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Comment by slimsag | Hacker News Reader

You can’t install non-WebKit browsers on iOS or iPadOS.

WebKit is probably the only thing holding the web open at this point. Imagine if this last bastion of non-Chromium went away, and Googles stranglehold on the web was finally total.

The web isn't made open by forcing people to run specific client software. It's a bit like arguing that Explorer was the only thing keeping Netscape in line. With Apple shipping private attestation in their browsers and dragging their feet on open standards, it's hard to consider them a friend of the weak.

I'm not sure a comparison between Netscape & Google works

It's a pity the Explorer/Safari one does. Maybe if Netscape had an Open Source version the metaphor would work a little better, though.

Opening up iOS to other browser engines doesn't mean that suddenly Safari stops working. If anything it would force Safari to become competitive with Chrome.

Regardless it will mean that Safari will lose a significant proportion its market share.

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.

> If anything it would force Safari to become competitive with Chrome.

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.

That's not disrespecting a set user preference though, it's limiting what a user can do on their platform.

Different even if just as or more shitty.

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