Is this a good thing? Doesn't this just expand the marketshare of Chromium?
Using market forces to encourage more consolidation into a single engine is *bad*.
Safari is often the hold-out on implementing features[1] that would be useful to users - presumably because it would make web apps viable on iOS, and compete with App store apps where Apple takes a 30% cut
> Using market forces to encourage more consolidation into a single engine is bad.
Competition on a level playing-field is not bad, even if you dislike the superior product (as determined by the free hand of the market.)
1. If memory serves: various APIs useful for PWAs were delayed or kneecapped on Safari
It doesn't support Ublock Origin.
Safari is missing many performance and device-related features that would allow you to create a compelling web application and bypass the App store.
I tried once, you run into the most unexpected roadblocks and come to the conclusion "I have to release this as an App." Well... guess why.
That said, about half the list appears to be stuff I don't care about one way or the other. At least not without spending way more time researching those CSS elements than I care to invest.
And I'd be totally fine with an "Allow Alternate Browser Features: Y/N" setting or similar, as long as it defaulted to the current behavior (locked down Safari only).
Yeah, looks like a nice checklist of things to turn off to me…
Where Apple is doing everything they can to make that “market” work in their interests instead of as it is supposed to from a user perspective. And when you don't have a choice, it's not really a market either.
Well what you personally want is irrelevant to the law and what regulators judge to be unlawful, so that's the real good thing.
>If they're not viable, it forces developers to make real apps or else just make a web page instead of whatever awful-UX nonsense they were planning.
They are perfectly viable and it has nothing to do with UX, but you have already exposed your bias and made clear that you are arguing in bad faith by spreading misinformation in your other comments.
If Safari were even remotely close to being "the best mainstream browser" as you claimed, it would manifest itself in Safari capturing a dominant market share i.e. people would naturally gravitate towards Safari without Apple forcing it upon users. Apple would also invest much more into Web technology, but they don't have any interest in doing that since it would threaten their App Store business model.
"Pushing back on features" translates directly to "preventing web apps from becoming a viable threat" and none of this is about UX, which is just one of the convenient pretexts to make Apple's devious and self-serving behavior more palatable. No matter how often Apple shills try to rephrase and euphemize it, anyone who has recognized Apple's conflict of interest in this regard will see through it.
For now, they're my AnCap-approved optional private enforcement regime against a bunch of the antisocial and market-capturing behavior of the rest of tech, since public regulators are asleep at the wheel. I'd much prefer real, very aggressive (by modern standards, if not historical) enforcement of meaningful consumer protection, standards mandates, and trust-busting across the board, but this is the only option I've got (aside from "just use less tech, and far less-usefully")
All hurting them now does is hand more control of the tech ecosystem to Google.
Meanwhile: yes they in fact have the best mainstream browser, and it's not even close.
1) Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813704 you regurgitate the classic Apple propaganda of "web apps are akshually not 'real' apps" - what makes apps 'real' for Apple propagandists is clearly when everybody is forced to pay Apple 30% tax.
2) The hallmark of the irrational Apple shill is also how increasingly bizarre and contradictory the apologia in defense of the trillion dollar company's anti-competitive business practices becomes, as you've just proven: "private enforcement regime against a bunch of the antisocial and market-capturing behavior of the rest of tech" - what kind of absurd logic is that?
Apple should be allowed to break the law according to you, so they can pretend to oppose something they are also guilty of themselves!? Then you disingenuously claim that "I'd much prefer real, very aggressive enforcement of meaningful consumer protection, standards mandates, and trust-busting across the board, but this is the only option I've got", but that's clearly not the "only option you've got" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... ) since you are literally opposing the other option by fighting regulators through spreading of disingenuous talking points in defense of Apple's unlawful business practices.
> 1) Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813704 you regurgitate the classic Apple propaganda of "web apps are akshually not 'real' apps" - what makes apps 'real' for Apple propagandists is clearly when everybody is forced to pay Apple 30% tax.
Yeah, that's my opinion on every platform, including back when I used Android. It's my opinion on Void Linux. It's my opinion everywhere, whether or not Apple's getting a cut (why would I possibly care that they make more money? Hell I'd love for them to have actual competition in their specific niches, to put downward pressure on their profitability, as far as their actual products they sell go). I've come to it through extensive engagement with the Web and various native ecosystems over decades, as both a user and developer. Webtech is a steaming pile of ass. It's so bad it makes the prior standard-setters for "steaming pile of ass" in its field look good. If I were somehow made Dictator of Technology for the World by a wish-granting genie, I would ban web apps, flat out (and do a lot of other things that would make market-distorting massive tech companies, including Apple, very sad)
> Then you disingenuously claim
Frankly, fuck off. You're being a dick for absolutely no reason. That's the flat-out truth. I could wrap that in HN-friendly passive-aggression, but screw that, you need to chill the fuck out, to be blunt.
You are talking about a "serious bias" after spamming the same debunked Apple propaganda, with a 5 days old account? lol.
>> 1) Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813704 you regurgitate the classic Apple propaganda of "web apps are akshually not 'real' apps" - what makes apps 'real' for Apple propagandists is clearly when everybody is forced to pay Apple 30% tax.
>Yeah, that's my opinion on every platform, including back when I used Android. It's my opinion on Void Linux. It's my opinion everywhere, whether or not Apple's getting a cut (why would I possibly care that they make more money? Hell I'd love for them to have actual competition in their specific niches, to put downward pressure on their profitability, as far as their actual products they sell go). I've come to it through extensive engagement with the Web and various native ecosystems over decades, as both a user and developer. Webtech is a steaming pile of ass. It's so bad it makes the prior standard-setters for "steaming pile of ass" in its field look good.
Well your opinion is biased nonsense and conveniently regurgitates propaganda designed to defend anti-competitive business practices. Web Apps do an excellent job despite being actively sabotaged and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about since your rhetoric is drenched in misinformation.
>Frankly, fuck off. You're being a dick for absolutely no reason. That's the flat-out truth. I could wrap that in HN-friendly passive-aggression, but screw that, you need to chill the fuck out, to be blunt.
I get that you're not used to getting called out on your dishonest and manipulative rhetoric, but you should have anticipated that before spamming the same debunked Apple propaganda for the 1000th time with a fresh account, because you know that it's bullshit propaganda.
You have lost all credibility. I mean, you had very little to begin with using a 5-day old Apple-shill account, but now you have zero.
Safari is the absolute worst browser, by far, approaching Internet Explorer levels of wtf. On iOS it implements touch gestures completely differently than other browsers, because Apple does what Apple wants - forcing developers to buy a real iPhone just to debug their shitty browser. Their lack of webAPIs is absolutely to push developers to their App store - and I know this first hand because I have a web app that works on every other browser but Safari due to its lack of APIs. So if I want to support apple, I have to pay them for the privilege to develop said app, as well as pay them to buy their hardware to develop and test the app. Fuck all of that. I don't have to do that for any other browser or platform.
Nowadays, I think the trend is more toward putting a battery-saver or data-saver mode inside an existing app, rather than creating an entirely new app, and I don't see any reason why Apple couldn't do something like this in Safari if they wanted to.
I'm sure Safari sucks to support for web developers and is missing a lot of cool apis, but I'm willing to take those tradeoffs for the increased privacy I get as a result.
That being said, I do think Apple should allow third party browser engines.
The West's Internet is just Cloudflare's proxy.
On the one hand Apple must be made to open up iOS more.
On the other hand it just leads to Chrome monopoly.
If a browser engine continues to exist not on its merits but because its users are locked in, there is zero value in it. If 100% of people switch to chromium based browsers (an open source project) while they have free choice that's how it is. There's nothing inherently wrong with this.
We don't need browser engine DEI. Even the term monopoly is spurious in the world of open source software. Say if in 30 years we have 100% linux market share because open source won, do we need to protect Microsoft so they can lock people into Windows, like some sort of endangered animal program for proprietary software?
There's an inherent contradiction to apply the competitive logic of proprietary platforms to fundamental OSS infrastructure. They'll tend to be natural "monopolies" just by virtue of how resource intensive they are and the desire to standardize.
Chromium is controlled and developed by Google. And it's dangerous to have fundamental infrastructure in the hands of one company. Here's a reminder what they did with Android: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-...
To literally take Chromium as an example. Look at Google's manifest v3 changes. Brave and all the other chromium based browsers just put their own ad blocking shim on top and they're fine.
Yes, yes, billions of people will work on the fork.
> To literally take Chromium as an example. Look at Google's manifest v3 changes.
That literally changed nothing in Chrome dominance.
> Brave and all the other chromium based browsers just put their own ad blocking shim on top and they're fine.
You mean: they literally just slap a skin on top of a Google-developed project, do no actual browser development of their own (do they even participate in web standards?), have vanishingly few users and are likely hemorrhaging money?
Basically it's not an argument at all against forcing Apple to remove that ban.
There's also the fact that websites themselves need to be mindful of multiple browser engines existing because of Safari. Once users are able to install Chrome on iPhones, developers will just abandon every other engine wholesale.
Firefox used to have a 25-30% share before Mozilla shat the bed by neglecting it while treating Firefox like a money-piñata to fund a series of dead-end, copy-cat projects in their big-tech cosplay era.
Blaming Chrome for Firefox and Safari being shit (as reflected by the percentage of users who voluntarily use the respective browsers) removes their culpability. Chrome had to grow their share from 0%.
One of three major factors involved actually being good, and I'd bet the other two factors overwhelm that one.
> One of three major factors involved actually being good, and I'd bet the other two factors overwhelm that one
Counterpoint: Microsoft Edge on Windows has the same 2 factors going for it, but failing to replicate Chrome's ascendancy. Edge and Windows pleading with you to not install Chrome is kinda sad.
That Microsoft abandoned Trident for a Chromium fork speaks volumes on the amount of innovation and engineering effort Google poured into Chrome/Chromium - I don't understand how it can be controversial to suggest that Chromium wins on its merits. The gaggle of browsers opted to fork Chromium rather than WebKit or Gecko because Chromium is best-in-class.
I can't say the same about the Trident based Edge though, it just wasn't as nice to use.
> The gaggle of browsers opted to fork Chromium rather than WebKit or Gecko because Chromium is best-in-class.
If I was making the decision to make browser, and finances were on the line, I'd pick Chromium just because other people have already done it. If I was doing it for fun, I'd rather just contribute to Ladybird.
The reality is that both had significant advantages over their competition when launched, but the company also used anticompetitive tactics to ensure dominance once those gaps closed.
This is the thing that is most concerning. We’ve seen this happen before. We ended up with an Internet Explorer monoculture that paralysed front-end development for over a decade. Huge numbers of developers were happily writing Internet Explorer-only websites and didn’t care about any other browser at all. There’s a real danger that this ends the open web and turns it into a Chrome platform controlled by Google.
Google also plays "fire and motion" with Web standards. They have a tendency to use non-standard(-yet) features on their websites. This gives them a perfect excuse to make other browsers look technically inferior (when the features are missing or the browser is blocked) or slow (when the features are implemented using inefficient polyfills). The unfairness is the one-sided choice of using whatever cutting-edge or Google-specific feature Chrome has, while they'd never do this in other direction. If Firefox implemented a new feature first, Google would never tell Chrome users that Chrome sucks and they need to upgrade to Firefox.
Microsoft got into trouble for pushing Netscape users over to Internet Explorer, but what they did isn't half as evil as the dark patterns Google is using to get Chrome and other Google apps onto the few devices left which don't have them.
It's IE6 all over again. But worse.
Safari is only available on Apple devices, Chrome is available everywhere. Let's not pretend that laziness is the only reason why Chrome has the largest marketshare.
> The point of the web is that it's an open standard. Expecting everyone to use the bleeding edge version of the most aggressively feature-laden browser isn't just unreasonable, it's counter to the spirit of the platform.
I don't expect Safari to be the bleeding edge. I just expect the features to work. Lets take for example: IndexedDB
- IndexedDB was first brought up in two propsals in 2009/2010 - IndexedDB was available for pubilc testing in early 2012 by Firefox and Chrome and was released for both browsers unprefixed in late 2012. - IndexedDB was "released" for Safari in late 2014. However:
1. The released version was so bad and buggy that it basically didn't work at all.
2. It essentially broke all the websites/web-apps that were using it, and there was no easy alternative to use. The affected websites/webapps had to essentially be rearchitected and remade or just plain shut down.
3. Apple had no interest in fixing it which essentially poisoned the feature for all developers. It was so egregious it was actually used in the lawsuits against Apple their monopolistic app store practices, which eventually led to the EU to create their new sweeping anti-trust regulation changes for app stores and browsers.
- IndexedDB didn't have a working release on Safari until mid-2016 and didn't have the industry standard "last two major version" support until late 2017.
That means we had developers affected by IndexedDB's poisoning for about 5 years.
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So by my earlier request of "I don't expect Safari to be the bleeding edge. I just expect the features to work.", Safari completely and utterly shit the bed. They shit the bed so bad it helped lead the EU to create new anti-trust regulations.
And that was just Apple trying to meet a standard feature.
And if you thought the IndexedDB debacle was over, they broke it again. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27509206
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Let's not even get into Safari breaking other features. I'd rather not type all this out: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
Chrome has plenty of problems but nobody cares because when Chrome doesn’t support something properly, no one uses it.
I agree that Safari is not perfect either. But let’s assume for a moment that nothing is going to make Apple invest more into WebKit than they are already. Which of the following worlds would I prefer?
1. WebKit remains the exclusive browser on iOS devices. The bleeding edge of the web doesn’t advance quite as quickly. A tiny number of developers who don’t already have access to an Apple device have to spend literally tens of dollars buying or inheriting 5+ year-old devices in order to test on a diversity of platforms.
2. Blink becomes available on iOS and Google continues use dark patterns to trick users into installing their browser. A small but non-trivial number of developers start assuming that everyone uses Blink/Chromium, and end users no longer have a choice of browser.
I’m sorry, I forget, isn’t the whole point about giving people a choice of browser? Because some people on Hacker News have some fairly dystopian blinders on and don’t actually care about user choice, they’re just lazy arseholes who don’t want to deal with an open web and resent having to test in more than one web browser.
Between these two alternative futures, I’ll pick number one every time, no hesitation. The open web is far more important to me than developer convenience.
The difference between Chrome and Safari not supporting features is that Safari is developed by one company (Apple) whereas Chrome is developed by two (Directly by Google and indirectly by Microsoft). So Apple can have an incentive not to add a feature and end up harming the entire industry. But if Google has an incentive not to add something, Microsoft can still add that thing anyway (and vice versa), we only need one actor to act good for their not to be harm caused.
> 1. [...] A tiny number of developers who don’t already have access to an Apple device have to spend literally tens of dollars buying or inheriting 5+ year-old devices in order to test on a diversity of platforms.
This is flat out wrong.
One Safari is not equal to another.
You need to buy one of each device because Safari will change how it works across different devices.
Example 1: Safari adds depth touch to some devices which adds weird box overlays around parts of the website while the user is trying to use it, which blocks the content and interferes with which elements are supposed to be interactable unless you add special webkit-prefixed rules (e.g. -webkit-touch-callout, -webkit-tap-highlight-color, etc...) to different parts of your pages.
Example 2: Safari adds different buffer areas around their browser which you need to test with (using the env() css function) on each device with a different screen to make sure content isn't flowing off the screen or elements are being cut off at incorrect spots when they're supposed to flow past the edge.
And so on...
Apple keeps adding device specific ways of breaking websites.
Furthermore, each device can only run one version of Safari. Every time a new version comes out, you need to upgrade your OS to get the new version of Safari. And you also can't downgrade your OS to get the older version. And because some users can't upgrade and others won't, you need multiple of each device running each one on a different version of the OS to test correctly.
We have to spend 1000s of dollars each year on new devices just because Apple keeps inventing new ways of breaking things.
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Side question: But what about just buying a mac and running the iOS Simulator to test different versions of Safari on different devices?
It's no good, the iOS Simulator is a simulator, not an emulator. So the bugs that are on the device are not the same as the ones in the simulator.
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So out of your two options, what will happen is:
Some users will switch to Blink/Chromium and find that things start working better. That will start to build up a reputation of Chrome/Edge/etc... working better than Safari.
Meaning Apple will need to invest more money and effort into improving Safari.
Meaning Safari will be improved.
So either users start migrating to a better browser, or Safari improves to the point that it isn't a problem anymore.
Your analysis is flawed at the core because you persist in making the same logical error which mid-tier web developers always make. Only web developers choose/change browsers because another one is "better". Ninety-nine percent of everyone else doesn't choose/change browsers, or if they do, it's because they were unwittingly exposed to an external influence, e.g.
1. Dark patterns (e.g. as employed by Microsoft in the 1990s, or Google in the 2020s);
2. Herd mentality ("my Son told me to use Chrome instead");
3. Because a website is broken (because the developer stubbornly refuses to believe that any web browser exists other than the bleeding edge release of Chromium)
And sorry but I just laughed when you said you need to spend "1000s of dollars each year on new devices". The only people who might need to do that are large corporations which already spend 1,000,000s of USD each year on developer salaries. A one-man team needs, at most, one desktop Mac made in the past 8 years ($200–1000 every 3–6 years) and one iOS device made in the past 5 years ($100–500 every 2–4 years). And that's assuming they don't already have either or both of these. And that's assuming that you're trying to do very complicated things. Most web developers shouldn't be doing anything that would break on a 10-year-old version of any major web browser (with the exception of TLS root certificates).
As an independent web developer with a Mac and iPhone, I begrudgingly buy and maintain a Windows computer and an Android phone, but you don't see me bitching and moaning about that, even though it's exactly the same thing.
No, it's not different because you're "forced" to acquire a new or used Apple product. As a developer, you are "forced" to acquire a reasonable spectrum of products based on what your audience is using. You are "forced" to test in Chrome. You are "forced" to pay taxes on income. You can wish the world was different, but wishes don't change practical realities.