Apple's Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA

open-web-advocacy.org

514 pointsyashghelani370 comments

Even if you get past the roadblocks Apple has put in place, it’s not beer and skittles for browser makers in the EU.

The CRA, which is now in effect, lists browsers as class I important products. Technical documentation, design documentation, user documentation, security conformance testing, a declared support period at the time of download, software bill of materials, the legal obligation to respond to and make all your internal documents available to market surveillance organizations, etc.

And if the EU doesn’t publish harmonized development standards by 2027, you will be required to pay a 3rd party to come in and analyze you, your design, and the security of your browser, and make a report to send to the market surveillance organization, who gets to decide if you have the requisite conformance.

Are you sure that anyone but the big boys want to make a browser in the EU?

Here is the law, please point out where I am wrong. Much appreciated :)

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L...

Holy cow, they’re serious:

Penalties:

• Up to €15 million or 2.5 % of global turnover for essential requirement failures.

• €10 million or 2 % turnover for other obligations.

• €5 million or 1 % turnover for misleading or incomplete documents

On the one hand, these are important standards. On the other, it seems impossible for small shops to adhere to a lot of this.

Hear me out, I have a tinfoil hat theory. What if, those requirements weren't put to help small shops making a new browser, but to guarantee the big shops who already have a browser are getting fined? *hits bong*

And this is why the EU's GDP versus the US is now only 65% and shrinking. The regulations are about beating US companies into compliance, sometimes with righteous motives; but there's no forethought on how a domestic EU startup might be able to comply, or how a startup would convince investors to take the gamble.

Yeah, because EU software companies were totally destroying the American software industry before the last decade…

The EU’s relatively shrinking GDP has much more to do with their populations growing older and their population size stabilizing, and the relatively tiny amount of migration, than EU digital laws, most of which have been replicated throughout the world.

Additionally, the EU has always had weak financial markets, and the only strong financial center, the city of London, quit the EU and both the EU and the city of London have suffered because of that, with a whole bunch of LSE listed companies moving to New York (including possibly Shell, which would be devastating for London as a financial center).

That's not necessarily true; as the EU had many major players, especially historically: SUSE, Ericsson, Nokia, SAP; all were or are being shredded by US competition despite a domestically entrenched position. Even in 2008, when both economies did badly, the EU and the US had nearly identical GDP figures.

The EU might point to ASML as a point of pride; but that assumes an ASML competitor wouldn't get tens of billions to compete the moment ASML is inconvenient.

ASML (plus Airbus, SAP and Spotify) can't feed 300 million EU workers. Europe needs more than just a point of pride on the entire continent to be an economic powerhouse. Like we say in my country: "a single bloomed flower does not make spring".

2008 was a point where euro was overvalued compared to dollar at 1.60$ after the subprime crises. It's not a significant number.

>The EU’s relatively shrinking GDP has much more to do with their populations growing older

I'm not buying this argument. Same how the US's economy isn't stronger because Americans have more kids because we're not talking about agrarian civilizations here where every pair of hands on the farm ads proportional labor output. In service based economies, a smart person with a wealthy VC behind him can generate the GDP growth of tens of thousands of traditional labor jobs so population growth isn't the bottleneck.

EU economy is weak not because of lack of more kids, but because they have not captured any high growth industries (specifically tech) to generate better jobs and new wealth for future generations of youth. Europe is all old wealth and in the hands of old people. Once the economy becomes a fixed pie with no growth, population growth follows suit. EU economy is weak because after 2008 they went the route of austerity while the US printed it's way out dumping cheap money on fueling economic growth.

If Europeans would hypothetically start having way more kids tomorrow, those kids would end up being even poorer having to share the same fixed pie of limited economic resources. Another argument why more kids != wealthier for Europeans, is a news I read today of another local university graduate who moved his start-up to the US, so what's the point in making more kids if they have no funds to increase the GPD here and they leave? More kids with no comparable growth in money = those kids competing with India or Bangladesh.

Labor is absolutely the bottleneck. You can come up with as many billion dollar ideas as you like, but without people to pay for them, where does the income come from? Economies grown because money flows, it gets invested, and that investment creates income, which goes to the workers and owners, and gets spent again. With fewer people, it doesn't matter how rich some of them get, the entire economy will slow down, because there is nowhere to productively spend that money in that economy -- it flows out.

>Labor is absolutely the bottleneck.

Question: Europe has had an open door migration policy since at least 2015 and taken millions of migrants, especially Italy and Greece. Why haven't all those migrants turned EU's or Italy or Greece's economies into a powerhouse and built US big-tech competitors here? Same question for Canada. When is that magic economic growth from population growth coming?

Answer: Because US invests more money in high growth sectors than EU and Canada combined, and because people aren't fungible cogs in a machine, that you can swap in and out and get the same economic output it's agrarian labor. Attracting the handful of the smartest people in the world with money and resources like the US did, is more important and ads more value to their economy than attracting millions of desperate unskilled laborers like EU and Canada did.

>but without people to pay for them

Yes, people to pay for them, as in billionaire VCs pay for them, not millions of poor uneducated people, those can't even pay their rent without government support let alone boost economy. They aren't gonna boost anything except Amazon fulfillment center and Door dash delivery rates.

So NO, I don't agree with you at all. EU has enough local skilled college educated people since university is free here, but it has no VC money to amplify their labor into economic output as proven how many EU's top minds choose to work for US companies. Adding even more random people to a stagnating economy just means lower wages and bargaining power with higher rents, not more wealth growth per capita. Your comment does not disprove any of this.

I was responding to a specific aspect regarding population and labor, I am not an expert on Europe. I would like to say, though, that starting with a conclusion and working backwards from it is a really terrible way to proceed with a hypothesis.

>I was responding to a specific aspect regarding population and labor

Like which example are you referring to? Be specific. Because you haven't provided any reproducible arguments or specific facts to support your opinion, and I gave you a real life example that disproves your hypothetical one.

>I am not an expert on Europe

You don't need to be one to argue on this, if you have other arguments that can be substantiated with proof or facts to disprove mine.

>I would like to say, though, that starting with a conclusion and working backwards from it is a really terrible way to proceed with a hypothesis.

I'm not starting from the conclusion, I just picked the best real life example at my disposal that contradicts your point and chose to narrate it from that end, but it doesn't change the start condition or the outcome, it's still the same no mater from which way you look at it.

> Like which example are you referring to? Be specific. Because you haven't provided any reproducible arguments or specific facts to support your opinion, and I gave you a real life example that disproves your hypothetical one.

Your first paragraph, specifically.

> Same how the US's economy isn't stronger because Americans have more kids because we're not talking about agrarian civilizations here where every pair of hands on the farm ads proportional labor output. In service based economies, a smart person with a wealthy VC behind him can generate the GDP growth of tens of thousands of traditional labor jobs so population growth isn't the bottleneck.

> You don't need to be one to argue on this, if you have other arguments that can be substantiated with proof or facts to disprove mine.

I am not arguing with you about anything, I am stating why population is an important factor in economic growth. Are you disputing that this is the case?

> I'm not starting from the conclusion

You are starting from 'the US economy is better than Europe's because Europe is stifling high tech growth' and working backwards from there. It is incredibly obvious that is what you are doing.

> Yeah, because EU software companies were totally destroying the American software industry before the last decade…

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44553811 I pointed out that in the past a lot (former) successful German software were simply bought out by US-American software companies.

And that will continue, since it’s a reinforcing effect: Just like successful American startups tend to be bought by the big corps, the same happens here. There’s just no behemoth regionally to swallow them.

If my coworkers are anything to judge by, the smart ambitious Europeans are coming to work in tech in the US to seek their fortune.

you mean the US GDP is bigger because the US lacks consumer and environmental protection?

Everything has tradeoffs. You can protect children extremely well, if you mandate that every household have a live-in social worker, subsidized by the government with a 30% caretaker tax on top of standard income tax. If a government were to pass such legislation, do you hate children and love money that much to want to repeal it?

At some point, protections are not feasible - and the EU's "consumer and environmental" protections are apparently unfeasibly expensive in their current form to have a competitive economy. This is also self-defeating, as only in the context of a competitive economy, would these protections have any merit or be enforceable. Beggars can't be choosers.

I don't get your first paragraph, sorry.

But I disagree with your sentiment that the EU is going too far. Look at how healthy and happy the US is and how happy and healthy we are. The market, corporations and the economy are there to serve us, not to dominate us. Their existence is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Consumer and environmental protection are not a luxury, it's essential.

And surely, tariffs and trade wars have nothing to do with anything, right? It's just this damn overregulation and nothing else!!111

We can look at China that is focused on growth at all costs. If you look at rare earth metals, they're equally distributed but they are toxic to extract. The west has pretty much stopped extracting. China is still going full steam ahead. https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic...

China would bulldoze my hometown in 2 seconds if it meant an addition 0.1 GDP. I would say that the US is between Europe and China for balancing GDP vs protecting its citizens.

>We can look at China that is focused on growth at all costs.

It's easy to look down on others from an ivory tower in the wealthy developed west, but consider that China was dirt poor a few decades ago. What else would you have chosen? Die of poverty while protecting the environment? Same with India. They did what they had to in order to survive.

The west did that too in the industrial revolution. China had to speed run decades of industrial evolution in years. So why gaslight other countries for doing the same thing your country did a few decades earlier?

The good news for them is China recently stopped extracting rare earths on the cheap for the west. Their cities, air, water are waaay cleaner than they were just a decade ago. Chinese cities are actually livable now.

That's why the west is scrambling to find alternative sources on the cheap in other places that will let their environment be trashed, like Ukraine and Africa, since China doesn't want to be the west's easily exploitable environmental pay-piggy anymore, and good for them.

The bad news for the planet is that environmental destruction is not stopping, it's just moving away from China to other poorer places with weaker economies and militaries who are more malleable to western pressure and corporate demands.

>China would bulldoze my hometown in 2 seconds if it meant an addition 0.1 GDP.

Your western nation most likely did the same from the industrial revolution till WW2.

I'm not looking down at China. I use using it as an example of there's a trade off between environmental and growth. I don't believe I offered a value statement. Yes the USA is famous for breaking treaties with the Native Americans whenever they found resources on the Native American's reservations. The USA seized private property to give to a pharmaceutical company.[0]

Do you believe there can be trades off between consumer, environmental protections, and GDP? I do.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

No they are about improving the lives of EU citizens.

America doesn't give a flying fuck about it's people it puts corporations first.

Now I don't judge every nation has it's own culture.

> US is now only 65% and shrinking.

It's a fake news that just don't take into account on currency value change (euro has lost some value between 2019 and 2024). But if you look really want to look at it this way, I have a bad news for new: USA has shrink 15% since January compared to Europe as EUR go from 1$ to 1.15$.

If we look at GDP at purchasing power parity from 2007 to 2023 we have this:

- European Union: 31,162 => 61,217, +96% (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...)

- USA: 48,050 => 82,769, +72% (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...)

Which shows a slight catching-up by the European Union over the period.

>GDP per capita, PPP (current international $)

In other words, it's already been adjusted for exchange rates. If you adjust for today's USD/EUR exchange rate, you're double-adjusting it. The US dollar has dropped in the recent months, and much of that is arguably due to bad decision making by the current administration, but it hardly refutes the claim that US growth has outpaced EU growth for the few decades.

Actually, that's because the USA has the world reserve currency as a result of the former Bretton Woods system, itself a result of World War 2. This allows it to command a large exchange rate premium without having to actually work for it. This is the reason the USA has a larger GDP per capita than every other country except for a bunch of tax havens (which have artificially inflated total GDP).

Probably the case!

Watch them not enforce this at all whenever they need something from the US, like how they delayed (and afaik still do) heavy Google/Meta/Apple fines for DMA. Laws don't matter, only enforcement. See TikTok ban.

This is the biggeest issue that techies on HN don't understand.

These tech giants are essentially extensions of the United State's government now and fining them or imposing restrictions isn't as simple as fining any corporation due to the geopolitics at play.

The long term solution is for EU to decouple its reliance on American technology. Anything else is a bandaid IMO.

The problem is not the technical reliance, EU is relying on the US, full stop. This isn't a question of making a new EU cloud hosting provider (already hard). This turn of events was completely unexpected and decades of strategizing crumbled.

As usual this is a panicked overreaction. No, startups won't be fined out of existence by the iron fist of regulators who despise innovation.

> (93) In relation to microenterprises and small enterprises, in order to ensure proportionality, it is appropriate to alleviate administrative costs without affecting the level of cybersecurity protection [...] It is therefore appropriate for the Commission to establish a simplified technical documentation form targeted at the needs of microenterprises and small enterprises. [...] In doing so, the form would contribute to alleviating the administrative compliance burden by providing the enterprises concerned with legal certainty about the extent and detail of information to be provided. [...]

> (96) In order to ensure proportionality, conformity assessment bodies, when setting the fees for conformity assessment procedures, should take into account the specific interests and needs of microenterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises, including start-ups. In particular, conformity assessment bodies should apply the relevant examination procedure and tests provided for in this Regulation only where appropriate and following a risk-based approach

> (97) The objectives of regulatory sandboxes should be to foster innovation and competitiveness for businesses by establishing controlled testing environments before the placing on the market of products with digital elements. Regulatory sandboxes should contribute to improve legal certainty for all actors that fall within the scope of this Regulation and facilitate and accelerate access to the Union market for products with digital elements, in particular when provided by microenterprises and small enterprises, including start-ups.

> (118) [...] specify the simplified documentation form targeted at the needs of microenterprises and small enterprises, and decide on corrective or restrictive measures at Union level in exceptional circumstances which justify an immediate intervention [...]

> (120) [...] When deciding on the amount of the administrative fine in each individual case, all relevant circumstances of the specific situation should be taken into account [...], including whether the manufacturer is a microenterprise or a small or medium-sized enterprise, including a start-up [...]. Given that administrative fines do not apply to microenterprises or small enterprises for a failure to meet the 24-hour deadline for the early warning notification of actively exploited vulnerabilities or severe incidents having an impact on the security of the product with digital elements, nor to open-source software stewards for any infringement of this Regulation, and subject to the principle that penalties should be effective, proportionate and dissuasive, Member States should not impose other kinds of penalties with pecuniary character on those entities.

I have two comments:

First, I believe that you are correct in that small enterprises are not going to be fined out of existence (unless they continually fail to adhere to CRA requirements). The issue is that if you want to make a browser in the EU, you have to be extremely serious about it.

Second, you are quoting from the section of the act that the EU uses to lay out their reasoning, justification, and thought process. This section is not legally binding. The actual text (page ~28 and beyond in the linked document) is what controls. We have seen from DMA enforcement in regard to Apple that the EC does not consider conflicts between the two sections to be important.

> if you want to make a browser in the EU, you have to be extremely serious about it.

Why is this a problem?

No, really; why is it a bad thing that if you want to create a complete new browser, you have to actually be serious and committed to it?

A web browser is a pretty significant piece of software, and it sits between you and the entire web. You do your banking through it. You access your email through it. You book flights through it.

If the browser is badly constructed or malicious, any of these very vital functions can fail in unpredictable ways, be compromised by unknown third parties, or even be deliberately intercepted by the browser itself.

Here in the US, and especially for tech people like us, we're used to thinking of software as a complete free-for-all: anyone can make anything they want, and anyone must be allowed to make anything they want! That's what Freedom means!

But that kind of freedom can have pretty serious consequences if it's treated without respect or abused. Frankly, I'm glad to see the EU starting to put some genuine safeguards in place for the people who have to use the software we make, to ensure that we can't just foist off crap on them and when they get their identity stolen because of our negligence, just say "lol too bad, Not Guaranteed Fit For Any Purpose, deal with it".

Yes, I don't want to say that this is a problem (or not a problem).

The original article has a quote from Apple saying that they don't know why nobody has submitted any new browser for them to approve and then goes on to list a bunch of reasons for why this is the case. All of which center on Apple being obstinate. If Apple was suddenly a nice friendly corporation, would the browser landscape in the EU change much?

The CRA has been law for less than 9 months. I don't think that the general software developer community has awaken to what it is going to involve when full enforcement begins in 2027. I believe that at least some of the people that had originally planned to create new browsers in the EU have reconsidered now that they know what their obligations in 1.5 years will be. And that is probably a good thing (but not Apple's fault).

> If Apple was suddenly a nice friendly corporation, would the browser landscape in the EU change much?

Not immediately. Because there are literally no browser vendors beyond the existing three. Everyone else is just söapping on different coats pf paint on Chromium.

But then there's Ladybird for example https://2025.stateofthebrowser.com/speaker/andreas-kling/

For the record you can still put your meme browser on F-droid and let people download it.

It just won't be in any Android default list.

It’s possible to have software, including browsers, that are not subject to the CRA.

F-droid is essentially a Netherlands-based non-profit that will follow EU law when they have to. Some, but not all, of the software they currently host will be subject to the CRA, and if F-droid wishes to continue hosting it they’ll be a distributor under the CRA and be subject to obligations that they currently do not have.

The situation today is not the situation next year, and especially not 2 years from now.

> The issue is that if you want to make a browser in the EU, you have to be extremely serious about it.

The current browser vendors have made the web so complex that this is already the case regardless of what laws do or do not impose. It's simply too large a project to implement one for any non-serious project to succeed (as evidenced by the fact that we haven't got a new browser since... Chrome. Microsoft edge sort of I guess but that project was abandoned and they moved to chrome).

True, but legal complexity and technical complexity are two very different things. I can pretty much guarantee from experience that small businesses prefer technical complexity every day of the week.

We are not generally used to this in our field but just think about the amount of paperwork you have to go through in order to construct a bridge or an airplane. Browsers have become a critical component and it seem not really unexpected that there will eventually be legal requirements to help to ensure that browsers are safe given the amount of software that runs on top of browsers. And this is also not new, there have been legal requirements for all kinds of software for a long time, you will just not think about those unless you work in an affected area.

How will regulations on browsers make us safer though?

By making their implementors responsible for implementation and safety errors, presumably. See every other engineering profession and business

Right. Define "safe."

Personally I consider Chrome to be one of the least-safe browsers available, because it sends my data to Google. Also it perpetuates a monoculture. However, others may define "safe" differently, excluding such considerations.

Are you seriously suggesting that becoming more regulated like bridge/building builders is GOOD for software?

You sure you are ready to freeze all innovation forever? Cause there is a well documented inverse relationship between regulation and innovation. (Small teams cannot afford compliance officers and other such dross. Big ones do move fast, and, without competition from the smells, do not need to)

For software used by regular people who do not know anything about software and shouldn't have to, used to manage their banking, do their taxes and other things that they need to be able to do online these days? Yes.

>For software used by regular people who do not know anything about software and shouldn't have to... Yes (aka kill the makers with regulations)"

That doesn't make sense. Even the big browser makers have beta-versions clearly marked as experimental. If someone is so dumb that they don't understand simple warnings and disclaimers, that's their problem and nobody else's.

"Don't use if dumb" is the only warning that regulators need to require. The regulator should pay to the maker for all other compliance measures, otherwise regulations become only a source of oppressive power and picking winners and losers. "Only" because they do not increase software security in any meaningful way.

>but just think about the amount of paperwork you have to go through in order to construct a bridge [...]

Yeah, I do. Guess which industry has seen negative productivity growth in the past 2 decades, even though the broader private sector grew by 50%?

https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250712_WBC...

Could it be fundamentals are different when you're building physical buildings vs software that's eating the private sector? (Among other factors.)

Curious then that this safety regulation should apply only to browsers on iOS and not every other type of app distributed.

> "Are you sure that anyone but the big boys want to make a browser in the EU?"

Surely that's the point - a collusive oligopoly making end runs around the "free market". Just look at all the other replies, rich with apologia.

Can somebody tell me if this applies to FOSS browsers?

Someone will need to establish an entity to bring a distributable version of that browser to an app store, and in doing so, taking on the compliance liability.

Doesn't Firefox already have it? Or the requirements for Apple store different from Google in EU?

Relatedly, all Google apps (e.g. Maps) on iOS try very hard to push Chrome on you (even though iOS Chrome still has to use WebKit). When you click an external link, they present you the options of Chrome, Google (the search app), or Safari. This happens even if you don't have Chrome/Google installed, so they take you to the App Store instead of opening the webpage. If you choose Safari, it still doesn't open Safari, it opens a web view inside Google Maps, from where you have to press yet another button to get it to open as a actual Safari tab. The menu has a "remember my choice for next time" switch, but it seems to reset every few times so it constantly re-nags you.

If the link goes to something that should open in another app (e.g. goes to instagram.com when I have the Instagram app installed), unless I satisfy its demands to install Chrome, it takes like 3 extra clicks to open in that other app.

I have never experienced this on iOS. I just tested it in Google maps and despite having Chrome installed it opened in Safari (my default) with no prompting or extra steps, it just immediately opened Safari

Are you in the EU?

I am in the EU and I still get the nag screen sometimes, it's awful.

This just started with me with youtube links last week. Super obnoxious.

I just had this happen to me in Gmail last week. The last time it showed the nag screen was probably a year or so ago when I turned it off, so it seems they flipped it back on to boost some quarterly KPIs.

Google Maps on iOS has a toggle “Ask me every time” that you can turn off, which maybe you did at some point.

The most infuriating of those are when you do a web search from safari and google give you an overlay on the result asking if you want to “continue” and if you do want to “continue” it tries to install the google app and breaks any way of getting back to your search. Because continue doesn’t mean “continue what you are doing”

I can’t believe that their search deal with apple allows that.

I get that all the time. It's such an overtly dark pattern. Sad and disgusting.

As a user I don’t get why Apple allows this user hostile behavior in an app they distribute in their app store.The platform has alternatives. iOS has a sharing sheet. iOS has a default browser setting (in EU).

Google Chrome and Search offer in-app purchases from which Apple receives a share.

You have to download Google Maps in the first place- my (older teen and adult) kids don’t even have an entry point for Google, they just use Apple’s built in apps + ChatGPT.

Even Google Search relentlessly nags you to download the Google Search app.

Is it useful anymore? I switched to DDG a few years ago and then OpenAI search. Even when I was on DDG exclusively I didn’t miss Google search at all. And occasionally when I use Google search I get terrible results filled with garbage ads and the likes.

DDG is just Bing

Hmm, mine doesn't seem to do this.

Same with Reddit. They have their own share sheet, and then 'other' which goes to the iOS built-in one.

I wish Apple was more strict on this. There is no reason for them to have their own. Same with the photo viewer.

I love the iOS photo viewer, it allows me to select text directly to copy it etc, but Reddit needs to use their own.

On the other hand, it should be possible for me to set up a default photo viewer.

My guess is that the custom share sheet lets reddit see what services users are sharing to

…which is exactly what Apple should prevent apps from seeing. It’s none of Reddits business where I share links to.

It also gives them a hook apply a watermark to the shared image.

that can be inserted before presenting the iOS share sheet

Yes, Apple should start rejecting apps with bad UX. However Apple defines bad is good for me /s

Also extremely annoying that they implement their own share menu that you have to do an extra tap on to get to the native share menu. Amazon does this as well.

I assume it's so they can track what option you choose.

Reddit does this, too. It is used to measure sharing something as some sort of analytic/goal on your account for engagement. I tend to just screenshot them now after the annoying middle menu started popping up for me.

I really am not a fan of apps wanting me to engage more with the app when I'm trying to engage with real-life people.

Reddit also has that annoying pop-up when you screenshot something. “Sending this post to someone? It looks better when you share it.”

Perhaps they mean it looks better for Reddit’s smarmy user engagement metrics.

There's an option in settings where you can disable the Reddit frame the put around shared images

They wanted to hire me at one point for their iOS app. I declined; I didn't want any part of that. What a mess.

I hate this industry so much.

I despise that phantom Share menu!

I don't experience this extra Share menu in Google Maps. The share button at a location directly brings up the iOS native share sheet.

I don't use Google Maps, YouTube is what I was thinking of.

Ah okay. I never watch enough YouTube to download its app.

I do not experience this at all. I remember having seen the browser choice screen in Google Maps but it consistently remembers my setting and does not nag me each time. My default browser isn't even Safari (it's Quiche Browser) and Google Maps correctly opens Quiche Browser whenever I click on a link.

All Google apps will forget this setting at one point. Usually after an update.

They used to be significantly more aggressive with it, but have dialed it back

In the same way, Apple is equally difficult about forcing the use of Apple Maps.

If you receive an address in an iMessage, clicking/long-holding will always open in Apple Maps. There is no way to share to Google Maps (it doesn't appear in the list), and the default setting to use Google Maps doesn't affect iMessage.

You have to copy the address, switch to Google Maps, paste it in, and search. I would much prefer clicking the address to open in the app of my choice.

The sharing is because Google doesn’t register a share provider.

I can share just fine from messages to other apps like Tesla or other mapping software like ABRP. I don’t see a Google Maps share provider anywhere on my device though

That's not what I observe, it opens in the "default app" for "navigation". I've just tried this on my iPhone, running iOS 18.5.

If I click on an address received via iMessage, it will open the "default app for navigation". If I long press it, the context menu will say "get directions" which opens the "default app", open in "google maps" if it's set as the default app. There's no option to open it in Apple Maps. If the "default app for navigation" is Apple Maps, everything I said above changes to Apple Maps.

If I click "share", Google Maps doesn't show up in the list, but neither does Apple Maps.

> default app" for "navigation". > iOS 18.5.

Where is that setting?

Settings | Apps | Default Apps has no option for Navigation (iPhone SE 18.5, in New Zealand). Maybe EU thing?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/121430

* Navigation (in some countries and regions1) –– choose another app instead of the Apple Maps app to use when opening links for a location

I don't have this option in the US.

Possibly an EU thing then, I’m in France.

However, when I use Google Maps, I do have the behavior described elsewhere in this thread: it constantly bugs me to open the links in chrome (which I’ve never had installed) even though I always click “use default browser”. Googling something in safari also regularly prompts me to install chrome.

I don’t want it to open google maps or ask me to open google maps. Stop trying to make things worse for everyone.

Google maps and google.com shouldn’t prompt either. No prompts.

Look, it's Apple, Google and Microsoft being at their peak of customer hostility. Each of them constantly push their own browser in their own products.

If you use DDG browser or FireFox you'll find it dangling even below Safari, in a unattractively colored button "default browser". A slap in the face of course, why do you think I have an alternative default browser?

Yeah it's so stupid. I'm this close to ditching them.

I notice something similar in GrapheneOS. I have Play Services installed, but have never installed Google Maps.

When I click on a Google Maps link, I get asked by the OS if I want to open it using an app from the store (GMaps). I say no, go to google.com/maps and then get asked if I want to use the app or "Keep using Web". And of course at each stage, it could remember my choice, but it does not.

Bing's mobile UI is highly annoying, covering half the map by default with "recommendations". I still use it rather than Google whenever possible. Though I do use Waze when driving.

> This happens even if you don't have Chrome/Google installed, so they take you to the App Store instead of opening the webpage.

Curious which Android flavour this is on. I'm running stock Android & I've found:

1. Chrome app can be set to "Disabled", but cannot be entirely uninstalled

2. When modifying any system settings that involve choosing defaults from a list of apps that could include Chrome, Chrome still appears (despite being "Disabled") & if chosen for that action opens up Chrome surprisingly fast & is magically suddenly no longer "Disabled".

On the contrary, I have not had the issue you describe with Google apps (I mainly use Gmail & Maps & both always open Firefox for me with no reversions). I also have an iPhone (for work) & Apple's complete disregard for browser defaults for links opened from most apps (including 3rd-party) drives me insane. Slack opens in Firefox but most other apps give me a popup with only Safari & (ironically) Chrome as options - clicking Chrome brings me to the App Store.

>>Relatedly, all Google apps (e.g. Maps) on iOS

>Curious which Android flavour this is on

emphasis mine

ah! I must've been tired...

Well, iOS apps do that all the time from their side, so I don't see any problem there. User suffers because of that, yes. On Android you set a default browser (like Firefox Mobile) and it's used almost always (except some security-sensitive login screens to the Google Services I believe).

I admire your skill in bringing up, and distracting everyone with Google in a post about Apple's shenanigans. No love lost for Google, but wasnt expecting to read about Google as a top comment on Apple thread.

Especially because the thing he's complaining about doesn't happen on Android. Why? Probably because Android supported setting a default browser app from the beginning, while iOS forced all links to open in Safari by default.

I’m not sure the default browser setting is nearly as relevant here as how Chrome is conveniently the default browser on the overwhelming majority of Android devices, and it’s rare for users to change that.

If Android shipped with Firefox or Vivaldi or something as its default browser, I’d bet anything that Google’s Android apps would do the exact same Chrome-pushing as their iOS apps.

Chrome wasn't even available until Android 4.0 (as a beta), and it wasn't included by default on most phones until later. On most Samsung devices, the default browser has been Samsung Internet for years. Starting March 2024, there is no default browser in the EEA. https://www.android.com/choicescreen/dma/browser/

Despite all of that, there are no such shenanigans on Android. The reason is almost certainly that Google had to implement such a workaround due to Apple's refusal to allow users to set default apps, and that workaround stuck.

Even so, Chrome is still by far the dominant browser on Android, sitting at about 70%[0] between iOS and Android and higher on Android alone. There’s little benefit to be had from Google harassing Android users about browsers, and in fact it could bring users to think worse of Android, so they don’t.

[0]: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...

Gosh, thanks for laying that out more clearly for me. I'll try giving Apple Maps another go.

Interesting on Android you can easily set default browser and never get bothered about it.

Several comments point out this doesn't happen on Android.

I'm using Android, with my default browser set to Firefox Focus, and I found:

- Every few months, the default browser gets reset to Chrome. I don't know this has happened until I realise I'm looking at something in Chrome. Then I look at the default browser setting, see it changed to Chrome (without my consent, and as far as I know, no notification), and I change it back to Firefox Focus. This has happened at least twice in the last year.

- For a while, when opening things from Google Search it opened them in Chrome. However I'm unable to replicate that now.

I would suspect your phone maker or a rogue app is changing it on you. That doesn't happen on a Motorola phone with FF.

This might depend on the brand of the smartphone, as I am a regular Firefox user and I never experienced any unwanted change in the default browser of my Huawei P20 and Samsung A52 phones.

I've always hated the in-app web views on iOS. They fucking suck. It's so easy to lose your state accidentally. And it confuses me later when I'm trying to find a tab I had open in the Safari app, and finally realize it was open in a stupid ass web view instead so it's gone.

As someone who despises Apple's anti-competitive behavior, I would be okay with them removing apps for this kind of abuse.

Setting a default browser means when I open a link it should always use that browser without prompting.

Facebook/Messenger are another case of not respecting default browser, and always open with their own in-app browser.

Unrelatedly, I would say.

I get really annoyed when I open safari type something in the top bar to search the google search happens. then google has a pop up asking me if i want to be using google search app instead. to which the answers are Continue(highlighted in blue) or stay on web (almost grayed out). and if you forget and click on continue it takes you to the fucking app store. then if i go back to the browser and try to go back to the search that it definitely did. it takes me to the app store again. if i go back twice, i end up where i was before doing the search. fuck google and their dark patterns.

Oh my god yes, it's absolutely infuriating. I chastise myself every time I accidentally click Continue, because it means I have to suffer through another Safari→App Store→Safari→App Store loop..

I agree with the point about non-EU web developers.

As long as people in the US can't test their web app on "firefox for iOS" without first buying a plane ticket to the EU and getting an EU sim card, all eu-only browser engines on iOS will be second-class citizens.

I think the next logical extension is that actually limiting general public use across the entire world makes apple less compliant with the DMA. Mozilla will not be able to justify putting significant effort into the iOS port as long as it can only reach a small fraction of users, so in reality the way to get browser-engine competition in the EU is to mandate that apple _not_ impose EU-specific rules about what apps can be installed.

And it can’t just be the woefully insufficient TestFlight 10k users because there are possible upwards of a million developers who need to test their websites/web apps in the EU.

What a load of BS. How can I test my website on safari without owning Apple hardware? I can't so I don't.

Not the most practical but you can rent a macOS VM.

A hobby dev will not do such thing.

It costs 10 cents an hour though.

@javcasas for sure it's not practical if you want to develop with it, I was more thinking of testing on preprod/prod.

But maybe ngrok can be sufficient to test your local dev from the VM?

Plus moving stuff into the VM, opening a vnc connection, testing that it doesn't show properly, uploading a tweak to see if it improves, testing again, and so on.

10 cents is the smallest of the associated expenses. You are ignoring all the other expenses.

You’ll only get rates like that if you’re reserving at least a month’s usage.

For small amounts of usage, the cheapest I’ve ever seen is $1 per hour, with a minimum spend past $30, with various further strings attached. And most are much more than that.

Apple has a 24h minimum mandate so I guess I stand corrected.

But it's not $1 per hour.

https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/apple-silicon/

OK, that does look like it actually is only €2.64 per day. Having looked carefully a few years ago and briefly skimmed now, the absolute cheapest other provider I’ve seen in small quantities was over 8× that price.

I don’t think hobby developers are the cause for concern here. To me, these steps should be taken for professionally developed services where there is a reasonable expectation of accessibility (in my mind this would roughly speaking be those that are either publicly funded or where the revenue is at least a million euros).

For smaller businesses and hobbyists it feels like expecting support for all major browsers would be discouraging in a negative way. I appreciate digital art even if it doesn’t work in my favorite browser and a shitty online menu for a food truck is better than none.

I'm a very broke hobby dev, but I still do this as a final check.

Browserling has a usable free trial. They have a finite number of VMs dedicated to the trial, so sometimes it takes a while to get to the front of the queue, but it's been good enough when I've needed it. https://www.browserling.com/

It’s relatively easy to own Apple hardware when one lives outside the EU, but basically impossible to use that hardware to run their own browser engine on iPhones or iPads.

> How can I test my website on safari without owning Apple hardware?

Download the windows version from their website?

If Apple doesn't want to make their browser available for other hardware that's on them and they'll suffer the consequences. Blocking other entities from making their browser available on Apple's hardware is very different.

What's the point in testing on a browser that hasn't been updated in 15 years, even if you bother to set up a VM specifically for it (since every other browser works on all three OSes)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)#Windows

Actually, all web developers should be forced to test on 15 year old browsers - ideally with period appropriate hardware.

I remember Safari for Windows. It had a Mac chrome that was extremely weird to look at on Windows XP. It did work but Apple killed it after a short while, maybe because they decided that after all the iPhone was not going to use web apps Apple could not cash on, but native apps Apple could get their 30% from the store.

I mean, ideally you can choose to _not_ do so, tell your users "We only support Firefox and Chrome on iOS, and not Safari, because we do not own apple hardware", and then report bugs to mozilla/chrome if iOS users report differences.

Being able to run cross-platform browsers on iOS does in fact make the very thing you're complaining about better.

I would love it if the EU did in fact force apple to release a cross-platform iOS emulator to allow web developers to properly test iOS browsers, but presumably apple would argue that there are strong technical reasons there (and the DMA differentiates real technical reasons from monopolistic arbitrary roadblocks).

For making browsers available across regions, that's very obviously not driven by strong technical reasons. Making cross-platform code has real technical burden.

I've worked at a company that did this. We didn't have Apple hardware (except for a very old Mac that took forever to boot). Chrome was promised, Firefox was often tested, Safari was unsupported.

Customers bought Samsung tablets to use our SaaS product. If you're in the right area of business, you can just ignore Safari.

> but presumably apple would argue that there are strong technical reasons there

They already have to make the appropriate iOS simulators and firmware for European developers. Making that available to American developers costs them nothing extra. They just don't want to.

> tell your users "We only support Firefox and Chrome on iOS, and not Safari, because we do not own apple hardware"

I'd be pissed if someone did that for my browser engine of choice. Also, from what I understand, Apple still leads in accessibility, so this would be an asshole move towards consumers stuck in that ecosystem just because Google and Microsoft can't get their act together.

> I'd be pissed if someone did that for my browser engine of choice.

I read it differently. I don't think they said somehow block people from using their browser of choice, but that if you report an issue, the first thing tech support will do is ask you to use a different browser. I think it is reasonable.

You should be pissed at the vendor of your favorite browser engine for not making it available cross platform. Until then, the reality distortion field that makes you think others need to put up with Apple's bullshit doesn't work outside their fan club. Sorry not sorry.

> and then report bugs to mozilla/chrome if iOS users report differences.

A very unreasonable expectation.

I develop on Firefox and it works on Chrome and Safari with no issues on all OSes (Windows, Mac and Linux). In the extremely rare case when there are some platform specific issues customers tunnel to my dev machine and check the web app (it's Vue) with their iPhones or Macs. I remember only two issues in about 3 years with this customer, all of them with the Apple ecosystem:

1. A form that could not find anymore a picture when they selected it from the Mac Photos app. Apparently Photos creates a temporary file that disappears before the browser submits the form, when probably reads it again from disk. No problems when the picture is loaded from a normal folder. We should read the picture into the memory of the browser and add it to the form from there, of transition to a JSON request. My customer decided that it's a niche case and it's not worth working on it.

2. A slight misalignment of an arrow and a checkbox, but that also happens in a different way with Chrome and Firefox, so there is some structural bug in the DOM/CSS of those UI elements. We're working on that.

Except those issues I can't remember any cross browser or cross OS problems in the last years. If it works in Firefox it works in Chrome and Safari too.

You can run Gnome Web for free. It's the open source version of WebKit so you won't be able to see all the tweaks Apple adds to their proprietary build, but it's close enough that obvious differences are visible, at least on desktop.

Safari on iOS cannot be tested without paying Apple so I generally don't for my personal stuff either.

All of that said, American developers often can't even be bothered to support characters like ñ or é, so I think it's quite reasonable to expect an EU browser to be a second class citizen for American developers. We can work around that pretty easily by simply not buying products and services that don't work well in the EU.

Right, but approximately zero people have ever said "this website doesn't work on Firefox, so I won't use this website". They say "this website doesn't work on Firefox, so I won't use Firefox".

Zero percent maybe. I personally changed banks when they broke Firefox support and said to use chrome.

I welcome the Safari walled garden because if Apple have to allow chrome on ios, that's the end of any cross browser testing (and the end of Firefox)

I think that is true when you initially switch and are still comparing browsers, but I certainly no longer check if something broken happens to work in Chrome. Stuff may equally be broken by my adblocker. Too lazy to debug someone else's work.

Too often the only sites I find are broken in Firefox are "necessary" things like financial and medical things. I rarely see any issue with hobby and nonsense sites where "laziness" might be excusable.

It's the perverse incentives where companies with a captive audience that can't easily churn will be the ones that ship broken half-arsed sites and not care.

One phenomena I am seeing more that makes me boil with fury is infinite captchas in Firefox. If Firefox increasingly gets excluded "for security" then...

> One phenomena I am seeing more that makes me boil with fury is infinite captchas in Firefox

This is driven by enhanced tracking prevention. If you turn that off for the respective site, then it goes away.

Good to know.

Pretty sure I try disabling protections in such situations but maybe not. I returned to the last site that did it to me to try this out (on a different machine) and it didn't captcha me at all with protections on! Ugh.

That's so weird. I've ended up just disabling ATP whenever I get a captcha. Super annoying but less annoying than the captchas.

> One phenomena I am seeing more that makes me boil with fury is infinite captchas in Firefox. If Firefox increasingly gets excluded "for security" then...

I can't figure out if this is true. I certainly get constant captchas, but everybody else I know who uses firefox is also ad-blocking, dropping cookies, resisting fingerprinting, forging referers, downloading embedded videos, etc. etc... A lot of us look like anonymous bot traffic because we are trying to look like anonymous bot traffic. I don't know what the solution would be.

I can't remember the last time I encountered a site that didn't work in Firefox. Very rarely I need to disable uBlock for a site, but not for anything mainstream such as my bank, utilities, online shopping.

I did exactly that with Mailgun and Ramp.com

It's almost every day I encounter a website that I choose not to use or choose to use in a degraded form because the intended experience would require me to install or configure my user agent in a way I do not desire.

That’s very different from the website not working on the default settings of Firefox, which is what most users are expected to be running.

Is it? 42% of internet users used ad blockers last year. That's an upwards trend and is surely going to be much higher on a niche browser compared to browsers that are installed by default. Firefox does not come with an ad blocker by default.

Go to an Apple store or use a friend's hardware.

No thanks. If apple wants others to care about their browser its up to them to make it reasonably easy to test.

> How can I test my website on safari without owning Apple hardware?

Arduously?

Check this very surprising thing out:

https://github.com/WebKitForWindows/WebKitRequirements/relea...

This is how Playwright has a webkit engine. An old discussion:

https://schepp.dev/posts/running-webkit-on-windows/

And this visual engine rendering compare tool leverages it:

https://github.com/niutech/splitbrowser

Separately, not sure if/when this will be a real thing for Linux:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/03/kag-orion-web-browser-co...

> As long as people in the US can't test their web app on "firefox for iOS" without first buying a plane ticket to the EU and getting an EU sim card, all eu-only browser engines on iOS will be second-class citizens.

VM is EU. Heck, it can be an ephemeral instance on EC2, so it would only cost money while in use, probably tens of cents or something.

If there's a will, there's a way.

Remote debug on iOS is ass unless you are fully invested into their ecosystem.

And apple has some "nice" licencing nonsense around their software that makes VMs not the "obvious" solution.

Ah, that was silly from me, I forgot about those shenanigans.

Testing mobile interactions such as scrolling and swiping, as well as animations' performance cannot be done through a VM.

Only real devices allow to test these aspects properly.

I have a bit of experience with cloud mobile simulators (like Appetize). Ignoring the question of whether their simulators have EU builds that allow running alternative browser engines, the experience simply sucks for developing interactive apps.

You can't develop an app if you aren't able to test it like a real user would use it on a real device.

Apparently, a faraday bag and an ESP32 is all that's needed to make an iOS device think it's in the EU.

I saw it posted on hn before. Apparently, you emulate some wifi APs that are geolocated to inside the EU and that's enough.

First of all.

  We must not agree that all the market will be taken by one engine (i.e. Chromium)

Sadly there's no incentive for this, of course we have Firefox (still, right?) but it may perish because of underfunding for example. We used to have opera, IE, those engines are lost.

So what I think about the EU directive is that it basically allows one company (Google) take over the whole market. Because what we have to choose between is MS Edge (Chromium), Chrome (Chromium), Vivaldi (Chromium) and other Chromium based forks. And I forgot about Firefox which is the margin atm.

I didn't want to say that Apple should allow other engines. What I wanted to say is that I'm scared that once iOS allows installation of chrome, there will become only one engine in the world and THIS will be THE MONOPOLY we don't want to have.

i think it's unlikely firefox would perish. there are endless open source forks of major browsers, including FF, and even of mozilla themselves fell apart over night, people would continue to maintain.

FF's real threat, as open source software, is either:

1. further capture of mozilla and intentional degradation by google to the point of obscurity

2. organizational implosion followed by google deliberating requiring changes to web standards that break firefox in a way that open source contributions struggle to keep up with

3. a paradigm shift in how we use the internet (i.e. people transition to interacting with AI 98% of the time)

True true true

> Firefox [...] may perish because of underfunding

Hindsight is 20/20, but remember that Google has paid Mozilla 3.8 BILLION DOLLARS in the past 10 years alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances

You could do a lot with 3.8 billion dollars, if you spent it on your core mission and not chasing Bay Area trendy shit. Mitchell Baker is still there, making phat bank, she's just the chair of the Mozilla Foundation instead of being the CEO of Mozilla Corporation.

I'm not getting into details. Open Source is getting quickly beyond the "I'll do it in my garage in my free time" phase. It has a lot of illnesses (kernel patching acceptance problem etc), but if we want to have some neutrality, it should be funded. We've seen world with only proprietary software. And we don't want to come back there

> So what I think about the EU directive is that it basically allows one company (Google) take over the whole market.

Yup. It's a lose-lose situation

I don't understand the fear of Chromium. What benefit is it to developers to have to run through three different engines to make sure their site conforms to all three? Users will naturally collect around one option and make it the most popular anyway. If Apple can only maintain relevance by preventing users choice and freedom, why is that worth keeping?

Even though all those browsers use the blink engine they are dramatically different experiences, features and support.

The simple fact that they restrict this to the EU, where they are forced to provide the option, shows that Apple is not serious about this. They're barely fulfilling the letter of the law here.

If this would be only about security as Apple claims, there would be no reason to restrict this to the EU and to force Browser vendors to publish other engines as separate apps after they meet the security conditions Apple imposes.

> Apple is not serious about this. They're barely fulfilling the letter of the law here.

Is that surprising in any way?

They've been asked to not reject third party browser engines in the EU. Check.

Google has plenty of developers in the EU so I'm not even sure what people want exactly.

they want apple adhere to EU law for everyone outside the EU lol

how can people think like this

No. Apple claims they cannot implement this due to security concerns. Yet at the same time, they assure EU users that the Apple platform is of course secure. So which one is it?

By limiting this change to the EU, Apple displays that they clearly are able to add support for multiple browser engines without compromising security if forced to, so the only reason left is their unwillingness to commit to their users freedom of choice.

It’s just greed, nothing more.

It’s actually the opposite, no? If it’s about security it makes sense they choose to compromise the security of their platform only where they are forced to.

Security for who against what threat? It's hard to make the case this is possibly in the users' interest.

This is about securing the phone in Apple's interest against the desires of the user.

> It's hard to make the case this is possibly in the users' interest.

Not in the least.

If anyone who wants can make a complete browser for iOS, then, for instance, Meta could come out with their own Facebook™ Browser that does extra super duper tracking on them and everyone they interact with online.

Or Russia/China/Trump/Obama/whoever you hate most could make their own browser that inserts propaganda into websites, redirects you away from sites that are critical of them, etc.

Or straight-up criminals could make browsers that steal your credit card info.

And a) Apple would be put in the position of having to do comprehensive testing on all these browsers to make sure they did not do these things, even in unusual situations, and b) do you actually trust Apple's App Review system to catch it all? 'Cause I like Apple, and I sure as hell don't. Especially in cases like the latter, where they could create a dozen profiles and have each one submit a dozen slightly different versions of their compromised browser (eg, one that's Skibidi Toilet themed, one that's got scantily-clad women (just PG enough that Apple won't ban them for that) framing the pages, one each themed for the MCU movies...)

I don't trust the app store to act in my interest at all. They have damn gambling apps all over the place.

As an iOS and web user, it is my desire that Apple doesn't allow other browser engines because immediately Google and other web devs will start pushing webapps that only work with mobile Chrome and we'll all be forced to install a Chromium browser to use certain websites, it becomes default and users will think "Safari sucks now, a bunch of websites don't work with it," finally ending Google's last bit of real competition in the browser space: Safari with its terrifying 17% marketshare.

That's not even getting into the resources/battery life aspect.

> Google and other web devs will start pushing webapps that only work with mobile Chrome

This is anti-competitive and should be illegal, too.

I mean, none of this really affects me. Forcing safari on me does.

This. Exactly this.

As a web dev, I happen to love some of the tech advancements in Chromium, and as a nerd, I'd be thrilled to see it on iOS, just for the fun technical novelty of it all. But allowing it on iOS will downright kill WebKit, as web devs will just code for Chrome (as they already do). The floodgates will be opened.

As a user, I value battery life, smooth performance, and system integration (technically and visually). It's great to use an Apple browser on an Apple OS, just as it is nice to use Chrome on Android—everything fits together.

Gosh, I miss the pre-Blink days when WebKit was able to benefit from Chromium, but alas…

So to protect an artificially inflated browser engine you're willing to remove user choice and freedom to prevent a competitor from doing well? Microsoft was learned this was illegal many years ago. When the US government went after monopolies and didn't cosign them.

"shows that Apple is not serious about this"

noo, that how law works

EU make an law that forces Apple to adhere, apple make changes that suit the new law

if its works in EU only then its working as intended

> The simple fact that they restrict this to the EU, where they are forced to provide the option, shows that Apple is not serious about this. They're barely fulfilling the letter of the law here.

Apple may or (more likely) may not be complying in terms of allowing third party browser engines, but I don't see how you can argue that not implementing this _outside_ the EU fails to comply with EU law (which applies _inside_ the EU).

That's not to say they shouldn't allow this elsewhere (although it will just cement the Chrome monopoly - actually _decreasing_ competition and solidifying the incumbent's position) but I don't think you can argue that this law requires them to do that.

I'm not saying this is against the law, but it is clear that Apple only moves exactly as far as the EU forces it to, not a bit more. And within the limits the law allows, they're doing everything they can to make it tedious and difficult to actually get alternative apps stores or browser engines on their OS.

> it is clear that Apple only moves exactly as far as the EU forces it to

I don't think this is a secret - Apple publicly opposes these kinds of laws.

> And within the limits the law allows, they're doing everything they can to make it tedious and difficult to actually get alternative apps stores or browser engines on their OS.

Sure, it's unclear what the EU can do to oppose this though. If they push too far they risk invoking the wrath of the much more powerful US government.

The EU does not risk invoking the "wrath" of the "much more powerful" US government by telling Apple to stop abusing it's customers, market and developers.

You have progressive states passing similar legislation as the EU within the US so I bet they'll be getting the firm hand first if anything.

If states get too onerous the Feds will pass similar, very much less restrictive legislation, which will have the effect of nullifying state legislation due to federal supremacy.

The US government doesn't really take kindly to other states trying to reign in its companies. This is something that has bipartisan support. Even American politicians who support regulating Apple, only support _them_ doing this. Is this good? No. But it's also how Europe treats other countries. Basically: think about what France would do if Mozambique ejected or otherwise restrained Total -- that's roughly what Americans would do.

https://www.politico.eu/article/victory-eu-donald-trump-meta...

> If they push too far they risk invoking the wrath of the much more powerful US government.

what is it going to do?

threaten massive tariffs then retreat?

repeatedly?

  > Safari is the highest margin product Apple has ever made, accounts for 14-16% of Apple’s annual operating profit

Does anyone know what this means? Safari is built in to the OS, how exactly would you measure its margin? Are they just talking about the Google search deal?

Safari has a minuscule team and brings in the Google money

I think it's a bit misleading to call Safari a "high margin product" based on that logic, considering they could have made even more profit by not making it at all and just charge Google the exact same money to let them ship Chrome as the default iOS browser... (I mean an actual Chrome browser, not the Chrome skin of a WebKit browser that Google currently has to settle for.)

I'm not saying I'd prefer that scenario, just that it would have been a feasible choice for Apple and as such their Safari costs are actually profit losing not profit generating (other than potentially indirectly, if Apple is correct that limiting devices to their own browser engine improves the product and therefore aids device sales, but I don't think anyone would argue that's significant enough to call it their biggest profit driver).

That scenario seems just completely illegal under the regulations that are being discussed

I'm talking about historic choices rather than current options - but yes I agree that even if they wanted to, they'd face legal trouble if they tried now to replace Safari with an exclusive deal for Chrome to be the only browser.

If a supermarket has their own store brand products it's fair to say that those products have a profit margin, even if the store could replace their spot on the shelf with a product of someone else.

Sure, but if they get to keep $x per item for both own brand and other brand products, but have zero expenses for other brand products vs. having to pay to create/ship/etc. the own brand versions, you wouldn't talk about what great profit margins the own brand products have.

Plus, in this store nobody is buying any of the items, the only revenue is from the Nestlé sign above the door, which they'd earn even if they threw all of their own brand products into the bin rather than letting customers have them. So it's not an exact analogy...

They're referring to the "Google Search Deal", where Google shares 36% of ad revenue with Apple in exchange for being default search provider across their devices, an amount approximately $20b/year for basically just not changing the default. Which was revealed in Google's antitrust trial, where the deal has been deemed illegal.

Interesting. So it doesn't have anything to do with the browser engine ban, since Apple presumably doesn't earn money from a Google search from Chrome on iOS regardless of whether it's powered by WebKit or Blink.

It does have a lot to do with the browser engine ban.

It means that if someone else comes up with a much better browser engine than Safari’s, iPhone users cannot use it so Safari remains competitive even though it may have a browser engine that’s lacking, since others are forced to use Safari’s browser engine and not their much better engine.

Safari is the default browser and they don't support ad blocking very well. It's easily the worst web browsing experience of any platform I've used in the last 5 years.

Safari supports ad blocking just fine. In fact I switched from a google pixel to iphone precisely for this feature. On the pixel there was no way to have ad blocking in embedded browsers, and of course so many apps defaulted to embedded browsers for that very reason. On iOS the blocking works everywhere.

Safari as a browser is great on iOS. The problem is the forced default of google search, and worse, you can't even use search engines outside of a very small number of built-in. E.g. I can't set the. default to be kagi. This is because the money from google is dependant on them sending users to the "search" site.

Ad block works fine on Safari.

This Apple policy is the only thing stopping chrome from having a full monopoly, and we should be careful trying to remove it

It is shame that this is true. However it should not mean that we need to accept this situation. Hopefully Google anti competitive practices with Chrome can be addressed at the same time.

Those popups I get multiple times a day about how this website works better on Chrome , which cover half my screen and which forward me to the App Store, are incredibly misleading. I have misclicked many times and then the App Store opens up. If you go back to the browser and hit the back button, it will again open the App Store. I have to press and hold the back button and skip multiple pages to get back to what I was doing.

Strange - I don't get this in Firefox. I wonder if its because I'm in the UK or perhaps Privacy Badger is blocking it.

I think we are talking about phones here because on macOS you can use any browser without limitation.

This is with the Safari browser on iOS, using Google websites while not being logged in to Google. No content blockers.

Monopolies are made illegal because they limit consumer choice and the role of competition in the free market, distorting incentives.

The status quo has all of the problems of a monopoly. Doing this or not doing this won't change that. But it will remove another barrier to consumers being able to do what they want.

I care about the web remaining a truly open platform based on standards rather than the whims of a singular software project. What matters is browser diversity, even if it's at the expense of browser choice. Because without healthy browser diversity, the web might as well be renamed the Chrome Protocol and you lose browser choice anyway.

Apple, with their iOS browser lock-in, is the greatest gift ever to the open web.

No, the status quo has the problems of a whole series of interconnected monopolies. More than one will need to be broken up before we are out of it, but one step at a time. I'd be surprised if chrome is still part of google when the politicians have reached a happy state.

We're very careful, it's not being removed even after blatantly illegal actions, and even then the mandate isn't global, and we've waited for many years.

If Chrome has a full monopoly, guess what's the next logical action...

Might as well get it over with quickly.

In case it's not obvious, these crutches should be removed.

Treat Google paying Apple for the use of Google's search engine and Mozilla for the same thing, as anti-competitive (they're token gestures propping up the monopoly).

And break Google up in multiple companies. Not sure along which lines but I would steer towards platforms (Android + Chrome + Search + Docs + Cloud; banned from entering advertising), Play Store, Ads.

The same thing should be done to Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Nobody has the guts anymore.

> Nobody has the guts anymore.

I think nobody has the manpower to deal with all the shit. The EU already regularly fines big companies, but for every fine they get away with so much.

I meant more in the US. I think they had a fairly aggressive head of FTC but she's been removed (Lina Khan?).

I would not be surprised if Google is lobbying like the whole company depended on it.

Google has an incentive to make everything work through the web. Safari has the incentive to gatekeep the app store revenue, which is why PWAs are a joke on iOS.

Google also has bad incentives (Android, ads) but Safari is the IE6 of modern web.

Chrome is the IE6 of the modern Web. Devs are building hacky sites that only work in Chrome.

It's the browser we're FORCED to have installed for the occasional shitty flight or hotel booking that doesn't work in Firefox.

it's the browser you need when your shitty default browser decided to spend their money elsewhere instead of building a proper browser that can compete against the app store lock in

Agreed, that's why we steer people away from Edge.

If anyone is building using experimental features that are either flagged or unflagged in Chrome, that's NOT on Chrome. For example, if I built a feature based on Chrome's weird Observables, sure, I could do it... it would work nowhere else. If you're actually seeing this happen, who do you blame in this situation?

IE flat out refused to implement features that were agreed upon by standards bodies. They pushed for VML development and ignored SVG. They ignored CSS3 in favor of their DirectX filters. Chrome does indeed put experimental features out there AFTER they support the standards. Firefox also has agreed to a set of web standards and is simply behind on implementation.

Having lived(as a developer) through IE4 - IE9, I reserve that title of "the new IE" for the worst offenders.

It depends on what you are looking at. Chrome is the IE6 of the modern web as far as it is often the only browser people care about, but it's very much the opposite of IE6 regarding developing new features and moving web tech forward. In order to have a productive conversation about which browser is the new IE6, I think it's important to state what you are measuring

Work? No. Google has an incredible incentive to make everything javascript so they can make money through spying. The web is HTML.

The web gives users a lot of control using extensions. That's why companies don't like it. Google tries to fight it by not supporting extensions in its mobile browser. Apple is more egregious, preventing people from doing many things using the web platform entirely, with no escape hatch.

Are PWA’s better and more popular on Android?

Biggest differences:

- You can fairly easily list them in the Google's app store, whereas they are basically banned from Apple's app store

- iOS/Safari is much more aggressive about deleting data from PWAs

Much better but only slightly more popular. Partly because the Play Store ecosystem treats wrapping PWAs as a first class use case and you don't even have to source APKs from the official store anyways - so there's not much to gain by delivering via "true" PWA. Apple goes more the route of the stick than carrot.

100%! Without the Safari walled garden, start ups won't bother considering cross platform testing.

Maybe that wouldn't be the worst thing. Maybe chrome capturing the majority of the iOS market would finally be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back and pushes regulators towards forcing Google to sell Chrome.

Or… Sundar Pichai has lunch with Trump, brings with him a few nice cigars and a Google-sponsored Yacht (I hear he’s still short on these), explains to him how that’s all just a liberal media fake news campaign against good American products, and they decide to axe regulatory bodies instead.

Maybe when all browsing is under one monopoly then we'll finally care to regulate it properly instead of sticking our fingers in our ears and saying we have a different monopoly for iOS users so everything is fine.

We have to put more power in the hands of one organization that fights for our rights.

Consider adding this to your website:

    <script src="https://eff.org/defend_the_web.js"></script>

This link does not exist right now, but it will allow EFF to take control when necessary. E.g. by nudging people away from Chrome if it becomes too powerful.

chrome could just block the script if they try this

Of course if a browser does not faithfully execute the code that it is given, that will be a next level of anti-user behavior and might cause an uproar that will make people walk away even faster.

That is some wild moral coating.

It's the unfortunate truth. Nobody gives a shit about Firefox, not even Mozilla. Safari is the only major non chromium browser. You get rid of it and Google basically has full control of web standards and we've come full circle.

I use Firefox because it is the only mobile browser worth a damn. Mozilla screwed up by wasting resources on FirefoxOS and other projects that had no business case in the early days of mobile browser adoption, but they eventually got their act together and started supporting extensions and other differentiating features that people want. They're still slow-walking container support, but nobody else has that either.

Oh its 'true' but does the pain of having to use Safari make up for some sort of benefit of having a non-chrome browser?

I really appreciate that you sacrifice your happiness in favor of Apple profits so I can have multiple browsers competing against chrome.

Thank you.

I daily use Safari on MacOS and iOS, and regularly use Edge on MacOS and Windows 11. I really don't notice a difference, other than I find the dev tools in Chromium browsers more familiar and overall better.

You are happy to sacrifice your freedom and you don't notice a difference?

Have you considered you are just rationalizing your condition rather than having a genuine take?

Its easier to cope with the idea that you've chosen this 'freedom', than to realize you don't have it.

Brother, I have no idea what you're talking about. I feel like it's gotta be some high concept trolling lampooning the spirit of the average Hacker News but I don't have the energy to read your comment history and find out.

This is an understandable concern, but it's not actually supported by the data.

On MacOS, where there has long been engine choice, Safari market share is >50%. Defaults are powerful and many users are happy with the real and perceived benefits of the first-party brand.

Safari has >90% market share on iOS today. If engine competition were permitted, they might lose a few percent initially, but would be highly motivated to close any gaps.

There's no world in which WebKit usage among the world's wealthiest consumers drops low enough that web developers can target a chromium monoculture. The purpose of engine choice is to create real competition in order to motivate Apple to do better.

Unfortunately, the problem is that what's needed is for a massive special antitrust operation to address the tech sector as a whole, unravel all the various anticompetitive, bundling, and otherwise monopolistic behavior they all engage in, and implement remedies on all of them at once.

But the US's system certainly doesn't allow that (and, of course, there isn't going to be any serious antitrust in the US for the foreseeable future anymore). I have no idea if the EU's does, but I really don't think they have sufficient jurisdiction to do things like break up Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Which is definitely necessary to address these problems.

Make no mistake: the reason we are here is because of the morally- and intellectually-bankrupt shift to the Chicago School-backed philosophy of antitrust under Reagan, coupled with a government—at all levels, in all branches—that didn't understand technology, and collectively refused to learn, for decades.

I don't disagree, but this is an "ends justifies the means" type of argument, which generally speaking I struggle with. I think sometimes the end does justify the means (within reason of course), but I try to be very cognizant when that is the position.

I do also think there are a lot of downsides to letting big tech companies exercise tight control over stuff, especially when it is anti-competitive. The slowing of Chrome is a good outcome, but there are plenty of other downsides that come along with allowing Apple (and others) to have these policies.

Two of the arguments just aren’t true.

If you use another browser today even if it does use Apple’s engine, Apple’s not making search revenue from Google.

The second point is that it came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games and in app purchasing. Those apps are not going to the web.

Third, if the only thing stopping great web apps is Apple, why aren’t their popular web apps for Android and why do companies that produce iOS apps still create Android apps instead of telling Android users to just use the web?

Yes but there's no reason to use another browser today, because the browsers aren't able to add differentiating features.

I don't think you are correct to assume games can't go to the web. Any feature they need from native APIs can be added to the web. Full screen, gyro, vibration, multi touch, payment APIs, notifications, WASM and GPU support are already on the web!

Then why aren’t profitable games based on web technology on Android if it is just Apple holding it back?

But it’s not about the technology even then. Games make money via in app purchases by whales. In app purchasing is easy and they are able to tap into kids spending money. Most parents aren’t going to put their credit cards on kids phones. They will let kids do in app purchases with parental controls that are available on the App Store.

Considering Apple isn't even a go-to choice for gamers, the idea that iOS's minority market-share is holding back Windows, Android (and even macOS), is nothing short of farcical b/s-ing.

Heck, most developers don't even produce versions of their games for any Apple hardware, even though there are plenty of cross-platform development suites.

I think you are misinterpreting what “games” are. Mobile gaming and in app purchases of loot boxes and other pay to win mechanics are a much bigger market than console or PC games.

Though Apple’s current level of web app support is sufficient to build those kinds of titles as web apps, but we aren’t seeing a web app gold rush, and even if there was zero web app support - why not develop one anyway so Android, Windows, Linux and Mac have a shared web app, instead of 4+ separate binaries.

Because HN users won’t admit that it isn’t Apple holding back PWAs - it’s the technology, the business use case, and the fact that the majority of Android phones out in the wild are too underpowered.

Web browsers aren't supposed to have differentiating features. There's a web standard that everyone's supposed to agree on and implement.

I think the argument is that as long as 3p browsers are forced to be just thin WebKit wrappers, it's harder for them to compete against. Why even bother switching from the default when it's going to be the same slop with a different brand?

Most people don’t care about the web engine. The ones who use Chrome now on Android care about bookmarks syncing, Google passwords, etc.

How about you let the browser makers decide whether they need to have their own engine to compete?

The fact is that Apple makes tens of billions in pure profit from Safari, and by closing off one of the principal ways of browser differentiation have ensured that they don't even need to invest in Safari. They can just lean back, safe in the knowledge that there is no risk of disruption.

(Like, the main selling point of Firefox on Android is support for browser extensions, and they're only able to do that thanks to having their own browser engine rather than using the platform-provided one.)

You never know where exactly the next steps in browser innovation are going to come from, but it is virtually guaranteed that they won't be just in the UI chrome. If you're e.g. going to make the best agentic AI browser in the world, it's not going to happen by reskinning Safari, and as a corollary Apple doesn't need to worry about competing with such a browser.

Yes because of all the great browser innovation on Android there are a plethora of great web apps on Android and companies are taking advantage of it so they can make one app that serves computer users over the web and Android users?

And Safari has had real browser extensions for years on iOS.

Where is the browser “innovation” on Android - the platform with 70% market share?

Last I checked, Firefox isn’t doing to well on Android either…

Firefox’s market share on mobile is 0.53%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...

1. If you use either "Safari" or "Chrome" on iOS, then Apple gets paid. That's 97% of the market on iOS.

2. Many of those games could be rewritten in WebGPU/WebGL2.. if it saved them 30% appstore tax, and the install process was decent and they had frictionless payments, they'd move.

3. Because Apple is the primary target market, and if you've already built native for iOS, what's the advantage of doing web for Android if your not making the cost savings of only having to build one app. 70% of Desktop usage is now the web/web apps... that tells you what's possible if browsers can compete.

That’s not true. Apple only gets paid for search going through Safari to Google.

If the game makers are do interested in saving the 30% tax, then why aren’t they making the games web based for Android? Gabe makers want the easy in app purchases and getting kids who while they don’t have credit cards on their phones, do have access to buy content in apps with parental controls.

How is iOS the primary market when 70% of mobile phones both worldwide and in the EU are on Android?

If they already have a web app for PCs, then why do they need to make an Android app too if web apps are so great on Android?

And if the web makes such a good platform for games, then why aren’t there more great games on the web that would run on PCs and Android unmodified?

> If you use another browser today even if it does use Apple’s engine, Apple’s not making search revenue from Google.

Yes, but this would limit the browser technology to Apple's implementation, or lack there of.

> Those apps are not going to the web.

It's likely because the mobile browsers don't support enough graphics and lacking robust control features of native applications.

> Third, if the only thing stopping great web apps is Apple ...

Having wide browser support across all operating systems would definitely increase the adoption speed of new technologies. Remember how IE7 kept us back for years?

That being said, a lot of people are bothered by Apple's success and would like to access to iOS ecosystem without paying anything to them.

That still isn’t logical. If Apple is the only thing holding great web apps back, then why don’t companies just spend money on a web app + iOS app instead of also creating an Android app?

Even if they did an iOS app + web app for Android, if it were just Apple, they would still save money on Android Play Store fees.

But the truth is that browsers aren’t good enough on Android even though it is “open” [sic] and most Android phones sold are so underpowered that you have to make a native app to get any type of responsiveness.

Having the Firefox engine or Chrome engine isn’t going to make it any better. If the alternate browsers that are on the Mac are any indication from both companies - they are going to be slower and less battery efficient.

> Having the Firefox engine or Chrome engine isn’t going to make it any better.

Nothing is going to change in the short term for sure. Users also prefer the responsive feeling of native apps in general, though progressive web apps might help slightly.

I still believe that the EU started with the correct intentions with the DMA. They saw a need to increase the competition in the digital marketplace. However, it slowly turned into a public trial of Apple and transferring the ownership of iOS ecosystem to public domain almost.

How will responsive web apps help when most Android users aren’t buying top of the line phones and app makers have to create a native app to get any type of responsiveness?

Facebook for instance realized years ago that it would have to make real native apps to get decent performance instead of the app being a web wrapper.

I'm all for native apps. And you're right about the performance. PWA would only work for very simple stuff.

The end-goal is to turn Apple into a pure hardware vendor so that they can get direct access to end-users.

I wonder why they should make iOS specific engines. To be honest only two things come to my mind: Shortcuts Integration and WebExtensions. Currently Orion is trying to bring extensions but I think there is a lot to be done for that to be considered operational and if that proves to work, then only remains Shortcuts which only lets you inject JS, or say get the content of a page from a "Safari" web page (while I think every webview is basically a Safari page).

That brings me to this: Chrome extensions are valuable and we know as early as the rumors of Apple being forced to open up, Google started working on iOS port, but really, is there any justification for bringing a browser engine to iOS? I really don't understand how will it be beneficial when the user probably will notice anything.

Also we only have like four players to enter: Google (which will come), Mozilla (broke and miss-managed as hell), GNOME Web (will never come), Ladybug Browser (they are crazy and will definitely come someday, but it takes a long time for them to be an actual player)

So my question is: Will all this effort even fruit?

Browser engines define the capabilities of web apps and websites. When they don't support APIs or have bugs, they impact negatively web software.

Apple's WebKit is renowned to be lagging behind, refusing to implement crucial features and being rigged with bugs, hence limiting the capabilities and quality of web apps, and effectively preventing them to compete with native apps.

Getting other browser engines on iOS would be beneficial for developers, businesses and end user by making mobile web apps viable.

So these web apps will prompt the user to install and configure a third-party browser engine?

The likely outcome of alternate, capable browser engines coming to iOS will be to push Apple to invest in Safari so it can compete with them and not loose all of its market share.

Otherwise, yes it's likely web apps will prompt their user to use a browser with a capable engine on iOS if they exist. Nothing to configure, install and use.

Users will then be able to use capable web apps that take up a tenth of the storage of native apps, that are cheaper and portable across platforms — among many other benefits.

On my Mac, Google Chrome takes 1.8 GB. I would be pretty sore if I had to download that on cellular while trying to hail a cab in a foreign country because the app requires something like the Battery Status API in order to extract a surcharge because my battery is at 2%.

An invisible low battery surcharge… That's diabolical… don't give _them_ ideas!!

People were accusing Uber of this 10 years ago. It's not a secret concept. And while it seems Uber has never actually done this, it wouldn't surprise me if there are companies out there who do.

To be fair to Apple, as a user of Safari, I mostly agree with their feature omissions. Web developers have shown near limitless capacity for abusing new platform features and Apple has provided sound explanations for why they won't implement eg. web bluetooth. On the other hand as a web developer I have definitely suffered my fair share of Safari's incompatibilities (however I find myself in these situations less and less these days).

Hopefully not. If Chrome gets to take over the whole browser world, everyone's desktop will wind up looking like a scene out of "Blade Runner" with all of the ads.

GNOME Web is just chrome around WebKit.

That you for your ongoing work Open Web Advocacy.

Yes, Thank you! Someone has to do it, Apple is clearly dragging their feet as much as possible.

Just so you know, my post thanking you has 15 upvotes at present.

So 16 people are thanking you together.

17 now - great questions (I watched the YouTube clip https://youtu.be/_nRU9XUbnpM?si=ep1pHNCfWmQKVf5b)

I feel you could be more aggressive in the questions given that no follow-up seems to be allowed. Apple's "were doing all of this for security" is clearly just a cheap excuse. You're given only one shot and are up against professional deflectors (lawyers).

The lawyer's "I'm not discrediting you for who you do or don't get money from like Spotify" is just cheap rhetoric 101. He prefers to chip "You think You know better how to design our OS" rather than answer the question on how non-EU devs can test. Empty "we're engaging with Google/Mozilla...". That's not an answer!

The open web requires browser diversity in order to remain healthy, far more than it needs individuals to have browser choice. The former is important for the health of open standards; the latter only matters if you believe the web is whatever Google implements in Chrome.

Without healthy browser diversity, the web might as well be renamed the Chrome Protocol and the "browser choice" you care about so much is gone.

Android already has all of the things being demanded of Apple and there is no dawn of a new age. No demand for web apps. No demand for alternative browser engines. All that's there is the Chrome desert with a near-total market share and a sprinkling of alternative app stores that few trust or use.

It's a form of regulatory capture, coopting legislation to rid the market of remaining competition.

Again, that's an argument for browser choice. What matters to me is browser diversity, even if it must come at the expense of browser choice. Apple forcing the use of WebKit on iOS is the last meaningful backstop against a Chrome monoculture.

That's a deeply fallacious argument.

https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-brow...

It's not fallacious, that article is fallacious. By conflating choice and diversity, the article is poorly written and misrepresents the bigger picture. Browser diversity makes the internet better, while browser choice encourages developers to be lazy.

Developers exclusively targeting Chrome and forcing users to switch isn't browser choice, it just replaces one kind of non-choice with another kind of non-choice.

Thanks so much! it’s been a four-year journey just to get this far, and none of it would have been possible without the volunteers who donate their time just for the belief in a better future for the web! Will be passing this comment on!

> Safari is the highest margin product Apple has ever made.

Anybody has the number of committers to webkit from Apple? It would give us a good idea on the margin of the product.

Assuming 100 engineers costing Apple 500k per year, that's 50 millions in investment for 20 billion in revenue.

> For each 1% browser market share that Apple loses for Safari, Apple is set to lose $200 million in revenue per year.

They should be investing like crazy to make Safari the best browser out there instead of just relying on their monopole. And why the fuck is there no Windows version to make their iOS users happy?

> They should be investing like crazy to make Safari the best browser out there instead of just relying on their monopole. And why the fuck is there no Windows version to make their iOS users happy?

Simple. Apple doesn't want you to use Windows. They want you to buy an expensive Apple computer instead.

Why would you only count engineers?

Same reason I choose 500k, it's an approximation.

Given that Stack overflow has 500 employees, I'd say Safari requires 500 people rather than 100.

FWIW 119 unique @apple addresses appear in Webkit.git in the last year.

( `git log --since="1 year ago" --pretty="%cn <%ce>" | grep "apple" | sort -u | wc -l` )

Of course there's more to Safari than just Webkit, and there's more than just committers. So yes, the number may be close to 500 in total.

Assuming a generous 500k cost per employee, we reach 250 million USD, which is less than 2% of what they get for Safari.

Safari is essentially pure profit.

> They should be investing like crazy to make Safari the best browser out there

So true. It didn’t occur to me that I had naturally assumed Safari to be worse, when it would have been better in a more competitive market. So by relying on monopolistic behavior, Apple is also partly responsible for the Chromium monopoly (that this law will help solidify).

They don't want their iOS users to be happy using Windows.

FWIW, there is a very high probability that Google's $20B yearly payment to Apple is going to vanish, pending a current trial.

Safari is actually a pretty great browser, both technically and from a user perspective, and the complaints often levied on sites like this usually boil down to "Why do alternatives to Chrome exist? So annoying! I'm incredibly lazy and want to just deploy whatever half-baked non-standard ad-benefiting nonsense Google threw into Chrome this month". There was a Safari for Windows for some time but they had a small enough uptake that they abandoned it.

> Safari is the highest margin product Apple has ever made, accounts for 14-16% of Apple’s annual operating profit and brings in $20 billion per year in search engine revenue from Google. For each 1% browser market share that Apple loses for Safari, Apple is set to lose $200 million in revenue per year.

Right now in many MRT stations throughout Taipei, there's ads for Safari. I don't think I ever in my life have seen an advertisement for a web browser until now. I guess now I know why.

Apple's malicious compliance all the way down. They need to get hit with fines that actually hurt.

I am not convinced this will help getting more browser engines in general. Currently, it's Chromium that dominates. That's worse than webkit only on iOS in my opinion.

Now basically the situation is: No browser vendor wants to port their engine, because cost > benefit.

I think the discussion should focus more on why benefit is this small for users to switch.

With browser selection dialog, I think vendors have already 0 cost channel for UA. I don't think new binary would make a big difference.

Edit: they finally did allow JIT for browsers.

The article doesn’t mention Apple’s persistent refusal of JIT support for 3rd party JavaScript engines, which is a main barrier to implementing a performant 3rd party browser.

They relaxed that for browser makers: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/browserenginekit/p...

It's too bad Apple still doesn't allow different browser engines.

Perhaps there's some scenario where webkit usage collapses and chrome increases here that I'm not seeing, and/or some security management issues.

Increasingly I'm looking at remote streaming browsers to get what's needed for some use cases.

    This browser engine ban is unique to Apple and no other
    gatekeeper imposes such a restriction.

What other gatekeepers are relevant to the above? Is it just Google?

DMA seems to be an EU thing, which I'm guessing makes Asia not relevant here.

Asian countries could just say "We piggyback on DMA and require you to comply with the same rules"

Unfortunately the problem here is that Apple decides that they are the only entity that knows how to do security and no you can't see how they do it. This means whatever choices they make are clearly the right ones.

Why can't the internet just be fun for once

Because the web became too "capable." Fun is incompatible with a platform made by and for serious businesses looking to make money with it. It's why the cozy web is a thing that emerged from the corporate theme park that the clear web has become.

I've got a flashback from all the 'civil society/advocacy forums' I've attended. Big Co. send the representatives whose sole purpose is to make it look like they care. They do not.

Only state coercion — big fat fines (% of the total income) make any difference.

I think personal criminal liability would be a nice step to make corporations finally respect the law, but that's too much to ask from late stage capitalism.

sell your apple stonks

Another reminder of Rockefeller’s reputed remark, “Competition is a sin.”

Apple is behaving like the Standard Oil Company of the 2020s.

Honestly those barriers they complain about are not so high. I don’t believe any major browser vendor is deterred by this.

We do talk to the browser vendors. The bundle ID one by itself ensures it's unviable project. That's why 15 months in, there are no alternative browser engines in the EU.

On top of that, iOS continues to push Safari on users by disregarding their default browser settings.

Steps to reproduce: 0. Select a different default browser, delete the Safari app (just for good measure, even though it's not really possible just like deleting IE in older Win versions) 1. Open the Books app 2. Select text 3. Select Search 4. Press Search the Web 5. Safari search results open as you stare in disbelief

They do similarly with dates and calendar app. Disgraceful.

Apple knows that what they're doing is against the law, but every day, every month, every year they can get away with it, till the hammer of the law inevitably strikes, is more money in their pocket. So delaying it by every means necessary is what's in their best interest, it's what their lawyers are paid to do because each such decision of conforming to the law boils down to an accounting decision for them: "are the potential fines bigger than the profits".

You know a company has long lost the innovation race when the company is run by the lawyers and bean counters instead of the engineers, trying to milk their product lines form 10+ years ago. I wonder how long until they resort to becoming a patent troll ... oh wait. Their final form will be selling ads to their users.

Tech giants need to be dismantled.

Western governments just need to toughen up. If China tells Apple to stop doing something by next Monday, they'll have it changed by then.

"But due process!!". For individuals and SMEs, sure. For mega companies, absolutely not. Getting to rake in billions of profits should come with a loss of privileges, not with a gain. That needs to be the trade-off.

>But due process!!".

If only they would give the same due process to the users and app devs before they close their accounts.

Companies want and exploit all the perks of the liberal democratic western societies that helped them make what they are today and reciprocate with defying the laws and tax avoidance, while bowing down to foreign dictatorships no problem.

The only way you stop them abusing this is to put an executive to jail. Because that's why they instantly bow down to China. Braking the law in China is a legal problem with personal accountability, breaking the law in the west is just an accounting problem that you can easily pay your way out of.

The moment you put someone in jail, everyone stops breaking the law immediately, because nobody likes the idea of going to jail.

It's not just that people go to jail in the PRC, after all it's not like Tim Cook or other western executives need fear extradition to the PRC or something, it's more like because for better or (mostly) worse the PRC is a single party government, if one aspect of that government says "do this, or we close this 1.3 billion person market to you," it's a threat with actual teeth.

In the USA any given administration can try something like that and one party or the other will work with whatever company is being sanctioned out of pure spite, or will know that divisions in the USA mean that all that a company needs to do is play just enough lip service to appear respectful to the current admin. Worse case scenario, they wait four years. See: nvidia flagrantly selling cards to the PRC through Singapore.

I disagree with the "dictatorship of the proletariat" ideology, but to be fair the remnants of it that survived Deng Xiaoping does seem to somewhat work in resisting the influence of foreign capitalists.

>it's not like Tim Cook or other western executives need fear extradition to the PRC or something

Tim Cook isn't going to jail in China, Apple has local employees of their branch that can go to jail and pretty sure they don't want to so they aren't gonna defy their government.

>I disagree with the "dictatorship of the proletariat" ideology

Sure, but then the masses easily switch their opinions when they see the whole due process is only for the super rich, and when they break the law it's an open and shut case.

> Sure, but then the masses easily switch their opinions when they see the whole due process is only for the super rich, and when they break the law it's an open and shut case.

I'm a bit confused by this, can you help me understand what you mean?

If Careless People is to be believed, not even then. In that book Facebook was perfectly happy to have employees spend time in jail, as long as it wasn't Zuckerberg or Sandberg.

I agree, we shouldn’t have due process for corporations.

They say that somewhere one Darl McBride makes a sad chuckle reading this.

It's why I think they're such a great short.

Google does this too on Android in a few places. Stuff still opens in Chrome even if Firefox is the default.

Do you know of an example? I use a non-Chrome browser on Android and can't remember encountering this.

Some apps specifically open chrome, e.g. chatgpt was doing that for login. Dunno if still is.

it's the "thin" browsers that are half-embedded in other apps, such as Google News. In the menu you can see "Running in Chrome" and "Open in <yourdefaultbowser>"

This feature is called Android Custom Tabs and it is supported by most browsers on Android afaik. I use Firefox for this purpose, but it is possible that certain Google apps always use Chrome for this, not entirely sure.

I have Chrome disabled, and every link that I open comes up in the standalone non-full-browser version of Firefox. I don't know if it would behave differently is Chrome was available, but I don't give it the chance.

No Chrome, no problem. Just remove it or - better still - never install it. Use an AOSP-derived distribution like Lineage, use Cromite as system we view and all your browser engines are belong to you.

Install "Choose Browser": https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ub0r.androi...

I have this installed and all links I can choose between Kiwi Browser or Firefox.

Isn't kiwi discontinued?

Yes, last update was April 2025. Their developer recommends users to move to MS Edge, which I have not made the switch just yet.

Just checking if it got updated because I switched to vivaldi after lack of updates (don't feel comfortable with a browser that doesn't get security patches) but kiwi was good and I wished it development continued.

This is because the safari app is a wrapper for apple’s webview, which is the only way to display web content on iOS, that’s what the article is talking about

No. This is not webview, this is opening a full Safari browser instance and disregarding the user's default browser setting. It also used to be the case with doing a dictionary look up anywhere in iOS too, where the user selects a word, uses the popup menu to Loop Up, and then selects Search Web. This resulted in the absurd situation where you're using your default browser, looking up a word, selecting Search Web and then having Safari (again, not the default browser) open with a search query. Thankfully, at least that behavior has changed recently

That literally sounds like Windows 11 with edge.

Interestingly this is not the case on iOS. So much so that Apple Mail has an option in context menu for hyperlinks to open them in any of the installed browsers (while respecting your choice of the default).

Can we finally start putting dimwit Apple execs in jail?

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