iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
But God I don’t want this. The iPhone is basically the only thing stopping a total Chrome/Chromium hegemony from ruling the web the way IE did.
I don’t think Google will practically abandon things the way Microsoft did. But they will absolutely have the kind of power Microsoft did to force any feature.
I don’t want to be forced to use Chrome because it’s the only browser that works on most sites. It’s already bad enough with some sites.
But Apple‘s stubbornness and completely different reasons are the only things accidentally holding back the tide.
What kind of control would Chrome have over the web? Adding APIs doesn't force the billions of websites to adopt them. So what if a website adds WebBluetooth? You don't want the web to have that anyway, and if you keep using Safari, you still won't have it. Happy you!
If scrappy Firefox on open platforms could save the web from 95% IE, then why are we all dependent on Apple, alone, to save us from ~60% Chrome? It's learned helplessness and Stockholm syndrome. I wonder how our species survived before the trillion-dollar company started taking such good care of us!
> I want my browser to protect me from ALL those things. Ublock origin did precisely that, then Google went in to kill ublock origin. Ublock lite is nowhere near as good.
>
> I consider this betrayal - naturally by Google, but also by random web designers such as on the python homepage who consider it morally just to pester visitors when they do not want to be pestered. I don't accept ads; I don't accept pop-ups or slide-in effects (in 99.999% of the cases; notifications for some things can be ok, but this does not extend in my book to donation Robin Hood waylanders)."
edit: I see now. Firefox still has uBlock Origin. You missed the point. If Chrome wants to make itself less attractive, you should celebrate.
I appreciate that Chrome reducing user autonomy in order to further Google's own business goals _should_ be a reduction in their competitiveness in a perfect market.
But the web browser market does not have perfect competition today, and I cannot recall a time when it had.
Regulators preventing Apple from controlling iOS browser engines but allowing Google to have de facto ownership of the web would be an example of governments picking winners and losers.
Public policy needs to move the market towards real competition.
I wonder how many chrome fanboys remember the ie6 days.
You are assuming adding APIs is a net positive, and the debacle that was Chrome’s privacy sandbox initiative suggests that’s not the case
> why are we all dependent on Apple, alone, to save us from ~60% Chrome?
How’s Firefox doing now? They’re literally dependent upon Chrome to exist. Without Google they have no money to fund development.
The only viable non-Chromium browser engine today that is not funded by Google is WebKit.
I have much more faith in a new entrant, like Ladybird. I should be able to use Ladybird on iOS. Why not?
Tabs/stability (Firefox vs IE). V8 (Chrome vs Firefox).
Anything else is a battle of attrition, where the deepest pocketed competitor in terms of advertising spend wins. Or Google, because it flood all its own advertising channels.
And Chrome still barely only won.
They are more concerned with making something from scratch than something that actually works.
Also they’re switching over to Swift which can only be worse for performance.
https://ladybird.org/#:~:text=What%20does%20%22No%20code%20f...
I want something free of Google code, which sounds like they aren’t doing if Skia is anyway involved.
Instead they’re wasting resources where it’s less needed. Like building a JS engine instead of starting off with something like SpiderMonkey, JSCore, or QuickJS.
Do you remember Manifest Version 3? They did away with ad block extensions.
If we all end up using Chromium, there’s no longer a web standard. It’s whatever conforms to Google’s standard because all sites will have to support Chromium. That means there will be an undocumented spec. It’s much too difficult for browser engine developers to compete with them, they don’t have nearly the resources.
Do you think the web should be an open standard? How can company catch up if Google is the one pushing the envelope?
The idea that you’re pushing is a hole that Apple themselves have dug on purpose, this is not an oversight but a very intentional decision of theirs to protect their profit margins that their main user retention strategy is that many courts in the world especially the US are never going to force them to compete freely in an open marketplace with consumer choice is a factor.
Whereas, a company that has 70% of the global browser market somehow would have no way to take advantage if they had an even larger share.
I wonder how our species would survive without the unique market analysis from one-of-a-kind minds like yours.
Absolutely not. Most of us are perfectly happy with Apple tightly integrating Safari with their hardware.
However, we're going to legally forbid them to prevent users from breaking that tight integration, because it's their device. Apple doesnt "own" the smartphone market: it provides hardware and services, and it shuts the fuck up.
The OS lock-in is much more difficult to break than Web where the standards are openly built and made available. One aspect in favor of Google is the complexity of implementing all those standards. But that is not lock-in, rather an issue of having enough resources to implement a compliant browser.
Where have you been in the past 10 years or so? Chrome views the web as their own fiefdom, and web devs happily oblige. There are now dozens of Chrome-only non-standards that are presented as "openly built standards" and devs deride other browsers for not implementing them.
In case of Windows, there is no spec. There is no possibility of implementing another Windows clone (patents limit such clones). Wine exists, but was reverse engineered with great difficulty.
A scribble on a napkin does not a standard make.
A feature released in a single browser engine without support, consent, and against objections of other browser vendors does not a standard make.
Just because Chrome ships something does not make whatever they ship a standard.
> The documentations and specifications are available for free.
That's how Chrome abuses its position and relies on gullible devs to assume that just because something is documented it becomes a standard the moment it's shipped in Chrome.
That's not how standards work.
Because ie at the time was dogshit. FF was such an indisputable improvement that people just had to switch.
Chrome great. There is nothing a newcomer can do to compete.
Think of the plethora of instances where you wish your browser made minor changes to make browsing easier
I have an iPhone now and miss Firefox for Android (with Ublock, sponsorblock, etc). But this painful restriction is the only thing stopping Chrome from becoming the new IE6.
At a few startups I've worked for, the devs all use chrome exclusively, and only test in chrome during development.
The only reason they consider other browsers, is because of Safari on iOS. Sometimes it's driven by support calls / complains from iOS users after a release. If Chrome's engine is allowed on iOS, that means support can just tell the users to install Chrome (like they do now if anyone has issues on Windows in other browsers). This means Firefox will usually work as well.
Many years ago, I was able to swap banks when my bank's website stopped working in Opera 12. If all the major banks / websites target Chrome-only, we'll have no choice but to use it. And then we'll have no control as Google push new restrictions into Chrome.
Besides, the mobile web is becoming more and more of a niche platform, since the web is becoming centralised as time passes and most main sites redirect to their own apps.
And that’s without considering direct web search being replaced by AI search,which google seems convinced is the way forward.
Google pushes Chrome HARD.
Also, it's wise to not underestimate the power of developers ceasing to test against non-Blink browsers and taking a page from their IE-era past selves with "Best Viewed in Chrome" and "Browser outdated! Download Chrome" badges. There are few user motivators stronger than things not working.
As far as I can see there are only two possibilities on any kind of near term:
Apple can lock Google and everyone else out, or Google can take over the web fully.
Those appear to be our only choices right now. I don’t like either one. But I know which one I don’t like more.
And if you find any content, it’s on a website riddled with ads.
AI search has none of these issues. Google from 15 years ago was wildly superior to today.
Yet. AI feeds from the content it substitutes. I’m skeptical to the long term feasibility for this reason, how is it going to bring me news when publishing those news is no longer profitable, for example?
but this can change. At least in the EU Apple already prompts a user which browser they want [1]. While at the moment every browser is WebKit under the hood, this will probably change as the EU is also pushing Apple to allow other engines [2] - and with users knowing Chrome from Ads, their work or from a previous Android phone, I can imagine a lot of them selecting Chrome as a default.
1: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Apple-alters-selection-screen-f... 2: https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...
You HAVE to use Chrome or possibly Firefox. We’ve always seen what Firefox is doing, they’re not going to be our saviors again.
1. They produce the world’s buggiest browser by far. Look at this chart that shows the number of bugs that ONLY OCCUR IN A SINGLE BROWSER. https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...
2. They don’t support any modern testing protocols like WebdriverBiDi
3. They don’t make their software available to anyone who isn’t using Apple’s hardware.
The core root of the problem is very clearly Apple who’ve done nothing other than make the world’s buggiest and least accessible browser and then tried to hold everyone hostage who was previously forced to use it until courts had to stop them and they had no choice.
Why should they? When did this become a rule? If Atari survived would they be required to make Windows software? Be? Commodore?
Where/why does/should the law require everyone to make Windows apps?
Really?
It's logical to skip that step.
From my perspective, Google tends to focus on somewhat niche features that will benefit a small slice of web apps. In contrast, the things Apple works on are those that benefit everything from static blog sites to huge commercial web apps.
I wish Google were more like Apple in this regard, because the primitives from which everything web is built are still overwhelmingly crude, which results in the half-ton-truck-built-on-a-golf-cart frameworks and apps the web has become famous for. Making the web reasonable to develop for without a dependency tree that looks like a spiral fractal would do way more to make it flourish as a platform than things like access to the GPU and USB devices.
Eventually, the hell that was IE was a combination of hostile user experience, security problems, performance problems, and developer pain in finding workarounds or other support because it was so far behind on everything. It had nothing to do with their power to dictate or experiment with new features. The extent of the hostile user experience that leaked outside the browser itself was the "only works on IE" problem that forced people to use IE for that site, on the whole it was comparable to the "only works with Flash or Java applets" problems and not as bad as the experience of the browser itself. For the most part these days, the two parts of that hell that remain relevant are the hostile user experience and the developer pains parts, and Mobile Safari is the successor to both for over a decade now. No one supports IE11 anymore (let alone older IEs) but they still have to support Mobile Safari. I have fonder memories of dealing with IE11 (and earlier) support/workarounds over Mobile Safari's crap. My view is more power to actual Chromium-based browsers on mobile even if I personally use Firefox on PC and android despite their user experience shortcomings (at least they're not very hostile). The only part of hell I'd be worried about is that of a hostile user experience, which can be worked around by individual users if they are allowed choices.
Only for those misguided "push the web forward" idiots who just wanted the latest shiny shit, aided by Google's plans to control the Internet itself. Plain HTML worked well enough for everything else.
Google's weapon is change. They have the resources to outcompete everyone else by churning the "standards" as much as they want. The less people think that constant change is necessary, the better the web will be.
Technologies like HTTP and Wasm are truly excellent tools for cross platform software delivery and browsers are an ideal sandboxed execution environment.
This idea that the web should only be for straight up HTML documents is a broken mental model.
Apple have a multi-billion dollar income stream that is firmly premised on the fact that nobody could deliver software on their platform unless they could steal 30% of the companies profits and as such spent a huge amount of time and effort undermining the idea that the web could ever be an app platform but you’re not compelled to cheerlead for Apple’s profit margins and anti-consumer bullshit.
Then the problem isn't adding features to make web apps more capable, either.
Web apps replacing unsandboxed applications is a net win. We could argue about whether web apps replacing sandboxed applications is a net win as well, but most local applications on PCs are not sandboxed, and even mobile applications aren't sandboxed as strongly as web apps. (I would love to see an "allow network access" permission on a per-mobile-app basis.)
No orientation API so impossible to make games and other experiences that require a certain orientation
No WebXR (though Apple will allow it on Vision Pro)
No support for ResizeObvserver devicePixelContentBoxSize so impossible to get correct rendering reguardless of user's zoom level.
No simple PWA installation. Requires an obscure incantation that only expert users know.
That's just a few off the top of my head.
Yes, I know all the comments will be about how they don't want those features. That's really irrelevant. Allow them to be turned off. Require permissions. Those features have been shipping on other OSes, Desktop and Mobile for > 5 years and the world hasn't ended.
That said, the only plugins I use are ad blockers, so maybe I’m missing something.
https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...
It’s undeniable that Apple makes a dogshit browser.
Even if that's an edge case, it's why having only one engine is pathological. Maybe Safari iOS works fine for you. Not for me. I don't want rationalization on why it's not Apple's fault, or somehow not Safari's fault, or "they'll fix it one day", or "I'm doing it wrong", or all the fanboy-talk that sounds like the enabling relative of an alcoholic. Don't care. I should be able to switch for even the most frivolous reason. Maybe I don't like that it doesn't render every website in pink.
It's like having only one type of chocolate in existence. This was never normal.
Do you see any pattern to which pages it happens to?
The reason why we have a Chrome/Safari hegemony is because Apple insisted on everything being Safari on their device platforms. This combined with Android shipping WebKit for years meant that the only mobile browser engine that mattered was WebKit. Chrome is a different engine now, but it was forked from WebKit, and it used to have a lot of the same quirks. Hell, Microsoft switched to Blink specifically because Electron - their own web app shell - couldn't run on EdgeHTML.
The fact that this change practically means Chrome displacing Safari is... not really all that meaningful. They're both forks of the same code. The single-engine dystopia you worry about is already here. I daily-drive Firefox, and the amount of shit Google deliberately breaks on Gecko is obvious. Like, YouTube tabs freeze up every few hours because they get stuck in garbage collection, and I have to manually kill whatever processes are running YouTube before I can watch another video. That sort of thing.
I don’t think one company should own all the stuff that Google does. It gives them way too many perverse incentives over the web.
I’m not saying it’s smart we got here. I’m not saying it’s good we got here. I’m not saying we should be here.
All I’m saying is we ARE here. And given that (effective screw up) I fear this will make things drastically worse.
Does it? It might give them perverse incentives in some cases, but in others it perfectly aligns their incentives by letting them internalize their externalities. The whole selling point of Chrome to executives, and the reason it's introduced so many nice features, is that consolidating means they have an incentive to invest in things that make their websites work better (a better Chrome means a better Google/Gmail/YouTube/Drive).
Google feeds DoubleClick. Gmail does too. YouTube is a pure ad play.
Drive/Docs/etc. I’d say drives Chrome and undercuts competitors.
And Chrome? It drives Google. And Google also helps drive YouTube.
They all end in ads.
If Chrome wasn’t owned by an ad company that owned all that other stuff I wouldn’t be as worried. I still don’t like the idea of a Chrome monoculture. But if it was independent I’d be less alarmed.
I don’t think they can compete. Apple doesn’t release Safari on Windows (any more, god it was bad) and that basically kills their chance at desktop relevance.
But even if they did my point is Google has way WAY WAY too much leverage and is already in an effective near monopoly position due to making Chromium. iOS is the only reasonably sized bastion left.
And that’s entirely due to Apple’s policy, whether one thinks it’s right or wrong.
The stakes are way too tilted. The market can’t function.
And we’re about to see it “freed”, which is basically handing it to Google for a total monopoly.
And I don’t like that future. Whatever I think of all the other issues with both Apple and Google right now and what has happened in the past.
It was possible to rip people away from Microsoft. That may not be something we can do this time with Chrome.
Try telling someone that moving off of Chrome may mean moving off of every single Google property because Chrome is the only browser they work on by then.
See how easy an argument that is. It’s right up with there with “stop helping capitalism and move to the woods“.
1. The US isn’t doing this. They have a case but aren’t calling for breakup
2. We all know howling anti-trust and appeals take
If Google gets handed the web (let’s say) this year by Apple being forced to allow them, it could be a decade+ before the Google side gets tackled.
And I’m afraid of how much damage they can do in that timeframe.
I think fixing Google’s ownership over Chrome before forcing other browsers on iOS would be less harmless than forcing iOS to allow other browsers than doing Google.
I’m totally good with doing both. I worried about the effects of the order they’re done in.
And I am only saying this about browser engines. This should not be taken to say Apple should be able to do some of the other nonsense they’ve been doing for 10+ years abusing their position.
Firefox is not going to save us again. It’s arguably part of the problem in a different way.
The best I saw was the case against Google in the US and they decided not to call for breakup.
I don’t see the EU trying to unbundle everything they do.
> Use memory-safe programming languages, or features that improve memory safety within other languages, within the alternative web browser engine at a minimum for all code that processes web content
Would Apple themselves meet this requirement? Isn't WebKit C++? Of course, I'm not sure what would be considered "features that improve memory safety within other languages," that's kind of vague.
So any language should be allowed as long as they instruct developers to be careful.
And heres a nice video about it: https://youtu.be/Gv4sDL9Ljww?si=Z4riPMKAKcIKaU0s
I am sure that Apple will make no other efforts to impede others from unwalling the garden. That would be completely ridiculous, and frankly, un-Apple-esque.
They will continue to do so for as long as it remains profitable. Navigating the complexities of multiple jurisdictions is the bread and butter of MNCs - it's the price of admission into the multinational club. Apple is guaranteed to have lawyers, admins, and executives already on the payroll for this task.
> Apple is guaranteed to have lawyers, admins, and executives already on the payroll for this task.
As both a shareholder and user, I really wish they’d invest their resources into feature development instead of manufacturing obstacles.
There's bluntly not strong external evidence that software quality is a driving priority at Apple in recent years, so it most probably follows that concerns about maintainability aren't either.
My personal opinion is that keeping the browser engine locked down isn't much of a profit generator, unlike maintaining full reign over the app store would be.
I don't buy this line, that Safari is intentionally hobbled to prop up the App Store. What's iOS missing for PWA's to be a viable money-maker for companies? Surely there so much money on the line that we would see companies using them. What does Match.com's portfolio of dating apps need to be viable as websites instead?
In reality, when you actually pay attention to Apple's software engineering practices you realise how incredibly cheap and stingy they are. All the apps are so under funded and under developed. Bugs are introduced all over their native platforms all the time and never fixed.
Probably, but Android allows side-loading. iOS does not.
> What's iOS missing for PWA's to be a viable money-maker for companies?
Brace yourself.
1. Notifications are hobbled. This is HUGE. Silent pushes, rich notifications, NSE, reliable badge counts, and reliable delivery. This is made worse by:
2. Hobbled background priority. PWAs are aggressively suspended and killed. No long running processes. No guarantee of process execution. IndexedDB and in-memory state may be wiped at any time.
3. PWAs can’t access most system frameworks. Bluetooth (CoreBluetooth). NFC (Core NFC). Background location tracking. HealthKit. HomeKit. CallKit / VoIP. Siri Shortcuts / App Intents. AirDrop. Apple Pay (full API). CarPlay. System share extensions.
4. No access to native rendering pipelines. Performance is severely limited.
5. PWAs have unstable, purgeable memory. No persistent file storage.
6. Limited UX and lifecycle control. No termination callbacks. No suspend notifications. Reloaded arbitrarily. Back/forward gestures conflict with browser.
7. No access to native UI components like FaceID, native text fields, drag and drop across apps, context menus, and haptic feedback.
Apple has done everything they possibly can to ensure PWAs are broken on iOS.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/google-pays-apple-36percent-...
The more likely explanation is that when every app can bundle their own browser engine, we will not see a competition explosion. Instead, Electron apps will come to mobile, with every app shipping its own browser stack.
You can’t tell me Gecko, which has already failed on desktop, will suddenly be popular on mobile. You can easily tell me every app shipping their own Chromium would be very popular with developers.
Seems either approach would rule out your Slack, Amazon app, etc. from shipping their own outdated 900MB Chromiums but allow Chrome, Firefox, K-Meleon, whatever.
Everything that's inconvenient for your preferred narrative can just be dismissed as conspiratorial thinking, makes the world so much easier - doesnt it? I've compiled some of the evidences that makes clear how one of the Gatekeepers (Apple) has a tremendous conflict of interest, which manifested itself in systematic sabotaging of PWAs over the years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45534316
is there a way to make more innovation in this area and maybe an extension or two developed adding more perms etc or forking Orion or the know-how behind it and replicating it could finally allow PWA on apple iphones?
I’m so sick of the ever increasing variances between the different “store” offerings in different regions of the world. Seems like every time I push an update (every month or so), I have to answer updated questions and declarations, often relative to different parts of the world.
They seem to have gotten a long way better with Japan in this process than the EU, but they’re still not happy about it. So they’re absolutely not gonna just roll over for everyone.
Software wise? Fail. EEA gets to disable start search in Windows 11. RoW does not. Interestingly EEA membership is decided at install time based on your selection, and is not changeable afterwards.
iPhones on the other hand have a daemon running that checks your location. It's not based on where you set up the phone. So traveling from Europe to somewhere else can actually prevent you from updating apps that you got via an alt-store:
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/06/alternative-ios-app-sto...
They will never deploy the "better" feature worldwide if they have the opportunity to limit the better code to a particular region.
1: And of course, by "better" I am always referring to "better for the user" not "better for Apple."
Chinese iPhones? They have 2 physical SIM card slots and no eSIM.
EU iPhones? 1 SIM card slot, and 1 eSIM.
US iPhones? 2 eSIM card slots and no physical SIM. US iPhones also have mmWave when other countries do not.
If Apple wanted to, keeping a Lightning US iPhone was easily on the cards. The EU’s role in forcing the issue in the US is exaggerated.
Almost certainly someone (or an entire team) carefully crunched the numbers and deliberately decided not to keep a Lightning US iPhone.
More importantly, if a user travels from one region to another, as long as they can use their phone in the place they arrive, having slightly non-optimal bands or a different SIM configuration doesn't matter. The fact that your phone is slightly different from the local model is not really a problem.
But having your charger vary across regions? That's a recipe for disaster. Not only is that another level of variance in your external casing, it impacts day-to-day use. When an American user travels to, say, France, or vice versa, and wants to buy a charger, or share one with someone else, having the same model of iPhone be incompatible would be a major frustration. It would be stupid to engineer a lightning AND USB-C version of the same device for each market.
2) Apple committed to 10 years of lightning support to weather the backlash from dropping 30-pin
USB-C on iPhone was going to happen regardless of the EU.
The best the EU can say is that the law moved up the inevitable a year or two.
Anybody that thinks otherwise is hopeless naive, Steve Jobs himself envisioned a web app future as the future of technology; before Apple found out the gold mine that the app store became.
I think that's the hypothetical part, it's not reality. Safari continues to be a fully modern browser. It doesn't release new features quite as fast as Chrome, but it does generally adopt them.
If Apple were attempting to put a "stranglehold on innovations on the web", Safari's feature set would look very different. But that's not what's happening.
Like I said, Apple does lots of anticompetitive things. I'm not blind to what they do with the app store. I just don't think that the single browser engine policy is motivated by this, or has much effect on it, given how Apple does keep maintaining Safari as a modern browser.
https://www.google.com/search?q=safari+is+the+new+ie
And Apple purposely will never implement lots of APIs that only their native apps allow (which other browsers implement), specifically to force many developers to create a native app to use these APIs, so that Apple can force the developer to give them a percentage of any purchases made through the app. They can't force a developer to give them a cut of purchases made through a web browser, which is why they purposely hobble the Safari browser engine and then force all other browsers to use this engine. If you can't see how bad this is, then you've been taken over by the reality distortion field.
It's spelled out in the DOJ lawsuit against apple, among many other anti-competitive practices.
Microsoft got sued and lost in an antitrust suit for bundling IE with Windows. Apple bundles Safari with iOS but forbids any other browser engine but their Safari engine. Can you imagine if Microsoft forbade any other browser from being installed on Windows? It's time Apple was brought to justice over their abusive anti-competitive practices.
Here's the whole DOJ suit against Apple:
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
They generally are pretty caught up on features. They have webgpu, they support the web notifications API (once a PWA is installed), lots of stuff. My main gripe is that they make it too hard to install PWAs, but we're still waiting for an actual API for that. (Maybe in 2027? [0])
> And Apple purposely will never implement lots of APIs that only their native apps allow (which other browsers implement)
Can you give an example?
[0]: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/11/24/the-web-insta...
>Can you give an example?
Web Bluetooth API, and lots of others. My product could use bluetooth but we're forced to work around Apple's Safari limitations and use Wifi instead, which drains the battery faster. We do not want to write a specific app for iOS (which costs us money to build and maintain), which then allows Apple to extort us for a percentage of sales through the app. Bluetooth would be the better option, but Wifi works although is a bit more cumbersome to deal with. So sorry Apple fans, you have to use wifi with our product because Apple reasons.
I am going to open a bottle of champagne when the DOJ finally forces Apple to allow other browsers on iOS.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
But there's still all sorts of wonkiness they just makes Safari non viable. If you don't PWA install, your storage gets cleared alarmingly quickly. If you do install it's still cleared wicked fast. Notifications seem to have incredibly unreliable delivery issues and require PWA installs to work at all. The features are closer to parity than before but the base functionality is still sabotaged deeply. 'The user is secure' with Apple is amazing doublespeak (the second meaning being securely in Apple's pocket with no where to go).
It's worth noting that Interop participants meet and decide via unanimous consent what they are going to work on each year. The anti-trust case against Apple would be far stronger if they didn't show up & find some stuff to work on, to agree to. And with apologies as I break out the tin foil hat, showing up also gives them some leverage to shape what doesn't get worked on too.
Interop 2025 is a subset of web features, but Apple gets a veto on which features get included in each Interop round, and vetoes heavily. It doesn't reflect interoperability in general. Safari also consistently starts out the worst each year, and improves the slowest.
They don't support notifications correctly, they have a semi-broken implementation. Only a subset of sites will work, even though they'll work perfectly on Chrome or Firefox or even minor browsers. Even if you put the site on the homescreen.
>Can you give an example?
Web Bluetooth, Web USB, Web NFC, Web Serial...
Of course Apple will uphold its usual charade to claim that it's about pRiVacy & sEcuRiTy to maintain plausible deniability. They could easily implement it and keep it disabled by default, such that users could make the conscious choice to enable it or keep it disabled. Any adequate analysis of Apple's behavior and motivations must mention Apple's conflict of interest, because Apple will be biased against technology that could diminish the value proposition of "native" apps which Apple has been taxing so unchallenged for all these years.
>Hard disagree on safari being even in the same ballpark as IE;
It's a crap browser, and Apple implements things the way they want to, especially around touch interactions. So I have to have a real iPhone to debug problems with Apple's implementations. Safari fucking sucks, it just does, and your trolling comment doesn't disprove it.
>what’s your alternative, Google owns the entirety of the browser space?
I don't care if they do or if they don't. All I want is an alternative to Safari on iOS. Is that really so bad??
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
You mean that Chrome is the new IE
No, we do not want to write our own iOS app where Apple can then extort us for a percentage of any sales through the app, and we have to pay for the priviledge to develop that app, as well as buy Apple hardware to do so.
So instead we use Wifi, where we can maintain one single codebase - the web application, which works on both Android and iOS, but has to use Wifi. If Apple allowed Chrome to use its own browser engine, we would simply tell users to install Chrome to interact with our device. Then we don't have to pay Apple for anything, nor should we have to.
Apple purposely won't implement some APIs so they can force developers to create an app for their app store where they can collect money from any additional sales through the app. It's all spelled out in the DOJ suit, why won't you just read it??
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
Which is of course bullshit
--- start quote ---
The allegation that Safari is holding back web development by its lack of support for key features is not new, but it’s not true, either. Back fifteen years ago IE held back the web because web developers had to cater to its outdated technology stack. “Best viewed with IE” and all that. But do you ever see a “Best viewed with Safari” notice? No, you don’t. Another browser takes that special place in web developers’ hearts and minds.
...even though Chrome is not the standard, it’s treated as such by many web developers.
https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...
--- end quote ---
The only reason Apple has banned alternative engines and continues to hold back on major web technologies is anticompetitive behaviour.
I'm torn on this honestly. Safari (particularly mobile Safari) is literally the only thing keeping the web from becoming Chrome-only. While I would love to see Safari-alternative engines on the iPhone, I fear that the "open web" in terms of browser compatibility is cooked the day that happens: Commercial web developers are supremely lazy and their product managers are, too. They will consider the web Chrome-only from that day forward and simply refuse to lift a finger for other browsers.
I think when IE6 died, on one hand it was a relief for web developers, who (very quickly) deleted all the code needed to maintain compatibility, but on the other hand, it made the web worse by bringing us closer to browser monopoly.
That's not true. It's not even available on most computers. IE was about Microsoft not following web standards and abusing its monopoly position; Safari is a minor browser by overall market share and is broadly standards-compliant.
> the fact that PWAs didn’t take off in the last decade js purely due to Safari.
So then why aren't PWA's super-popular on Windows and on Android? Since Safari doesn't affect those?
Says who?
"Yes, PWAs have become popular on these platforms. I work for Microsoft on the Microsoft Store (app store on Windows) and I work with the Edge team, and I work on PWABuilder.com, which publishes PWAs to app stores. Some of the most popular apps in the Microsoft Store are PWAs: Netflix, TikTok, Adobe Creative Cloud, Disney+, and many others.
To view the list of PWAs in the Store, on a Windows box you can run ms-windows-store://assoc/?Tags=AppExtension-microsoft.store.edgePWA" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457849
It's officially compliant but in practice there's a lot of buggy implementations in Safari and you'll spend lots of time on workarounds and debugging.
It's also the last non-evergreen browser being tied to the OS so it's the slowest to update, compounding that effect.
> So then why aren't PWA's super-popular on Windows and on Android? Since Safari doesn't affect those?
Personally I think that's because it's still not that convenient even on Android even if better.
> Steve Jobs himself envisioned a
> web app future as the future of[...]
His remarks at the time of the initial iPhone release (with the benefit of hindsight) were clearly because they weren't ready to expose any sort of native API's.
Pissing on you and telling you it's raining was typical Jobs reality distortion field marketing, and not an indication that he actually believed it was raining.
This is inappropriate. People can reasonably disagree without being insulting to each other.
If you have concrete evidence that Apple is deliberately withholding some essential advancement in Safari or its support for Web standards so that it can sell more apps, by all means, cite it.
Just read the summary that Gemini provides for a good quick understanding, and follow up the multiple articles about it. Then please don't come back and say that there is nothing concrete about this evidence, that is just people speculating about a behavior that Apple has been engaging repeatedly and continuously for over a decade.
You claim to know something with certainty, so one can reasonably expect you have the expertise and data to prove it. If you come to the kitchen claiming to be a chef, you’d better come with sharp knives, not photos of them.
Security-wise, the sandbox should limit damage to within the browser, and if it doesn't that's not the browser's fault. Maybe restrict access to password filling and such though / figure out how to offer an API to reduce the impact.
Standardization, eh? Forcing Safari on iOS and not making it available on the mass market platforms (Android and Windows) makes it a pretty wonky standard. I guess there's a claim to be made for the embedded browsing engine, but IMHO, that should be an app developer choice.
Unfortunately, the makers of a certain browser also control several major web properties, and regularly make 'mistakes' that break compatibility with competing browsers, while releasing a set of apps that 'forget' users' browser selections on a monthly basis.
Personally, I'd much prefer apple allowed a browser engine with proper ad blocking support. But I do worry that the moment they do so, the almost-monopoly browser market would become a total monopoly.
There is zero percent chance developers are wasting a second making sure their sites actually work cross platform if not for iOS (and iOS more moneyed user base).
2. IE stopped all development of useful UI or web standards features, meaning if you needed the compatibility you were stuck with a stagnant browser
3. Due to #2, of course web devs hands were tied when it comes to adopting things like HTML5, <video> tags etc. Users would have needed to switch between the two constantly — Firefox for cool new sites and IE for their bank, school, government, whatever.
I would posit that none of the above seems true about Chromium. They do continue developing it, they add new web standards the most aggressively of anyone, and it’s available on basically every platform except the one Apple bans it from. Mind you I don’t really want Google to own it, because they are way too damn big even without Chrome… but honestly it’s no IE situation.
It's similar to how the overwhelming majority of people driving cars aren't going to make note of the difference in driving dynamics between CVT and automatic transmissions unless one severely underperforms compared to the other. It either runs or it doesn't and that's where the distinction ends for people who treat their car/computer/phone as an appliance.
No they won't. People on HN will. Not the average person.
> Security-wise, the sandbox should limit damage to within the browser
The problem is, arbitrary code execution vastly expands the risks. Your "should" is doing all the work there.
> Standardization, eh? Forcing Safari on iOS and not making it available on the mass market platforms
Huh? Apple follows web standards. Why the heck should it make Safari available on Android and Windows? Safari isn't a standard, web standards are.
>No they won't. People on HN will. Not the average person.
Yes they will, Apple has made it very easy to see.
To check iOS app power usage, go to Settings > Battery, where you'll see a breakdown of battery consumption by app for the last 24 hours or 10 days, showing usage time and background activity, allowing you to identify power-hungry apps and manage settings like Background App Refresh to improve battery life.
So yeah, it's easy to see which app is taking the most power, and users can do this easily, unless you think Apple's UX is so bad that users won't know how to read it?
>The problem is, arbitrary code execution vastly expands the risks. Your "should" is doing all the work there.
If that's a problem for web browsers, then it's a problem for every single app in the app store. There's nothing really unique about a web browser app that makes it more risky than any other app. Javascript is already very much sandboxed. And there have been plenty of exploits that already target Safari. So saying other browsers are the problem is like blaming the victim (of Apple's anti-competitive practices).
>Huh? Apple follows web standards. Why the heck should it make Safari available on Android and Windows? Safari isn't a standard, web standards are.
If web standards are standards, then let other web browsers on iOS.
The real reason Apple disallows other browser engines on Safari is so they can force developers to create native apps where they can get a cut of any purchase made through the app. The problems with Apple's anti-competitive practices have been spelled out in the DOJ lawsuit against them:
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
Apple even disables JIT for Safari itself when you put an iPhone in lockdown mode, at no small cost to performance, in an effort to harden the device even more.
Do you have a rebuttal to that?
It's easy to see, but seeing doesn't mean the user will do anything about it. I guarantee that for the average user, their list goes something like Instagram/TikTok/FaceBook/Twitter, and they haven't uninstalled any of those yet due to battery drain...
And what percentage of users do you think ever check that, or even know it's there to check?
> If that's a problem for web browsers, then it's a problem for every single app in the app store.
No it's not, the app store disallows arbitrary code execution.
> There's nothing really unique about a web browser app that makes it more risky than any other app.
Yes there is -- JavaScript.
> Javascript is already very much sandboxed.
...by Safari. It wouldn't be if you allowed any developer to write their own JavaScript interpreter as part of their own browser.
> If web standards are standards, then let other web browsers on iOS.
That's a non-sequitur.
adtech is the big security and performance drain and allowing ads and making them hard to block is a big security and performance gap
The demand that the application with its alternate browser engine must be a completely new and separate binary from any app already using the built in browser makes it hard for existing big players like Chrome - they would have to manage two apps on the store during any transition to their own engine, which supposedly has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks for them already in the EU.
Shipping a good and complete browser engine on iOS will require more than just developers. You'll also need a team of lawyers to threaten and sue Apple to get their policy restrictions relaxed and APIs fixed.
I doubt Mozilla or Google will be willing to spend the many developer-years and lawyer-years it will take to fully port every feature of a whole engine and properly maintain it in such a hostile environment, just for the Japan market. I expect to see some hobbyist-level ports but not something worth using for a long time. Unless other countries follow suit.
Also the EU, no?
Yes.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/26/24052067/mozilla-apple-io...
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home?tab=readme-ov-file
(it's great)
But right now you can use uBlock origin lite in Safari. Or any other of multitude of other adblockers.
> Prioritize resolving reported vulnerabilities with expedience [...] Most vulnerabilities should be resolved in 30 days, but some may be more complex and may take longer.
Apple does not comply with this.
At this point, Apple and Google devices are nothing more than instruments of coercion and mass surveillance.
Coercion and surveillance problems are pretty far down the list of complaints most people have with their personal devices.
For example I'm running a pretty sweet calibre-web automated setup with Kobo readers. Ive changed the storefront on my kobo and have seemless sync OTA of selected shelves. And even I struggle to get my wife to choose that setup over Amazon kindle. The very minute there is a single snag, normies (sorry wife dear) lose interest.
As absurd as this sounds windows -> iPhone via their phone link is actually almost as good as apples built in ecosystem to the point where I can make phone calls and send texts on my computer. It’s not quite as seamless especially the setup but that is a well done wizard and it mostly works.
Looks like you can thank Apple for that one.
https://github.com/KDE/kdeconnect-ios?tab=readme-ov-file#kno...
Linux on mobile is probably even more behind than Linux on desktop was in the 90s.
Why? I am a very tech-minded person but simply don't care about running alternative browser engines on my phone. Am I "wrong" in your opinion?
Similarly with Linux, the sheer number of rough edges, papercuts, and quirks is still too high (regardless of if I’m using a big name DE or hyper minimal tiling WM or somewhere in between) for them to serve as my main desktop environment.
Freedom and privacy exist on graphene.
* If Apple allows alternative app stores then the whole ios ecosystem will rot and be foooded with malware, brough up during the Apple vs. Epic cases
* If Apple can’t control the data on their user’s phones, then privacy rights will disappear, a common talking point during the Apple vs. Facebook case for opt-in data collection.
And like, these points are correct — Apple kind of acts like a “benevolent dictator” when it comes to their ecosystem. But shouldn’t there be alternatives between “Apple can control all software on the hardware they sell” and “the moment Apple doesn’t have control of their user’s experience then it’ll be far worse”? Like, we should have more tech companies, more options to pick from between these two extremes. The market needs to be more competitive, and if that isn’t possible shouldn’t there be regulation to protect users and devs better? This constantly feels like a “pick your poison“ kind of deal, where we can only pick between a company locking down their hardware or abuse of users via. software. If Microsoft banned alternative browser engines there’d be riots in these comments. Apple is just better to its users.
Giving companies the power to lock down hardware they sell isn’t a solution that will work when Apple inevitably turns against its users, and is a horrible precedent to set legally. Lord knows John Deere and a million other predatory hardware companies are salivating at the idea of users of their hardware not having control over what they bought, and Meta and Microsoft love the idea of users not having control of the software they run and the data it collects. We can’t just picking between the least worst of two companies.
Apple directly dictate the shape, speed, and existence of any innovation on iOS, and by extension, any innovation involving mobile phones or meant to run on mobile phones. They don't simply have "power" over it, in the sense that they get to say "Yes" or "No". iOS is locked down in such a fundamental way that any innovation will not come about unless Apple specifically envisions it and designs the OS to support it.
Browsers didn't exist when Windows 1.0 came out. But they happened. If it had been iOS, there would have been no networking, no JIT (I know that came later, bear with me), Firefox/Gecko could never have existed and been able to fix the web. Apple alone would have controlled the evolution of the most important tech of the past few decades. It couldn't have existed in the first place unless Apple, and no one else, invented it and put it in iOS themselves. Basic OS features: files and the filesystem, sharing, casting your screen, communicating with other devices. It doesn't exist until Apple makes it. It doesn't change until Apple changes it.
Even something as simple as file syncing. They forced Dropbox, GDrive, OneDrive to adopt their shitty, buggy backend. Those services all had to drop basic features to adapt. Those features can't ever come back unless Apple allows them. Any hypothetical new features won't exist unless Apple, and no one else, thinks of them and adds them.
How is this sane?
No platform highlights the issue you hit on here like VisionOS.
It is barren. Not just because of the lack of customer base for paid apps, that hurts too, but because the APIs aren't there, and because you can't hack on the private APIs or the hardware directly...they won't be. The app store on Vision Pro is filled with half-assed "spatial computing" consumption apps (Wow, I can put the stock tickers on the wall! That I can only see with these huge goggles on! Neat!), "showroom" apps that are just pure consumption, mostly 3D models of products, and media consumption apps. The games that exist are all pretty lame, and you can't enjoy any of the backcatalog of games written for VR because A. They'd never pass app review, and B. you can only use the PSVR controllers with it, so my Index controllers that I already have are useless.
The Vision Pro demands being as open as the Mac. The problem space is too ill defined and the hardware too packed with interesting use cases to gate behind the restrictive App Store rules. The iPad model worked because it was 2010 and had all the upward momentum of the iPhone to ride. Here and now, on a stagnant, occupied app market where room for innovation is small, on a device with far less promise, the App Store restrictions take all the air out of the room. The entire device is suffocated by Apple's iron grip and belief that they are entitled to own any good ideas that happen on the device, and that they are entitled to 15-30% of any economic exchange happening on the device. Just an utterly kneecapped platform right out of the gate, pricing, specs, weight, and everything else aside. There are no good apps because you just can't write the sort of apps your imagination is likely to want to make. Hell, accessing the main camera wasn't allowed until visionOS 2.0, and you have to use the "enterprise apps" API/entitlement to access it.
Apple's grip has killed it. It is a glorified TV you can wear on your face. It's a very good TV. It's even alright as an external monitor for a *real* computer.
It reminds me of when I asked for my account to be deleted from some online learning site (Udacity maybe?) And they're response was: "Nope, we only do that for European users." Like they went through all the effort of implementing a proper way to delete your data, but they just... don't do it if you're not in the right geographic area.
If by "this", you mean "a set of rules so complicated that no 3rd party will ever ship a browser"...
In practice, they've shipped a whole lot of nothing, and we still don't have any 3rd party browser engines available in the EU
To be honest, I suspect that Apple is purposefully doing this to make alternatives a logistical and legal nightmare vs their own App store.
By having different rules for different countries, different fee structures, etc, Apple is basically making alternatives as inconvenient and painful as legally possible
The US not getting these features is on purpose, it makes the entire idea of "alternatives on iOS" extremely inconvenient vs just using the App store.
Time to force Apple to do it everywhere. Very long overdue.
I’m sure some devs will love this. But equally, some may worry about the monoculture implications.
Unfortunately I don't think we will see if this is how it plays out until Apple has to allow other browsers globally.
It has nothing to do with people no longer using Safari and Apple being sad about that. Other browsers can technically be installed on iOS, but the underlying browser engine is forced to be Safari, which lacks many APIs other web browsers could implement, reducing the need for a native app. It's purely Apple's anti-competitive greed that drives this situation. And the EU, Japan, and the US DOJ have noticed. So far only the EU and Japan have actually taken measures to force Apple to change this.
Here's the entire DOJ lawsuit which includes many other instances of anti-competitive practices by Apple.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
It's simply not a good excuse to defend the iOS browser ban.
It would be good to see Firefox with its own engine there for example.
I guess the requirements are pretty onerous, but they all seem like table stakes for a browser these days (Firefox or Chrome should have no problem with them, for instance.)
They are the ones allowing the alternatives because they are the gate keepers. They have "the keys"
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
Who knows if this will actually move forward now that "Tim Apple" gave the current leader a meaningless golden trophy.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...
• (4 years ago) Japan forces Apple to slightly loosen restrictions on ‘reader’ apps — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28387094
• (3 years ago) Japan pushes for Apple and Google to allow sideloading — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36393809
• (3 years ago) Japan to open up Apple and Google app stores to competition — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36368735
• (3 years ago) Japan to open up Apple- and Google-dominated phone apps to competition — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36370398
• (3 years ago) Apple Japan hit with $98M in back taxes for missing duty-free abuses — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34156235
• (2 years ago) Japan to crack down on Apple and Google app store monopolies — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773429
• (2 years ago) Japan forces Apple and Google to open their mobile platforms — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40666651
• (2 years ago) Japan enacts law to curb Apple, Google's app dominance — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40671162
• (5 months ago) Japan: Apple Must Lift Browser Engine Ban by December — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44810061
• (5 months ago) Japan Law Will Require Apple to Allow Non-WebKit Browsers on iPhone — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44826077
• (15 days ago) Apple Announces Changes to iOS in Japan — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307858
• (14 days ago) Apple and Google respond to new Japan smartphone law, including reduced app fees — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46310074
… and more here: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=japan+apple
This hardly seems to allow anything.
Now every phone will ship with 2 engines (inevitably chrome is going to be bundled in at least one of your apps). Both are tied to large tech companies. And both have approximately the same feature set.
At this stage, I can't think of any upside for the end user. New CSS crap or obscure web APIs, or proprietary DRM? And the cost is that we're going to get new website badges "only in Chrome", or "only in Safari", like it's 1999.
This is Apple, people know what they get into, and they kind of want that an iPhone is not a PC.
It looks like everyone thinks that this is a good thing. Can anyone explain beyond the "this is a monopoly" argument? It's not a monopoly if the engine is free, and if they need the engine to more or less match all the desktop engines.
I don't feel cornered by Apple on that one.