switch for the entire page.

> if a page renders poorly in webkit.

what's a URL of a page that renders poorly in webkit?

Anything with a high amount of textures in WebGL.

I couldn't link to any websites that render incorrectly under Safari on iOS (WebKit) off the top of my head, but I think that's rather a side effect of WebKit being the only engine available on iOS: I don't want my site to be unusable on iOS devices, so I end up spending a lot of time trying to work around bugs that only happen on Apple devices.

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.

are you implying that all other web browsers implement and comply with all web standards? are you implying that no website is leveraging experimental features and hence not standard yet?

I am not, and that sounds like quite an uncharitable interpretation of my comment. All web browsers have bugs, and practically all web browsers support features that are not part of the standards track. That's not the problem.

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...

Web devs have to deal with Safari bugs all the time, that's why you don't tend to see them. Maybe now that there's going to be other browser engines on iOS, we can show nice "please open this page in Firefox" banners and force Apple to stop undermining their browser to push native apps.

Those of us that remember "This page works best in Internet Explorer 5" are shivering at your statement. I love Firefox and use it as my primary browser on my desktop. But suggesting to users that they should use that instead of fixing issues in your site feels bad.

There's a subtle but important distinction between "a browser misbehaves and incorrectly renders my compliant site, and I refuse to make my site wrong to satisfy it" and "a browser doesn't render my malformed site the way I want it to and I refuse to fix it because other browser (incorrectly) renders my site how I want".

It will also be great to have video background enabler, dark mode and ublock origin extensions like on Android.

On the other hand: wouldn’t it be nice if Apple would start contributing/forking chromium?

WebKit just has too many issues these days…

Firefox Android is rather bad at being a mobile browser (it's too slow), and if it is any indicator Firefox iOS will likely be the same.

Is it? It's the only mobile browser I use. I use it on a mid-tier phone (Pixel 5a). It seems fine to me.

Have you tried comparing it with Bromite, Brave or even Chrome? There is a very noticeable difference.

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...

I have not done much comparison, as it works fine for me. I could believe that it is slower, but I still wouldn't call in slow. Perhaps my using an adblocker with FF makes it better for me.

I've only noticed this in very compute intensive SPAs.

But you know what? Having AdBlock makes up for it 10 fold because I never have to see ads on mobile FF.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com