When will Apple admit?
Yet, whenever I want to search for a highlighted word, it opens Safari. This is such an absurd situation where I am browsing a site and want to do a search for something I just read and, instead of just opening a new tab or replacing the active tab with a web search, it opens a different browser app I do not want to use.
This is just not the way any reasonable user would expect a system app to behave once all browser selection settings are configured to use a different browser.
I cannot replicate, it opens Firefox for me BUT it completely disregards my search engine choice, so it opens Google even though Kagi is my default search engine.
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This is not true, and I've got receipts. Just downloaded Firefox and set it as the default browser, then used the Lookup option on the word "Lettuce."
First section is dictionary, second section is "Siri Suggested Websites." These entries have Firefox logo and open Firefox when clicked.
Firefox on iphone is just webkit. It is not actually Firefox.
Chrome on iphone is just webkit. It is not actually Chrome.
Chrome on iPhone is Chrome on iPhone, but it uses WebKit instead of Blink.
The reason this is important for you to keep in mind is because Firefox is whatever Mozilla says Firefox is, and Chrome is whatever Google says Chrome is. There's no reason to suppose the iPhone version of some product should share any code with the Android version of the same product.
I’m saying the people at MS promoting this in this particular way are, well, dumb.
But as a user wow is it the most trashy and abusive program I routinely encounter. Start it for the first time and you're confronted with tabloid news and advertising. Sponsored links are mixed into your frequently visited sites by default. It injects itself into your online shopping and sends all your images and browser behavior to their servers for various weak justifications. You can turn it into a passable experience by scrolling through and configuring something in nearly every single settings tab, but then they just ignore you and inject new advertising sidebars or icons in a random update. Keeping it restricted to "just a browser" requires constant vigilance. It's clearly first and foremost just an advertising revenue funnel for Microsoft, which is completely pathetic of them. At least IE was mostly just a browser even if it did that pretty badly most years.
That's the "rules of engagement", same way you can't run Flash or Linux binaries; the same way you can't touch windows kernel space without a code-signing certificate from a eye-gouging authority.
Exceptions to apples rule are rarely given, even for educational purposes; such as pythonista.
When taken though that lens; if we hadn't turned everything into a fucking web-app: alternative interpreters of HTML/CSS could exist.
Unrelated, but: Ironically the original vision for the iPhone was web-apps not native ones (as there was only an app store created after community backlash over Apple pushing people to the web).
It's rich to hear this used as a defense of any corporation. Everything is a web app now because nobody got their act together to ship a true "write once, ship anywhere" platform. Microsoft smugly profited off this in the short term with Windows, and Apple used it as an excuse to double-down on their proprietary SDKs. It's obvious why everything is a webapp; what's the realistic alternative? Developing native apps for every platform on one device isn't even feasible nowadays. Then you'd need the developer subscriptions, a cross-platform app architecture and the willingness to write n number of UI mockups, where n is the number of target platforms you intend to hit. It's a veritable waste of time to do anything else.
Come on, we have excellent open computing platforms; it's just not where the money is right now.
Nobody can see passed their nose for profits though so we end up with lowest common denominator everything: which forces you to run a whole code interpreter on everything.
Apple said "no, you can't" and that's where the money is, so you had (and continue to have) a choice and your business chooses to use it.
So, you have to play by those rules.
I mean, I'm not taking a stand here; despite people believing that I'm defending apple. You don't get the sit around though and reap the benefits of the system they built (and developers helped build) while simultaneously trying to tear it down.
They set the rules, you all agreed to play by them; so why are we complaining?
If you actually care you would make programs on one of the many open standards platforms which in turn would turn them into more attractive platforms as the ecosystem improved.
But nobody does, everyone just wants the money now.
Apple is at least complicit in the status-quo as a vendor of native app SDKs, and it's something they could probably fix with the right initiative. At the business layer, they have no motivation to fix this issue. On an individual level, it's a black hole of annoyance, confusion and hand-wavey abstraction as to why certain things are off-limits or why certain apps aren't on iPhone. Treating your userbase as a hostage situation is an obvious ploy, and one I can't encourage even to fix another problem. If we rely on the altruism of businesses to fix our market problems, then we are subject to their whims when they want to change things for themselves.
If we can both agree that Apple can and does make decisions that harm their users, then we're basically on the same page. I want to scrutinize that harm, and hopefully spread enough awareness to codify a change. You're free to feel however you want on the topic, but I would object to this behavior from any company.
> They set the rules, you all agreed to play by them
The internet did not agree to "Apple's rules". That's like saying Sony made their "rules" with the Playstation 3 browser, and now everyone has to play by that. They released a client, and their customers agreed to their Terms of Service. The internet will do whatever it wants, including whittle itself down to the lowest common denominator of 'document rendering' to hit Apple's platforms. If that's an undesired outcome for them or their users, maybe they should change their approach.
As I heard, that was just the cover story to hide the fact that the original iPhone was too slow to properly run Flash (or native apps).
Read that again to yourself, slowly.
It was not practical on Android either, mostly a stunt, and faded quietly into obscurity over the course of a couple of years.
I'm not saying it was great, but performance/efficiency was massively better than similar code in JS at the time. (And several years later, I rewrote a Flash app for ancient Tivo boxes in HTML/JS - same functionality, half the performance even after a lot of fine tuning.)
He was on firmer ground complaining about the bugs & security issues admittedly!
No thanks, I'll take properly managed freedom within my OS.
> if we hadn't turned everything into a fucking web-app
Could you elaborate?
> Could you elaborate?
I run a web browser with JS turned off and the web is mostly unusable for me, even things that should be plain documents like news reports try to choke down a dozen or so megabytes of obfuscated garbage that it insists must run on my CPU doing goodness knows what to render a document in common markdown.
So, despite being "free" you just run any old garbage you happen to come across on the internet and hope the "Fantastically optimised awesomely sandboxed" runtime that is definitely not too complicated to have issues (despite being one of the most complicated interpreters in history), definitely has no security bugs and will protect you.
I'm not pro apple here. I'm anti the enshittification of everything because some arsehat decided it was necessary for me to run whatever arbitrary shite they managed to vomit onto a web-server.
That Apple makes it hard for you? Fine. Enemy of my enemy.
Also: fuck Chromes monopoly.
That's a highly contradictory stance. Accepting one brand of enshittification to solve another, less-significant problem is an indefensible position. You can't ignore Apple's arbitrary shite while complaining about the prevalence of other arbitrary decisions, it's a go-nowhere fallacy. There is no point; you are just promoting something that you think can help you, and then refusing to rationalize it in the greater context beyond browsers.
There's no reason to paint this as an "enemy of my enemy" situation, either. You either think browser clients are a powerful tool that deserves better scrutiny, or you think the status quo is fine. Nobody is putting on armor and picking up a sword to go to war for their favorite corporate-sponsored browser. If anyone has you believe that, they're probably manipulating you.
Apple doing shitty things is irrelevant because ultimately that applies to people who buy apple products and people who want to sell products that work on apple devices.
What Web Developers are doing affects me daily.
Apple pisses off web developers who want to turn a browser into an OS with crap like WebUSB? Not seeing a problem.
Apple actively prevents the monopoly position of v8/blink/Chrome? Not seeing a problem.
Apple has my support in-so-far as its the only company that seems to tell web developers "no".
Enemy of my enemy applies; No other company, especially one with any actual leverage, is preventing the lurch of web crap.
See, this is the problem. If Apple is going to charge you 30% to use a serialized data cable, they're going to get annihilated legislatively. That's not a choice the market gets to make, it's one market regulators decide on. As we've seen in multiple European countries, Apple doing shitty things is not irrelevant because they get fined for participating in said markets.
Thank god for the Digital Markets Act. Apple can take their performance art and sell it somewhere with proper authoritarianism, like China. Oh wait...
It would take more than just being competitive, the WebKit team would need to start perfectly reproducing Blink behaviors and quirks. Devs are already more than happy to never test their work against anything that’s not Chrome and that’s only going to intensify when they don’t need to care about WebKit any more — any deviance from Chrome even if it’s technically within spec will be considered an error.
That’s where users feel forced to change browsers, because if they don’t they’ll frequently be running into pages that are broken in browsers that aren’t Blink-based.
There will be less incentive for developers to make sure their stuff works on anything but Chrome forcing safari devs to just play catch up all the time.
Different even if just as or more shitty.
That's a choice that is not based on technical conditions and is pure disrespect of user preferences.
Both companies need regulatory actions to reign them in. Apple probably needs to be broken up.
Integration between devices/software is their entire selling point.
It's always done to end monopolies, to open up closed markets. The people benefiting are consumers and competitors, not Apple itself.
If the deep integration between hardware, software and services is the main reason why people buy Apple’s products the harm from breaking the up might outweigh any of the benefits.
I've never seen any video open in anything other than my default video player IINA, it's almost like quicktime isn't installed, i've never seen it pop up.
When you change the file association on OSX, be sure to also click the “Apply for all .mp4 files” button. Common mistake.
When I click on an address in FB Messenger, I get the “open in google maps or Apple Maps” prompt, but choosing Google Maps just takes me to the Google Maps App Store page, even though I have the app installed and updated.
If there is a solution to this problem (where my attempts failed for some reason), I’d be all ears. :)
Apple don't provide such system and so you are blocked by what the source app wants to open. On Apple apps, it will open other apple apps, and on tier apps, it's up to what they want to open. Of course Apple have zero incentive to change this so I don't see it changing.
> When I click on an address in FB Messenger, I get the “open in google maps or Apple Maps” prompt, but choosing Google Maps just takes me to the Google Maps App Store page, even though I have the app installed and updated.
Is it possible that this is only the case on FB Messenger? I think there are other Apps offering this option where it does work.
* Microsoft: we will let you set a preference, but we will ignore/reset it
* Apple: we won't let you set a preference at all
If someone wanted to say "Microsoft and Apple don't care about your preferences, but Microsoft is slightly worse", I think that'd be a fair thing to say.
Agreed that apple's is a lack of a feature, BUT if you look at the features which apple does support, it feels closer to they don't want to add it for anti-competitve reasons, and not a technical/implementation reason
* ios apps can be deep linked via "apple-app-site-association"
* ios apps can have custom url schemes "comgooglemaps://?parameters"
* android has had "intents" for a very long time
* ios sms is already detecting "this is an address" from free text and is hot linking it to their maps app
This is almost certainly a bug in Messenger.