And if someday hopefully some of the anti-trust anti-competitive legal moats do get torn down, Google will be ready.
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.
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.