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Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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.

> 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.

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