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Comment by mrastro | Hacker News Reader

"Firefox/Chrome duopoly"? You're forgetting Safari; they have larger market share than Firefox.

Safari's share is capped to a specific hardware. Firefox can grow by converting people without needing to wait for them to buy new devices.

That said, I'm not really holding my breath for FF to grow again.

WebKit is portable and is used by a lot of browsers, including on Linux

It took me a bit of searching, but it's nice to know that there are desktop browsers that are not based on Chromium or Gecko, i.e. WebKit [1]. I would like to try Otter Browser [2], next time I use my Windows machine.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/nkzrj0/comment/gz...

[2] https://otter-browser.org/

Apple is not on my tech radar at all due to their approaches to product design and their developer business model.

In about 6 months, I won't consider Google either. I'll simply start targeting reasonable, good, healthy Web standards and implement them with progressive enhancement.

If they support the standards, then there won't be a problem.

The Web is fragmenting and it's gonna be ugly.

Firefox works very well on iPhone, by the way. It’s my daily browser there.

It doesn’t support extensions though. I think only Orion supports extensions on iPhone.

Safari itself supports extensions

Not Firefox and Chrome extensions though, only a much more limited selection

right, but Firefox only supports Firefox extensions and Chrome Chrome, so what’s your point?

Both Firefox and Chrome implemented Google's EEE WebExtensions format so there's rough parity between the two.

As a result, Firefox extensions got dumber. Bye bye Vimperator, DownThemAll, etc.

oh really? this must have been fairly recently, right?

My understanding was that until next year when EU+UK legislation regulating digital marketplaces comes further into force, all of these iOS apps for browsers like Chrome, Firefox, etc. MUST be wrappers around the exact same Webkit rendering engine that Safari uses. I think it’s cool that everyone can enjoy the better UIs today (myself included), but everything other than the UI is placebo.

It's a reskinned safari if you are not aware. The hope is once Apple allowed sideloading, we can start to use the actual firefox with extensions.

Well I did not know that. Perhaps that's why it works so seamlessly. Well one of the upsides then is that switching to Firefox in IOS is very painless then.

But it uses the Safari engine

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