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Comment by cnst | Hacker News Reader

Maybe enough with the character assassinations?

The first thing I do on an Android is skip the Google Account screen (bypassing the Play Store), open the pre-installed Chrome browser to install F-Droid, and then uninstall/disable Chrome. You can then install any other browser from F-Droid, or through Aurora Store through F-Droid, without any login credentials for any service.

Can you do that on an iPhone or iPad?

Can you install any app without having an Apple Account?

Can you uninstall Safari and replace it with any other browser? (For those unaware, Chrome and Firefox on iOS in the App Store are simply skins for Safari, having the exact same rendering bugs and issues as Safari; so, there's actually no way to install any other browser besides Safari on iOS.)

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Not until Chrome advocates stop pretending their proprietary APIs based on ChromeOS features are standards.

Nothing exists in a vacuum.

I'm not a fan of Chrome, or some of the choices they made for ChromeOS, but if they're willing to provide "proprietary" hardware APIs, that are fully documented and open-source, and can be used free of charge, and free of mandatory centralised control mechanisms like on iOS, then I'm all for it.

Mozilla had the opportunity to do the same with Firefox OS; but, of course, now they don't quite have the resources to do that anymore, so, instead they get to tell us that we cannot have nice things?

The process is via W3C, or in agreement with other browsers vendors, otherwise it is Internet Explorer all over again.

But which other browser vendors have the capability to deploy these things?

For example, who else can deploy WebNFC?

Mozilla, for one, cannot, because Apple won't let them.

There are other OSes out there where Mozilla doesn't do WebNFC, exactly because it isn't a Web standard, it is a ChromeOS feature that Mozilla doesn't agree with.

> Chrome and Firefox on iOS in the App Store are simply skins for Safari

They are not. They are required to use WebKit, which means they use the same rendering engine as Safari, but there is far more to a web browser than just its rendering engine. They are not just skins.

It's difficult to have an argument when you keep redefining the words.

An app without a rendering engine is not a web-browser, it's far more akin a skin.

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