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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Safari is the last man standing before a ChromeOS world.

Except it isn't. Maybe I'm being slightly obtuse here, but the world is not "Chrome Vs Safari". It's "Chrome Vs Safari Vs native apps". If Safari dies we'll be in a world of "Chrome Vs native apps", and that is what Apple wants. Browsers represent a way to deliver software to users that's outside of Apple's revenue mechanisms.

Apple have every incentive to keep Safari being good-not-great at running web apps, so users prefer the native version (even though most of the time that'll be Electron.)

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Am I the only one left happily using Firefox? You know, the only "major" browser that doesn't seem to have these conflicts of interest?

Also happy Firefox user here. Do not worry, there are dozens of us. Dozens!

It's always nice to meet a fellow neverChrome.

I use Firefox Mobile but have long abandoned the desktop offering. The only thing I feel like I get from the desktop version lately is a spiritual victory whereas the mobile browser actually has tangible features I prefer like add-ons and the search bar at the bottom.

On iOS it’s still safari backend though?

Yes.

Another happy Firefox user. On desktop and mobile. I always have used Netscape/Firefox.

The Firefox that gets the vast majority of its revenue from Google, that Firefox?

I think the only full-featured browser with a prosocial funding model is Konqueror, where what little money there is mostly comes from EU grants. Not coincidental that its code quality was so much better that everyone else based on its rendering engine.

and until recently, the only browser that allows to split the view into independent sub-windows..

wait how'd you do this

It's in the right click menu, or there's a key command for it.

Konqueror is underfunded and can't catch up with the standards

Konqueror no longer uses its unique KHTML engine and has switched to working on top of WebKit/Safari, making it just a wrapper, similar to Brave. It’s a pity that the last truly independent player in the browser engine market is gone, but such are the realities.

Being the only Android browser (that I know of) that support extensions, namely UBlock Origin, means that Firefox is the only logical choice for me.

Chrome's Manifest v3 forcing UBO into becoming UBO Lite only strengthen my original decision.

Hopefully this move by google would push more people toward Firefox. Although considering the amount of people who happily surf the web with zero adblockers (including every single of my IT colleagues), I'm not holding my breathe.

Kiwi browser (chromium fork) on android supports extensions from the chrome store. Not that it'll help for much longer.

Notably this desire -- to own a platform by making "native" code for your proprietary OS the "preferred" way to interact with the world -- was exactly the logic behind MS's "embrace and extend" nonsense in the 90's. It still feels weird to me that people don't react the same way when Apple does it.

They don't. Apple gets away with stuff today that would have made Bill Gates blush in 1998.

Imagine if Microsoft was able to just ban any competing browser from running on Windows. We wouldn't be here debating if Chrome is the new IE. IE would be the same old IE (and the web would be a lot worse off today).

    > Apple gets away with stuff today that would have made Bill Gates blush in 1998.

Can you provide some examples?

Native apps have always been better than browser/cloud based solutions. The only people who prefer the cloud are lazy developers, tech companies who want to sell software as a subscription, and corporate IT who finds it easier than dealing with native software on the computers.

The end user is always served better by native apps.

Mostly I agree with you but sharing URL’s to resources is vastly better on the web. So is distributing updates.

Chrome won't die when it already owns 80% of the browser market.

And if it is bluntness that you want, native apps should wipe both of them, lets get back to the days of Internet protocols and leave browsers for documents, nothing else.

How many Regular Joe people are using progressive web apps in the first place? I think Android users also prefer apps over websites and PWAs anyway. I would guess that if I took a poll of all my real life not-technology friends that zero of them use a PWA, know what it is, or even have one installed by accident.

I think that this idea that Apple is making Safari deliberately shitty to stop PWAs from taking over may have been true at some point, but I think by now that battle has been lost and Apple doesn't have to defend that moat anymore. There's just a plain reality of installing native apps being a better user experience regardless of platform, even though it is more locked down and has its own significant list of disadvantages.

More recently, I have difficulty seeing what's so bad about Safari in this regard. It lets you add web apps to your home screen and works with notifications since iOS 16. Safari has features like picture-in-picture that the native YouTube app doesn't have. It also has extensions. Maybe there are some PWA features that I don't know about here that I'm missing?

Maybe this is my dumbest opinion: say what you want about Electron, every Electron app I've used has been a better experience installed as a native app than used inside a browser. Not much better, but better enough that I didn't want to keep using them in the browser (regardless of choice of browser). Slack comes to mind. I greatly dislike using Slack in a browser, and it's hard to point my finger on exactly why that is.

> How many Regular Joe people are using progressive web apps in the first place?

I know several of them, because Google doesn’t let e-commerce apps in my country sell cigarettes and other products containing tobacco. The android version of these apps guide users into installing their PWA version if they wish to order such products.

Of course e-commerce doesn’t really need app-like features at all and works fine on the plain web.

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