Hacker News Reader

Comment by pharmakom | Hacker News Reader

Is there a timeline for real Firefox on iOS? Is the EU actually going to push this through?

I don't know why apple can't just make an exception for Mozilla and call it a day.

It used to be that all scripting engines were off limits, because you could easily write a commercial app that didn't give Apple 30% of all revenue. And Firefox is pretty obviously a big scripting platform which you can do anything with.

But since then they've made so many exceptions to that policy, where the applications are important to keep people in the Apple ecosystem, that it's hardly a strict rule anymore. So while they probably could make yet another exception, they probably feel a general purpose browser such as Firefox would risk being the last exception they make.

Once you make an exception, you bet Google will want an exception too.

Wow, if that happens I can really see myself getting an iPhone. Haven't used one for must be 8 years now, but the disrespect from Google towards the open internet has been pretty galling, and the voice commands and speech to text are absolutely fucked, and the exclusive presence of uBlock Origin on Android (of all systems!) is the only thing keeping me on it at this point.

No earlier than march, I guess. That's when the DMA kicks in for iOS/appstore.

It may still take longer, since dev work has to be done, and I have no idea if apple's still going to block JIT usage for anything besides safari.

Other browsers on iOS are already supporting extensions, with WebKit limitations, including ones like uBO. iOS is not a priority for Mozilla at this point, or we’d have seen _some extension support_.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com