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Comment by circuit10 | Hacker News Reader

> fined before by the EU for this kind of OS/Browser bundling

And now Apple gets away with only allowing one browser engine on iOS, even if you try to go out of your way to use something else you can’t (third party browsers have to use the Safari engine built into the OS by App Store policy)

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The market share of OSX in the EU is too small for anti-competition laws to kick in (5-7% depending on source). They also used this in a shield against Epic in those cases (since iOS is less than 40% on average). If that is a good argument I leave up to the reader to consider.

When Microsoft had it's browser mess it had near saturation level op dominance (>97% if I recall correctly).

I do mean specifically iOS because Mac OS doesn’t have the same restriction

Safari has been called out under the "gatekeeper" part of the DMA in the EU, apple's app store as well. the version on the ipad may escape due to a technicality, but I doubt that will persist for long.

Why is that an issue when it’s the engine? It’s hard to argue this is anti competitive in any way when it comes to browser product choice.

It limits what plugins/extension can do. For example Firefox on iOS doesn’t support plugins at all and thus you can’t use the same Adblock you would use on desktop (unlock origin)

I don’t see the point of being able to change the UI skin only? All that does is tricks people into thinking they’re using a different browser when they aren’t, and it gives Apple control over which features and APIs are supported etc. (maybe you can patch new ones in by injecting a polyfill but that’s a terrible solution)

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