Apple's plan to allow browser competition dubbed unworkable | Hacker News Reader

Apple's plan to allow browser competition dubbed unworkable

open-web-advocacy.org

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I’m not a fan of this. If the desktop market is anything to go by, this won’t mean huge inroads for Mozilla, it will mean huge inroads for Chromium. Safari on iOS has been the only thing stopping Chrome from become the modern day Internet Explorer, where Google feels they can do whatever they want, because Chrome has a big enough market share to dictate the standard.

How did we end up back in this place, and why is it being framed as a success? Opening up iOS in this way would only be a success if it was destroying a monopoly. Instead, this move enables Google’s browser monopoly to grow.

I love Firefox and would buy my first Apple phone if I could use it with plugins. Chomium without ublock on mobile isn't appetizing. Give me a choice!

FYI I use Safari with a Mozilla produced ad blocker extension. It comes along with their FireFox Focus browser.

Give Orion a go. Built by Kagi (privacy-focused subscription web search service taking on Google) that has ad-blocking built in, and supports both Firefox and Chrome extensions.

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...

Despite Orion being built by Kagi (and works natively with Kagi search), you're still free to use other search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and some other obscure ones.

Orion also allows you to chose a different search engine in private mode, which is a nice feature.

As a side-note, I thought I'd still be using Google a lot despite subscribing to Kagi for search. I barely use Google now as Kagi works just as well, without Google's crap, for essentially everything bar some really obscure spatial questions I have which Google seems to have indexed more. Though I don't expect that to last long.

I was not paid by Kagi to say this. I was a skeptic at first, I am very happy with how good Kagi is.

None of this works on either the old or the new conditions IOS imposes on software. These companies (or any open source project) cannot offer these applications under the conditions imposed by Apple.

Yep. I’m completely over the utter hubris of these computer nerds that have deluded themselves into thinking that this time it’ll be different, that this is the entrypoint to their techno-utopia, instead of looking at the reality of what this is going to mean for users, including them.

I like that I can use Firefox on my Mac, and that I only very rarely come across something that doesn’t work and DOES in Chrome. I’m aware of the reality that Mobile Safari is the biggest thing standing in the way of Google just doing whatever they want with web “standards”, regardless what bureaucracy fetishists say about there being “other members” in standards bodies. I see the prospect of Blink (or whatever it’s called now) on iOS as a threat to the browser ecosystem. And as a web developer I’m just flat-out tired by the mere thought of having to go through another IE.

But hey, I’m glad that we are getting all this to briefly allow some freedom-loving nerds to play make-believe and enjoy a couple of years of Firefox on their devices before they start seeing sites break.

I'm trying to think of a time that something has ONLY worked on Chrome on my Mac in recent times and I honestly cannot think of one. Actually there was one: When I booked PeruRail a couple of years ago, the booking site only worked on Chrome. Otherwise in the exceedingly rare times that Firefox doesn't work, switching to Safari does.

Switching to Safari works because iOS only had Safari.

Right but we are talking about MacOS here not iOS. And FWIW because of that I just straight up couldn’t book PeruRail on my phone I had to do it from my Mac

Even if bringing down Apple's walled garden ends up strengthening chrome, don't you think we should be trying to solve this problem at the source? Maybe the solution is to break up google (usually a messy affair), or maybe we should all agree on a fork of chrome that has full community support, is shielded from google's menacing changes and is adopted by all current chrome derivatives (like brave, vivaldi, opera, etc). Heck, call it khtml2 and give governance of this project back to the KDE folks (with of course the whole FOSS community helping and backing it, they obviously can't do this alone). Maybe even Mozilla could throw the towel and use this new engine without having to give up control of the web to google.

Who's "we"? Google controls Android and Chrom(e/ium). Unless all Android OEMs switch to your engine (why would they?), and you somehow get a bigger developer base, upstream Chromium (and hence Chrome and Google) sets the ecosystem.

Instead of Chrome being the modern Internet Explorer, mobile Safari has taken that place.

From this point of view I'm not sure what we're losing in the proposition when we still get Firefox and alternative browsers on iOS.

Right now the choice is between Safari holding back the whole web on mobile (as Safari stagnates Chrome gets a pass for barely coasting as well on android) or finally have it move forward at perhaps the cost of Chrome gaining more market share. Refusing progress just to spite a single company doesn't feel worth it to be honest.

No it hasn’t. There’s at least a duopoly now.

With sufficient market share, where is the incentive for web developers to test in anything but Chrome?

Today they need to ensure it works on the iPhone, and if they are already testing two browsers, or ensuring capability across two browsers, that means Firefox is likely coming along for the ride.

With this move I’m preparing for a future where developers simply put up a message, “best viewed in Chrome”, or they simply do a user agent check and don’t even load the page if it’s not Chrome. Not because the page wouldn’t work in Safari or Firefox, but rather because they couldn’t be bothered to test.

I don’t see this as refusing progress, I see it as defense against a monarchy on the Internet, where Google holds all the cards.

You are describing the android situation.

There is almost no incentive for devs to test non blink based browsers when targeting android. But that's the space where firefox lives, it's actually pretty good, there's extremely fewnpages that don't work in it (disclaimer: I'm not opening figma on my phone) and I'm glad to have it.

I sure wish firefox could get better marketshare and bring real competition, but if my choice was "Safari only" or "Chrome dominating, with other browsers on the side", I'd choose again and again the second proposition.

Safari does not compete on any OS other than MacOS. It was placing no competitive pressure on chrome, and Apple most certainly cost Firefox many billions in search revenue due to lost market share on iOS.

Also our main and primary goal is to ensure that web apps become viable. That was never going to happen, while Apple had no incentive whatsoever to invest in Safari to the level required to make a competitive browser.

OWA was only formed out of deep frustration with both the feature set and stability of Safari, born as a result of a lack of competition.

This paper is a couple of years old now, but it really describes the issues in a lot of detail: https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#introdu...

While I don’t think it’s great they don’t allow other browser engines to run on iOS I find this article to be hollow on the details as to how the new guidelines Apple put out are unworkable that it will be insurmountably hard to implement on for the platform. It is scant on these details.

I don’t like the verbiage Apple used either but this doesn’t layout what the actual “unworkable” issues are

I thought the key issue was most likely Apple's Geo-locking of open browser engines to Europe only. The article should have expounded on the challenges of browser providers having to now essentially maintain two entirely seperate apps, one for a global market and one for the EU market.

One thing that comes to mind for web developers outside of Europe, how can they even properly test that their website operates and renders correctly if they can't even run the version with their own rendering engines on their iOS devices?

If an issue arises, how can they even troubleshoot it adequately if they cannot reproduce the problem reliably?

> how can they even properly test that their website operates and renders correctly if they can't even run the version with their own rendering engines on their iOS devices?

We will have to see. This is a natural experiment.

Would be ironic if the EU strengthens native apps’ hand. More entrepreneurially: there might be a niche for a testing suite that emulates across these phone-OS-browser sets, perhaps on real devices.

How does Apple apply the geo-fence? Could one VPN into Europe and bypass it?

I guess the user can't stop them from using the GPS to get your real location and send it home, so maybe there really isn't a solution with such a tightly controlled platform.

This doesn't matter. Apple will impose "app notarization" (you can distribute apps through alternative app stores BUT apple still approves (or not) apps)

This approval is not optional, not free, and dependent on developer acceptance of a runtime fee. If your app gets installed on >1 million devices, it's 0.5euro per install (heh ... euro, I bet someone in apple management thought that was clever, funny and very insulting to the EU. I get it ... heh. Funny. I hope they'll be made to regret that)

By the way, NO, not just a runtime fee. Also a 10% tax on all payments made through any third party payment service, you don't get to use Apple APIs, ... lots of other limitations.

So they removed the app store requirement, but aren't allowing sideloading (anymore than before), and kept both Apple as gatekeepers AND the fees everyone's complaining about.

So now the question is: does the EU have the balls to restrict apple imports or impose the fines they threatened?

Indeed, that is the question. My guess is no, and Apple knows it which is why they're complying in such a malicious way. They could definitely surprise me, and i hope they do. I'm in the US so don't have a perspective on the EU beyond what I've read online, but it takes so long to iterate and Apple can drag it out a long time and wear people down, and they are clearly going to embrace malicious compliance to the maximum extent.

Same way you can today: test in the mobile builds.

It’s highly unlikely the iOS engine will be too different from the Android one for example. There may be some differences but I doubt it’ll be in the rendering, at least in practice

There's a ton to go through, we're working on a story for late next week that will go through all the detail. We wanted to make sure the story was out there, and that we posted all the links so that people could go through it.

+ the article is a bit of celebration of a milestone, it took us 3 years and collectively thousands of hours of work to force Apple to do this.

Dubbed is when you give something a title or a nickname. Deemed is when you evaluate or judge or regard something as.

yeah sorry about that, we're all computer nerds, English is not our strong point.

Even more absurd, alternative browser engines are limited to iOS; iPadOS be damned.

What a mess.

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/01/26/apple-eu-app-ecosystem-...

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