Apple tells over a billion iPhone users to stop using Chrome | Hacker News Reader

Apple tells over a billion iPhone users to stop using Chrome

tomsguide.com

34 pointsmandeepj23 comments

> While it doesn’t overtly tell people to stop using Chrome

clickbait headline.

i did find it interesting that 30% of ios users use Chrome. wild!

Some significant portion of those users with Chrome installed in iOS are using it to access the Google/Chrome password manager synced with Google accounts in other apps (like Safari), without ever using it as a browser on their phones… iOS will suggest passwords from Chrome as well as its built-in iCloud password manager when installed.

> i did find it interesting that 30% of ios users use Chrome. wild!

As someone who used to use Chrome on iOS, it's not that wild to me: the UX of Safari on iOS sucked pretty bad for a long time (up until iOS 16, IIRC). I usually have hundreds of tabs open, and the old Safari UI for viewing all tabs was horrible: it used a skeuomorphic design, simulating a stack of paper. The 3D effect is distracting, and it's also a terrible use of screen real estate; a grid of all open browser tabs/pages is much better for quickly finding what you're looking for. Prior to iOS 16, I used Chrome specifically because the tab overview UI was so much better.

In case anyone has forgotten, the first few seconds of this video shows what the tab overview UI looked like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSXJow3LAWA

Strangely, there are people who would like the old iOS Safari UI back, despite it being strictly less usable: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254384502?sortBy=best

I eventually switched back to Safari when I accidentally realized that Apple had fixed their tab overview UI (and I couldn't get ad blocking to work reliably with Chrome).

Tom's guide wants to show notifications.

Apple's continued insistence on "privacy" in their marketing is just plain stupid. They somehow assume that if you've bought an iPhone, you automatically trust every single one of their online services as well, including their asinine app review. They literally don't allow you to take your own responsibility for your data, they treat you like a child who doesn't quite understand yet how the world works. It ain't privacy if the damn thing couldn't get past the out of the box experience unless some Apple server allows it.

> like a child who doesn't quite understand yet how the world works.

This is an accurate representation of most people’s relationship with technology. Not the average HN reader, but we are not the majority of the market.

The majority of the market clicks on everything Facebook shows them.

But if the big tech will continue to treat them like that, no progress will be made. The difference is that an actual child eventually grows up and somehow learns the basics of living in a society. This average user, though, is somehow not expected to "grow up".

IMO we are only so good with technology because technology required education to use. But at the same time enabled experimentation with no consequences.

The average user will grow up only after they’ve transferred all their money to a Nigerian prince.

If this is what it takes for us to progress as a society, then let them do it.

The title has nothing to do with the ad, and it’s heavily editorialized to the point of clickbait. Chrome isn’t even mentioned by name or by icon in the entire ad.

It doesn’t even show any specific browser (before Safari), just a generic design made for the ad.

From the video title -- it seems it's a wordplay on "flock"/FLoC? Quite cool

Worse then that is how hard it is to search or use gmail on yourniii ppl home without accidentally clicking a pop up from google that will take you to download chrome

Safari will always be worse than Internet Explorer.

I disagree, as someone who lived through the atrocities committed by ActiveX.

Most of those atrocities happened because IE was the popular browser at the time. Nobody would have built those things if no one was using IE, they built them because "everybody" was.

Chrome is in that same popularity catbird seat at the moment. There are entire websites that "everyone" needs to install Chrome Extensions to work with, and those are only Chrome Extensions. It is the same thing, different decade. It will be the same mess that IE left behind when Google decides working on a browser is boring and there are more promotions to be had in moving the team to building another Messenger or a another new Operating System.

> There are entire websites that "everyone" needs to install Chrome Extensions

Do you have examples? I've never heard of this.

I suppose offline gDocs might qualify. I can't think of too many others that I have encountered.

Some have been Corporate Intranet things, which are also the most scary from IE hindsight because that's where IE6 infested the worst was Corporate Intranet things that became mission critical legacy code that stuck entire companies in IE6 for decades.

One of the big ones that is a huge company (that probably should know better, but here we are) is Salesforce and their Lightning Chrome Extension [1]. "Everyone" says that you should "always" have that extension when working with Salesforce, because Salesforce is horrible to work with if you don't. That's not even the only Salesforce Chrome Extension, if you are a developer or an admin there are two to three others to consider too. Instead of building a better web app, or a proper desktop app, Salesforce has become a "Chrome-only" worst of both worlds for a lot of its users.

[1] https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.lex_lightnin...

This isn’t a substantive argument at all and feels very low-effort knee-jerk for this forum.

How is it worse?

it objectively isn't

Safari is superior to Chrome. I don’t care much but I’m typing this just out of spite.

Chrome is a telemetry device with the appearance of a web browser.

Firefox is shady abusing telemetry. It seems FOSS but Mozilla has turned into an advertising company and activated adds for every user.

If you want real FOSS, you need to use Librewolf or some other alternative for the time being

> Safari is superior to Chrome

For visiting Google and Facebook maybe, but I can’t tell you the number of times ads and pop up malware has caused my phone to hang in Safari, which doesn’t happen in Chrome. You visit lesser known media sites, stream sports not available in your country on a shady site, etc. only on chrome, never safari.

Safari is one of the primary reasons Internet Explorer died.

The iPhone became a huge hit and it ran Safari. Huge swaths of the internet had "requires Internet Explorer" plastered on every page. The iPhone immediately made that untenable, at least in mindshare even if marketshare was not quite there yet.

As someone who used Firefox at the time web page compatibility improved tremendously thanks to the iPhone and Safari.

I'll also remind people that Google decided they didn't want to play in the same sandbox as everyone else and forked WebKit to make Blink, then promptly went on a tear ripping out what they didn't like and adding their own proprietary extensions as fast as their engineers could think them up.

Google is also the one spamming everyone who goes to Google.com with prompts to switch to Chrome.

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