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Comment by dotdi | Hacker News Reader

A bit of context: Apple is being forced by different jurisdictions (EU, UK, Japan) to allow third-party browser engines. In all other regions it's still not allowed to use them.

Apple has been maliciously compliant, putting up roadblocks to testing and distribution. For example, the existing Firefox iOS app cannot be simply updated to use Gecko/Servo; it needs to be a new app.

As far as I know, none of the major browser vendors have released apps with their own engines on iOS. I suppose maintaining two (or more) different codebases for US, EU, etc. is not very attractive.

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The other requirements are also pretty vague and give Apple full discretion to remove browsers they don't like:

https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...

> 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;

> Adopt the latest security mitigations (for example, Pointer Authentication Codes) that remove classes of vulnerabilities or make it much harder to develop an exploit chain;

These allow Apple to take a security-maximalist approach and block alternative browsers that don't include the most performance-killing mitigations possible.

I don't think these points are bad per-se, but within the context of malicious compliance that Apple has already displayed, I'd be scared to invest money on alternative browser for iOS.

For instance, rust doesn't support PAC yet https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/73628. Support for PAC wasn't even in upstream LLVM for a while (it now is, but lld still doesn't support it).

Why do I have a sneaky feeling Safari for iOS isn’t fully written in a fully memory safe language?

"We're smart enough to safely use these languages but you're not" is a bold claim that just happens to end up with the exact same consequences of their earlier rule that was deemed anticompetitive, there's no conspiracy here!

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