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Comment by gbxyz | Hacker News Reader

I kind of get the vibe that Mozilla is laying the groundworks for Microsoft vs Netscape Round II - or at least some kind of antitrust litigation.

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I really wish they'd go after Apple and Safari. Safari is basically the modern day IE. Whenever I do anything slightly weird, I'm fairly confident it works in chrome/Firefox and almost sure that it's broken in safari.

The fact that you can't test on Safari without osx is insane. Some bugs can be reproduced in other WebKit browsers (I test with epiphany) but some are safari only. Not to mention the fact that Safari is the only choice on Apple mobile devices.

I believe Apple is significantly worse than Microsoft in regards to browsers. I wish Mozilla would focus on them.

Once Chrome is allowed on iOS, then Firefox is dead. When they're no longer forced to test in a second browser by management, all the web devs will just check for a recent Chrome user agent and if it's not there they just say "install chrome to use this site", and we're back in the IE days. And then Google can stop paying Mozilla for search field defaults and then all of Mozilla's income is gone.

I've seen that sentiment a lot, I don't buy it. Google pays for Firefox so they can claim they are not a monopoly.

I'm hopeful that if people have a choice on iOS, then Apple would invest more on their browser.

They won't. They already have given both Apple and Google pass when chrome was launched or when smartphones took of. Mozilla sees Microsoft as devil's incarnation while Google and Apple are the ally in their holy war.

I am saying this as a developer who was using Firefox since firebug v0.8 era.

There is https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/26/24052067/mozilla-apple-io... and https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/01/19/platform-tilt/.

I hope so. But a lot has changed, notably the financial power and sheer size of their counterparts. We're talking about three of the most valuable companies in the world.

About time!

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