Vivaldi on iOS
vivaldi.com
vivaldi.com
But Vivaldi (the company), over the course of many years, took their desktop browser from a Chromium clone to the most feature-packed browser currently available. I’m confidently they’ll do the same with their mobile browsers.
Alternative browsers don't have that much control over what's rendered, so they are probably using the same content blocking functionality baked into Safari.
Vivaldi's schtick is that they have every setting and feature that you want and quite a few that you don't. Tab stacks, pinned tabs, split screen, mouse gestures, notes, a full mail client, an RSS reader, ad blocker, custom themes, all built into the browser. And just a ton of customizability. You can control the position and show/hide every UI element (vertical tabs is amazing if you've never tried it), you can create "command chains" (a set of commands which fire in sequence on a keyboard shortcut), and if that's not enough, you can install CSS and JS mods for arbitrary functionality.
But this is just on desktop, just about none of those features exist on mobile right now.
The only other bottom address bar browser with gestures that I have seen is Kiwi on Android and I am surprised this paradigm is still not more common.
It happily crashes, lags, as in, the touches take a couple of seconds to register, and overheats the iPadlet like I've been using the pen for 30+ minutes in the summer.
Also, I can not understand why they do not have the custom themes on mobile, Android or i*OS.
> We’ve integrated an elegant desktop-style Tab Bar in the UI by default.
I think there's a good reason why no mobile browsers implement desktop style tabs. Even the Vivaldi screenshots in this post show just 2.5 tabs with significant truncation of all the visible tabs. On tablet this might work (where other browsers have a more traditional tab view), but on portrait phone this seems like a terrible idea.
iOS Safari has done it for a long time, since the first Plus iPhone, as long as you use it in portrait.
You could also do the same with the url bar, and then you're looking at just a bit more vertical space vs safari with more information and functionality
There is ongoing pressure to open that up and there have been changes to allow non-Safari default browsers, but at the moment WebKit is still the name of the game for iOS.
Check out https://browser.kagi.com/ for one that wraps WebKit with web extensions and other goodness in a unique brand feeling browser.
And of course https://www.icab.de/ for offering a unique WebKit experience for over a decade now:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090426232408/http://www.icab.d...
There are nice ideas there, but if I were them, I'd focus on making sure you are not losing users before going all in on growth and features.
It's literally a game changer, sonething many want, yet the sheer lack of care and concern for those with vision disabilities, or just older users, is astounding.
Every desktop browser does zoom reflow, and it was removed from chrome just because google wanted to punish website who didn't make proper mobile websites. What a bunch of asshats.
It's interesting to note that other people have entirely different usage patterns of their phones and actually prefer a small screen to a proper computer.
Not saying either is right/wrong, just curious. How prevalent is this on HN, I wonder?
Edit:
It is quite fast. Search button tries to fix address bar location, but I don’t like it. Switching tabs is a pain and sweeping them interferes with iOS app switching. Difficult to add a new tab
yeah, "supposed to" is doing a quite a bit of heavy lifting. it has gotten soooo much better than in the past, but yet things still do slightly weird things depending on browser. the closer to the designer you are, the more you notice. by notice, i mean have it pointed out to you.
Until that happens, Safari will always be the only browser that truly matters if you use a iOS device and that's a fact.
https://support.apple.com/en-eg/guide/security/sec15bfe098e/...
> Memory pages marked as both writable and executable can be used only by apps under tightly controlled conditions: The kernel checks for the presence of the Apple-only dynamic code-signing entitlement. Even then, only a single mmap call can be made to request an executable and writable page, which is given a randomized address. Safari uses this functionality for its JavaScript Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler.
In other words, Apple only allows Apple to do Javascript JIT on iOS.
But there are many other reasons besides JIT to want to have non-Apple-Webkit-based rendering engines (including wanting different JS engines with their own JIT) - and so IMO it's very much a restriction that regulators should force Apple to relax. The security considerations should be no different than those on a desktop platform.
Still, my original point still stands. As you note, you can't have Spidermonkey running on iOS doing JIT. But you also couldn't have Gecko doing rendering and using WebKit JIT, either. ... Right?
> The security considerations should be no different than those on a desktop platform.
Completely agree. The "it's for your own security" angle is just usual Apple FUD to make their anti-competitive stance seem pro-consumer.
This is a double sided coin. 90% of the browsers on Google Play are absolute trash (if not, arguably, straight up malware), and some are apparently very popular.
Give 3rd party iOS browsers more permissions, and devs will exploit every single bit of privilege to the max, and then some, en masse.
Chrome, Brave, Firefox, Edge, DuckDuckGo, etc. are used by ~100% people.
Gratuitous data harvesting, and Edge in particular has gotten really spammy with Microsoft promos.
> Firefox
Very slow/power hungry for me, especially with extensions which I need for dark mode, adblocking and such.
> DuckDuckGo
Probably good?
You probably come out ahead if you load it up with a real adblocker though
Being able to browse with uBlock and Privacy Badger is a game changer for me. I basically don't use my mobile browser at all on iOS, and I don't use any social media or news apps either, so you can guess how useful the device is.. haha
I am on an older Android phone though. If it ain't broke...
My mom has an iPhone and I can sleep safe knowing she won’t install some dodgy browser or anything like that.
I’m happy such category of devices exist and I’m happy to pay a premium.
Microsoft in their last few years tried very hard to incentivise developers to build apps for Windows Phone.
But many didn’t bother. Some even only targeted iOS because of the reach and how amazing the development experience was, including less devices to test and support compared to Android and Windows Phone.
And this made the choice for consumers easier, when (I don’t remember the names) some very popular and big apps at the time were not natively available on Windows Phone at all.
Even Tim Sweeney never brought Unreal Engine to Windows Phone despite their promises and I’d say played part to build the current status quo.
Developers voted with their time to build apps for a 30% fee marketplace that suddenly was a gateway to distribute their work to millions of users worldwide that was not heard of before in the era of Windows Mobile. (pre iPhone)
And now they cry wolf about the system they’ve voluntarily helped to build.
Sure, there are plenty of duopolies out there, but there are also plenty of monopolies. That doesn't mean they're inevitable.
Most users won't change the defaults anyways, I think this fear is well overblown.
99.99% of users don’t care.
That’s why iPhone today is still the #1 mobile phone with highest loyalty and consumer satisfaction scores for over a decade.
You don’t become an industry changing leader and stay #1 by “crippling 100% of users”. It’s just what you think is crippling, others don’t care about.
> That’s why iPhone today is still the #1 mobile phone with highest loyalty and consumer satisfaction scores for over a decade.
That's just another thing you've made up
> You don’t become an industry changing leader and stay #1 by “crippling 100% of users”. It’s just what you think is crippling, others don’t care about.
That's a rather simplistic view of the real world where leadership and customer satisfaction must depend on the single factor you're currently arguing about. In reality you could easily be a leader across a bunch of areas and then totally fail in others with the overall balance still being in your favor
But 99.9% don't care about running non WebKit browser, so it doesn't cripple 100% of users because they are not affected by this.
Same as having no Flash support today doesn't cripple 100% of iPhone users, because they don't care about it.
Go and ask your friends/parents/family/grandparents if they're crippled by not being able to run a non WebKit browser and listen to their answers.
I'm not making up numbers, I'm generalising it.
There's 1.5 billion iPhone users in the world, and there's ~26 million developers in world, that's less than 2% of 1.5 billion. Only a set of ~26 million developers have iPhones, even smaller set know the word WebKit, and even smaller set of those that know what WebKit means even care that their iPhone cannot run a non WebKit browser.
So yes, I can generalise and say that 0.01% of iPhone users care about non WebKit browsers. I can make it 0.1%, 1% or even 2%, it doesn't change the point - a minority of techies who like to tinker with their gadgets (including some business owners who want to increase their revenue) want to force their needs on 99% of people by exposing over a billion people to new security and privacy threats and attack vectors.
All while for the last 15 years they were happily piggy backing in the walled garden that was designed this way since day 1 and playing key role in Apple's success building a marketplace of 1.5 billion people that was unimaginable in 2008. And then suddenly 15/30% became too much, please change the terms we were playing along for 15 years, open up the iPhone!!
Admittedly lot of the Safari security concerns (like JIT) seem very extreme.
The entire compiler and language-runtime using a JIT becomes an attack surface. Securing Javascript is hard enough.
Still a little rough around the edges (sometimes freezes; restart it; and switching orientation is slow), but the pros outweigh the cons.
Edit: I can’t find any hard and fast rule about browsers not being allowed WebExtensions on iOS, so interesting to see for sure.