Agreed. If the doors open, then Google will fight for the iOS browser space. And their ability to leverage all of their properties is pretty powerful here.
If Chrome takes over iOS, then that's it. No one will bother with site compatibility for anything else. Firefox's chances to stay relevant in that world will be slim.
Because that's the only scenario where that happens and it's plausible - the exact scenario we were in with IE6 where Microsoft refused to provide a better browser and keep up with then new and much better Mozilla and later Chrome browsers.
Good product doesn't need monopolist lockdown to be used. If Safari as as good as Apple fans say it is, this massive change won't happen. If Safari sucks, then iOS users are better off with Chrome until someone better comes along. A lot of them will probably choose Firefox though, since it suits them better. Or Brave. Or Vivaldi.
It's called competition and drives towards better products for users. It's incredible how anti-free market some of megacorp fans here are. Outright refusing to allow existence of Firefox and other free browsers on iOS is a much worse take than we've ever seen from likes of Microsoft.
No, I mean that Google will use their search monopoly, along with their dominant position across other product areas to undercut the market share of any competing browser. Any merit Chrome has is dwarfed by the strength of Google’s ability to push it on users.
I have many complaints about Apple’s handling of iOS. But it seems to me that their stance on iOS browsers is the only thing preventing the web from becoming a Blink rendering engine monoculture.
I don’t like Apple’s approach. But I’m also concerned about the prospect of a Blink-only future.
Please, provide ANY proof, that Google has this crazy amazing power against the company that owns a platform and that easily caused a tank in Meta revenue by just slightly flexing the power on that platform.
And after that, please provide ANY proof that that megacorporation, richer and more competent than Google, cannot provide a browser that could even remotely compete with better user experience on the platform they themselves own.
Because what you're claiming is pretty crock that has no basis in reality or history.
Edit: I said PROOF, not downvotes ;P
You're exaggerating while also being abrasive and wrong ("is pretty crock that has no basis in reality or history"), basically.
Chrome didn't rely on word-of-mouth and geek evangelists to spread like FF did in the early years—Google leveraged their monopoly on multiple web products to do it. The proof is that they already did it once—a whole lot of users who truly don't give a shit which browser they run, ended up with Chrome, because Google told them it was better. The differences you list that make this situation seem different aren't actually notable barriers, as you imply they are. If anything, tapping an "install this!" call-out and following through in the app store is both an easier and higher-confidence action for most users than downloading a .exe installer file, running it, and clicking through the installer.
It's the web's destiny anyway. Its design lacks modularity to such a huge degree that a monopoly open source implementation is inevitable. There's no deep reason that has to be bad, Blink is open source and can be forked. In some ways it's not really clear what benefit the duplication between WebKit, Blink and Gecko brings to the table nowadays, as they implement the same specs in essentially the same way.
I hope that you're wrong! Google already has a tremendous amount of influence, and a Blink monoculture would give them near complete control of the future of the web. (And I think Google have been poor stewards of the web. But that's an entirely different conversation.)
Blink being open source is better than the alternative. Internet Explorer achieving total dominance would have been even worse. But it doesn't buy you that much. Under a monoculture, your fork of Blink could never deviate from the original meaningfully because sites wouldn't be built to standards, they would be built to work on Blink.
Google not being able to unilaterally dictate web standards is a good thing. For example, I'm glad we have WASM and not Google Native Client.