The article does an incredible job as painting Apple as a dystopian corporation that is strangling the web with forced WebKit, but spends so little time actually refuting the statement "if WebKit weren't mandated, Chromium would take over". It pretty much comes down to "if Apple were forced to open their platform, they would spend money improving Safari, and user's wouldn't switch because Apple has a gorillian dollars". The author seems to ignore that Google also has a gorillian dollars, plus the added inertia of Chromium itself, plus the pervasive network of Search and YouTube that would shove ads for Chrome down the throats of users. Money alone, even billions, cannot create a competitive browser engine. Microsoft tried. I'm not sure that, if you actually cared about browser diversity, that forcing Apple to open up iOS and then hoping they don't mismanage Safari trying to compete with Chrome is a losing bet.
You do see the implication of what you say: Apple produces a vastly inferior browser and only gets to maintain market share via absolute, monopolistic control over their OS.
You clearly believe that if they were forced to compete on equal terms with Chrome, they would loose.
Do explain how forcing inferior browser on iOS users is better than Chrome winning on merits?
The road to better products has always been competition.
Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla can, and do, compete with Chrome.
Apple not allowing competition is the root of all evil.
Neither Apple nor Google spends money on developing browser out of the goodness of their heart.
In a battle of two evil corporations I'll side with the one that's making a better product. And in web browsers, it's Google.
Please consider the relevant viewpoint before commenting. This is about the reliability and capabilities of Safari as a target for websites and web applications from a developer point of view, not the reliability from a user point of view (although, being a Safari user myself, I can also definitely say it's not "rock solid" in that regard either).
From a developer point of view, Safari is widely lagging behind other engines in terms of features, and has been rigged with hundreds of show stopping bugs for years, including relative to very basic features like scrolling. As an example, as of today, it is still impossible to reliably prevent page scrolling in Safari on iOS. Don't tell web developers "Safari is rock solid"; for us it's the bane of our existence.
I’m a web developer, and I use Safari almost exclusively. It’s not the bane of my existence, I find it pleasant to work in, the dev tools are good. Just wanted to offer a counterpoint, not all developers hate Safari! I find it to be rock solid.
A lot of the developers who rail against it are in the advertising industry and those who want to push notifications to you as well as run their garbage javascript in the background.
the biggest problem of safari (Apple ecosystem) is the same as IE or even worse, it is integrated into the system, and old devices like ipad do not have updates ...
I used Netscape through 4.x, up until 2000 or so. It took years before Phoenix / Firebird / Firefox was considered "stable" (I'd say Firefox 2.0?) There was a solid 4 or 5 years there where IE was your only real choice. Apple was even shipping IE with the Mac!
I find it hard to imagine anyone preferred Netscape 4.x to IE 5 and 5.5. I think even IE6 may have existed before Netscape 6, though I definitely made the switch to Phoenix as soon as I discovered it.
I certainly did. I used a lot of features in Netscape that IE never had, and at university it was _the_ browser used on campus in the late 90s.
IE 5 was a buggy browser lacking a lot of features, but was used often by people not building things online. And forced on people by bizarre site requirements. Though this came worse with IE6.
Microsoft was embroiled in legal issues of their browser at this time, and anyone with a sense of logic (most programmers) could see being locked into one piece of software instantly degrades the value of that software.
Sept 2002 was when Phoenix was released.[0]
IE 6 came out only a year before Phoenix.[1] And you if you were involved with Slashdot back in the day you were tracking browser usage as a daily trend. Phoenix was doing well.
The difference from now is that back then there was an army of dedicated tech oriented people that _knew_ MS and IE were a problem that needed to be resisted.
I knew tech oriented people, myself included, that used a Windows desktops for a few years because the other browser alternatives were unacceptably bad.
Sure. As someone who had to build sites for both, IE was far superior. Vague css support and it didn’t crash if you nested tables more than seven layers deep.
OK, if you really think Safari is worse than dealing with IE hacks you probably were not writing anything for the web back then. This was already a tenuous argument, but come on.
OS lock-in and slow adoption of new web features is perhaps lame but Safari doesn't have anything even approaching it's own box model, or `-ms-filter` equivalent, or quirks mode... the list approaches infinity.
Also, "install something else?" Do you know what the browser landscape looked like back then? IE had >80% dominance for years, and your other option was Netscape, which lacked huge swaths of custom features in IE.
If the one key feature in an iOS webapp _kills_ your business, then _yes_ iOS/Safari is magnitudes worse than IE ever was.
The expectations and businesses relying on browser functionality back then is minimal compared to today which amplifies the core issues at hand.
Try building an PWA with offline capabilities (trivial in modern browsers) that's your core of your business, and you will see what I see. Apple is _trying_ to strangle non-app store apps. Where IE was just a dumb lumbering problem by comparison.
I have, for one of the world's largest companies. You're missing the forest for the trees if you feel PWAs are this much of a linchpin to the broader conversation.
The only programmers that had issues with IE were when IE broke something they needed, it hardly matters what it was. Apples to apples comparisons are the relevant issue.
So if your PWA works on iOS/Safari, great for you, but it doesn't mean everyone's does.
If you've checked mdn or caniuse anytime in the last 2-3 years, you'd notice that Safari has been leading the gang in standard web feature adoption.
Safari offers the most refined developer experience for web dev and testing (my favourite are the automation capabilities which are incredible and private as it separates my data from test data during a run). With technology preview updates delivered directly in macOS, I'm always confident I have the latest setup to test my web apps...
You've got be joking right? ok so lets go through some stats:
1. Safari, performs worst on wpt.fyi by a VERY wide margin
2. In State of CSS last year had the most number of complaints in relation to bugs. 360 related to Safari, compared to 30 for chrome and 10 for firefox.
3. In the MDN developer Survey developers ranked Safari as the second biggest problem after IE. A browser that's no longer supported.
3. Doesn't really support Web Apps, no user findable method of install (install prompts), no push notifications.
4. Huge numbers of bugs (some of which haven't been fixed in over 7 years)
5. and the devtools are still far behind chromes.
6. and missing all of these:
Notifications / Push API
No AppStore Support
App Store Support for Web Apps
Fullscreen API
Badging
Deep Links
Screen Orientation Lock
Bluetooth
NFC
Web Share Target
Screen Wakelock
Keyboard Lock and Keyboard Layout APIs
getInstalledRelatedApps()
Background Fetch API
Background Sync API
WebGPU
WebXR
Offscreen Canvas
Declarative Shadow DOM
SQL
SIMD
WASM Threads
Shared Array Buffers
AV1/AVIF and VP8/VP9/WebP (Open Media Codecs)
Compression Streams
Scoped Custom Element Registry
ElementInternals
You can see other replies for details lists of functionalities and capabilities often pioneered and supported by Safari long before other browsers (even Firefox).
Some loud voices from the community have very selective memory, and they momentarily forget all the evilness pumped into Chrome regularly. (remember FLoCs? Advertising API? AMP?)
All that hate for Safari can be much more productive if channeled as constructive feedback on browsers' bug trackers and governance discussions, improving the ecosystem as a whole (which is what you want if you care for the web). Such conversations can even lead to the natural evolution of standards and implementations towards more refined engine customizations on each platform.
Today, iOS allows for open browser choice on iOS, so any technical requirements for the implementation are of no meaningful consequence to iOS users. Everyone can get the look, feel, and service integration with their preferred vendor's ecosystem. Consumers and developers also get a consistent experience throughout the entire operating system - a piece of content will appear the same in any context. Simple, efficient, and reliable. All this will be lost the moment someone decides to prop a "To view this website, download browser XYZ." Imagine you are faced with this in a stressful situation when you need your phone to work the most.
> Some loud voices from the community have very selective memory, and they momentarily forget all the evilness pumped into Chrome regularly. (remember FLoCs? Advertising API? AMP?)
Hell, remember logging users into Chrome without permission because they logged into a Google website like Gmail and then "accidentally" synching all the user's bookmarks and browser history to Google?
iOS does not allow for any meaningful choice, it’s all basically Safari.
Says who?
Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, EFF, the uk regulator, the Japanese regulator, the EU and most importantly the group of people who actually build web software on iOS.
Chrome-only non-standards that both Firefox and Safari are against.
> Declarative Shadow DOM
Actually proposed by Safari, and stalled for multiple reasons. Moreover, at the start of the whole web component brouhaha Safari wanted to have declarative ways of specifying Web Components, but Chrome said "no, we want to move fast and break things"
> WebGPU
Proposed by Safari
---
Can't be bothered to check others, but off the top of my head, but most of other standards that you just dumped without understanding fall under the following categories:
- Chrome-only non-standards with multiple issues that have multiple objections from both Safari and Firefox
- Originally proposed by Safari
- Have specific technical objections from Safari, and specific reasons for not implementing
- (very small minority of specs) No idea why they haven't implemented these yet
Would you point me to Apple's alternative implementation for access bluetooth / nfc? That's right it doesn't exist. Instead they offer for you to install a native app which once granted bluetooth access can continuously scan and connect to any bluetooth device they want.
- Install Prompts 7 Years behind. Many thousands of requests. - Notifications 7 years behind.
- Fullscreen API 11 years behind.
- Badging 5 years behind.
- Deep Links 7 years behind.
- Screen Orientation Lock 10 years behind.
and what's your excuse going to be the myriad of bugs/stability issues?
> Would you point me to Apple's alternative implementation for access bluetooth / nfc?
1. This is clearly moving goalposts
2. Why would Apple or Firefox provide you with an "alternative implementation for access bluetooth / nfc"?
> Instead they offer for you to install
No. Instead both they and Mozilla consider these non-standrads harmful and have no intention of implementing them. Or are you going to pretend that Mozilla is in Apple's pocket and does this to enrich Apple?
I'm not going to react to yet another mindless list of things that you have little knowledge of.
1. If you're going to say you don't like spec because of issues, you should explicitly describe what those issues are OR offer up an alternative spec. Simply not engaging on the spec doesn't present as engineers trying to solve a problem.
2. Neither Apple or Mozilla have described in detail what they think the harms are and why the specs do not cover those harms. But Mozilla is not a gatekeeper and doesn't ban the competition from 50% of mobile devices, so IMO they should be free to decide to do whatever they want even if I disagree with their decision.
Apple on the other hand not only doesn't describe the security issues in ANY detail, or outline why the specs don't cover them, it bans the competition from bringing any solution to the problem while at the same time providing a significantly insecure solution on native which is widely used to track and surveil users and for 9 years didn't even require a permission prompt.
As for resorting to insults about mindless list of things, have you even attempted to build a web app for iOS?
In every single case of the most ardent Safari defenders the answer is no. Unsurprisingly the people that care about the issues in Safari are the ones with the most knowledge that have to work with it daily.
Again. People who ACTUALLY build apps in Safari are the ones that run into these issues. The only people that attempt to defend it are the ones who don't even build apps for it.
At the bottom right there is a chart and Safari is in 3rd.
I built a company based on browser testing and Safari in general was/is always behind.
They have hired some good people so maybe that situation will change but in general Safari is the currently the boat anchor of browsers. Hopefully the situation will change over time.
This just isn't true! There are so many features that have not been supported long after other browsers implemented them (webgl 2 comes to mind, though that is finally available - 4% of global web users still don't have support due to this, though!)
Exactly:
Install Prompts - 7 Years.
Fullscreen API - 11 Years.
Push API - 7 Years.
Badging - 5 years.
Screen Orientation Lock - 11 years.
Bluetooth - 5 years.
"A native app would do just fine", why would we want to build a native app using proprietary tech, be forced to go through an app store, risk to be turn down by Apple and be taxed 30% of our revenue otherwise? All this when we can build web apps using open standards, working on all platforms and without being extorted by a giant abusive conglomerate?
You would want to because you want access to Apple's customers. Also, your example doesn't sound like it'd hold up to real world practice. If you're selling someone proprietary tech then your revenue isn't subject to 30% of Apple's fee. Only the software portion done through the app is. You obviously have a motivated buyer at this point if they bought a physical device. You could route them to a website to create an account, sign up for any subscriptions and launch the startup process that eventually has them install your native app. You want what you want, but you describe hyperbole. Plenty of apps have users manage subscriptions on a website, not on native apps.
from a developer point of view, i'm about to give my team a talk on container queries + subgrid, and safari is the only browser i can use to demo both.
not sure what your scrolling issue is, hidden overflow and blocked pointer events have always worked just fine for me. typically when someone gets scrolling wrong they're using 100vh instead of stretch and/or not scoping overflow correctly
Container Queries and Subgrid are only available in Safari Technology Preview, not stable, and Firefox has actually been supporting Subgrid for more than 2 years. Because CQ is not supported by either Chrome of Firefox, it will be at least 2 years before we can start actually using it.
It would have been much wiser for Safari to catch up on the dozens of features they don't support that both Chrome and Firefox do, or to focus on bug fixes for the most basic features that's been broken for years. Instead, they chose to ship shiny new ones to try and convince both regulators (from the EU, UK, US, etc) and web developers that they are leading the way in feature adoption. Unfortunately this seems to be working to some extent in the web devs community. Regulators are unlikely to fall for it though.
Here you can see that Safari has 5 times more API failures (representative of both missing features and bugs) than Chrome, and 3 times more than Firefox: https://wpt.fyi/
Original author of the post here. I'm also a Blink API OWNER, so can happily report that Container Queries have 3 LGTMs and will ship in Chromium browsers very shortly, likely 105 (shipping to Stable in September):
> Nobody in their right mind would ever want to zoom & pan a map on a website
1) I agree. Apps have maps, but most websites?
2) Zooming and panning can be done without WPA. At most some basic JS, although I think you can do the same via HTML+CSS.
3) The old way of zooming panning was buttons for zooming and panning. Those worked fine. In face ,they worked better than zooming and panning buggy implementations.
You might be right if one fix one mind on developer and latest greatest. But apple preposition at least for user might not be that. We n fact, I thought the whole point of browser is serving the user.
Until m1 I am not sure apple has the intel experience considering the hackintosh. But apple dominate for a while the developer market.
The question imho is whether apple provide a good enough solution for its users. And for monopoly I am not sure why os pre-installed browser is that relevant. Remember why edge exist. Just to download chrome.
Btw I use both as there are things can be easily done by one cannot by the others. I hope we have more. Not less.
Actually, didn't the latest build of Safari nightly recently over take all the other browsers in terms of number of supported features? I swear that was shared here on HN.
It 100% did not in that universe. Safari is massively lagging behind, and has been for so long it will certainly be years before it catches up with Chromium or Firefox.
The caniuse data shows that the number of APIs Chrome supports that Safari doesn't is at least 3 times higher than the opposite, and among the APIs Safari supports that Chrome don't, most are either too old and useless, too new and equally useless, or very small compared to the massive APIs listed to Chrome advantage.
I really don't see how that translates to "Safari and Chrome trading blows" and Safari taking over Chrome by "50%"?
Also, here is more representative dataset, where you can see that Safari has more than 5 times the number of API failures compared to Chrome, and 3 times compared to Firefox (in the stable channel): https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...
Interop2022 is probably what your referring too but that’s just a small (but still important) functionality that the browsers have agreed to focus on. Interop is great, but using it as the primary metric for your browser is very dishonest. Apple tried to do this in their regulatory filing but every other vendor and developers said that the overall stats are much more representative.
Same here. I use it on all my devices. It's fast and it feels light weight and secure. I love developing for it because I can open web inspector for my iPad and iPhone.
I don't trust Chrome. When I went to App Store to get it, and the data Chrome gathers that is linked to your identity is: financial info, location, contact info, contacts, user conten, search history, browsing history, identifiers, usage data, diagnostics and other data.
Safari also collects browsing history and location information, but they don't link it to your identity.
I would honestly not care if Chrome was 100% faster, because Google is severely lacking in their privacy policy.
Ex-Chrome engineer here. Chrome doesn’t “collect” this information about you. It optionally syncs it across devices. Take a look at the privacy policy: data like autofill, your browsing history, and your password manager does not get used for ad targeting. Apple basically blackmailed Google into putting all of that stuff in the “privacy nutrition label” with absolutely no nuance, under threat of having to take Chrome out of the App Store.
> Apple basically blackmailed Google into putting all of that stuff in the “privacy nutrition label” with absolutely no nuance, under threat of having to take Chrome out of the App Store.
And this is so much better than the alternative which is a 500 page legal document.
When you install the app you see what data can be collected and decide if you trust the provider of the app with that data. And for that you don’t need any context. Because you don’t know what the code in this app does.
You realize that the only time Chrome needs to link those things to user identity is for synchronizing profiles across devices, right?
They have to declare everything they might use, but everything is still subject to the various Chrome privacy policies. I can guarantee that if Chrome were found to be violating those policies, people would sue.
I can't try Chrome out on my work iPhone because Apple won't let me download a free app without first signing into their store. That and other things make me doubt the sincerity of their privacy push.
Why do I have a work iPhone? Because Safari is the one browser that you can't just assume things will work for so I need to occasionally use it before pushing website changes.
Say what you want but it is so frustrating when you run into problems like this. It does remind me of old IE days where we had to produce one gazillion hacks for IE.
People have different priority, most end user gives no fuck about the pile of garbage APIs that just keeps growing in modern browsers, they just wanna read some stuff. When developers cry about their "api", some kid in africa isn't able to access knowledge on ther internet because sites have to use look behind or whatever.
I had the same issue & had to rewrite not to use RegEx [1], but if that's the main issue people are running into, it's a non-issue that can easily be worked around.
Personally I find Safari a great browser on iOS and prefer not to add to the test matrix burden with different browser engines on iOS. Also this restriction is the only thing keeping Chrome from dominating the future of Web, who can't be trusted to not use it as an anti competitive weapon as we've seen with AMP.
It's not just regex, it's a long list of features and bugs. The OP was simply giving an example. I've encountered many time-wasting bugs on safari in the past, which have simply been open for several years.
I second this. I hit a goofy issue recently too: Safari can't select text in text boxes... but only sometimes. What causes it is unclear. Out of this mountain of workarounds, I had to use setTimeout: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3272089/programmatically...
And in Safari there's zero visibility into why things break, they just silently don't work. At least Chrome is pretty good (in my experience) about throwing an exception or at least logging warnings to the console
In this situation, grabbing a 3rd party JS regex library for a handful of kilobytes probably solves your problem, but I’m sure that crossed your mind.
Is it really as bad as the IE days though? I didn’t work on web back then, but these days if I run into a safari comparability issue, the workaround is usually pretty painless.
I did work on the web back in those days. The situation now is nothing like it was during IE's dominance in the early 2000s, to claim it is is hyperbole at best.
You are right, it's worse because the problem is more hidden and therefore a lot harder to solve.
At least in the IE days everyone _knew_ IE was a problem, so we were looking for a solution as a community. Now? We comments that are dismissive of crap instead of inspiring towards quality.
I do not believe there is a 3rd party polyfill for lookbehind as it is quite tricky to implement regular expressions. If you found one, please let me know. Thanks in advance.
Try to write a non-trivial web app using vanilla JS/HTML/CSS. Then test with the major browsers. You'll find that Safari is always the one where things break and that forces you to go back and rewrite stuff due to (for the most part) bugs and lack of features.
I have not talked to a single team developing mobile apps for Safari that hasn’t run into significant problems.
If you’re just building a standard body scroll website with a simple ui/ux you’ll likely be ok. As soon as you start doing complex stuff with pinned panels, or gestures, animations, drag and drop then you’ll hit the bugs.
Some of the bugs developers have been complaining about for 7 years.
Every browser we develop has bugs, Safari just has 10x as many.
I've been a web developer for about 3 years and in my anecdotal experience of the modern browsers I have had the most trouble with Safari.
Multiple times I've hit issues with things that I would have expected to be 100% complete, like SVGs not being able to properly transition animations in certain cases.
If you actually wrote a complex web application and didn't encounter significant bugs in Safari, you either didn't test very well, or your app, although "complex", doesn't try to do much.
Check out my side project in my profile. It’s written in plain JS/HTML. I did have to work around some Chrome issues, but didn’t have any problems with Safari at all!
Oh that second one is a nightmare. Our solution for it was to copy the element and create a new one that was absolutely positioned for the draggable element. The issue is syncing elements can be quite tricky.
- Nice to have
- Problem
- Don’t want it, will never allow it
- Nice to have
- Don’t want it, will never allow it
Of the five items you list, I only see one as a real problem. Two of them are privacy misfeatures that have no business being on the web platform. The other two are annoying and would be better to have than not.
It's not about whether you like it, or they like it, or I like it; it's about being able to provide certain features that a subset (of which you may or may not be a member) desire or require.
For example, taking web push notifications, you and many others may not want it, but someone else and many others too may want it for whatever reason:
- maybe from a developer perspective because they're a hobbyist and don't want to create an app instead of a website just to get notifications, but would be happy if they had the option. And before you say you don't need them, you DON'T know their use case, e.g., if it's a chat web-app it's going to be pretty damn useless without notifications.
- maybe from a user's perspective because they're not happy granting additional permissions (or making it harder to use an ad-blocker) that could be required by an app from the store, they just need the push notification to get some alert, but don't want to give up access to their photos, files, or contacts too.
In any case, it's about having empathy towards allowing others to have wants/needs different from yours, and if you do that and put yourself in other people's shoes, you should be able to see that Safari is clearly lacking in implementing a bunch of features (or delivering them several years after every other browser).
Finally, all that doesn't take away the fact that Safari does some things better than others, and that other browsers do things worse or push features that are in line with their own agenda or monetisation strategy.
that kind of test is always biased in favor of the browser you develop the app in though. If you conservatively use caniuse during development usually there's not so much in the way of problems. Nevertheless I don't entirely disagree, Safari's not perfect and definitely is more sluggish to support APIs. But in terms of bugginess/odd behaviours I would say I actually run into the most issues with chrome (I develop in FF and then test safari and chrome after)
Battery thing aside, it's inferior.
As a developer that sometimes have to dabble on the front end, I have come across areas where Firefox and Chrome supported features for years and I just assumed Safari did also...nope it didn't dues to what I could only assume is some nonsense Apple dogma
I’ve long found it shocking the extent to which Google and Mozilla shrug this aspect off. Between laptops, phones, and tablets, computing is dominated by battery powered devices… power efficiency should be a headlining goal, not a trailing afterthought.
As a user I don’t care nearly as much if my browser supports WebOnions v2 or whatever feature-du-jour as I do that it’s not wantonly burning through my battery just doing basic browsing.
If you look at the WebKit/Safari Technology Preview releases over the past 6-12 months, it paints a different picture. They’ve significantly expanded the WebKit team and are (now) clearly invested in improving compatibility.
We generally develop on chrome. The outcome always works fine on Firefox and then we start finding bugs on safari. The reason you find safari pleasant is probably because developers spend time working around the shortcomings and bugs because safari has a good chunk of the user base.
At the same time by lacking features it becomes the lowest common browser api target blocking progress.
Same, from a battery perspective I'd say it's the best browser. I have all the plugins I had on chrome, pages seem to load faster, and my battery life and resources seem far more protected. I'm also not being tracked at every level or being mined for ad data.
> why does apple need to prevent people from installing other browsers
Because, perhaps, the main one of those "other browsers" is widely considered to be a surveillance tool first, browser second, for a surveillance company and one of Apple's main current marketing thrusts is "we help you avoid people spying on you on your phone"?
> And that's why users have to prevented from installing all of those other browsers?
...yes? Who are people going to complain to when ANOther browser leaks their PII from an iPhone? Who will get the bad PR? It won't be ANOther browser because lord knows they've been getting away with it for years with little to no consequence. Why would Apple put themselves - and their customers given their marketing claims to care about their privacy - in a position where that privacy can a) be compromised and b) reflect badly on Apple?
It is pretty astonishing reading the rhetoric on HN, overwhelmingly from web developers who basically want a single target. They are quite literally the anathema of the web spirit, but it's basically IE v2.0 -- during the IE 3 / 4 days there were lazy devs who told everyone they should just run IE and be done with it.
It is astonishing reading like Safari is some derelict junk when the edges are laughable trivial stuff. "But it doesn't support some random, irrelevant standard Google tried to railroad through last month..."
I think the point the other author is trying to make isn't that apple's anti-competitive practices are good. it's that google's anti-competitive practices with their browser are more powerful than apple's anti-competitive practices. In particular the close integration with search, youtube, and add delivery. I don't think the other author was making a point about one product being inferior to the other, more that both products rely on anti-competitive practices and google's anti-competitive practices are more powerful. safari could be an excellent product, but google will just stick a big modal dialogue on every search page and youtube video "For the best results download chrome.."
no browser product these days compete in a completely free market.
Exactly. If Apple is required to open up iOS to other engines, Google should be barred from aggressively promoting Chrome with their own services as well as ensure that their sites perform well on competing engines (currently, they don’t) with the same stroke.
I see it as Google will use the same techniques they used for desktop to aggressively push Chrome regardless of technical merit - aggressive banners & popups on their own web properties, user-agent based blocking of functionality, etc.
edit: I suppose due to the nature of the app store (at present), they can't do the bundling stuff - like they used to do with Chrome-by-default when you downloaded Adobe Reader, for instance.
> and are the last army standing preventing the Web turning into ChromeOS
Except safari doesn't exist outside of Apple's luxury walled garden.
> they are still winning.
The strategic purpose of Safari is to extract dollars from Google and push users to the app store. Indeed a second rate, mediocre Safari is in Apple's best interest. On the other hand Google has every reason to develop the best browser possible and the incredible scale of chromium development demonstrates that.
>Apple produces a vastly inferior browser and only gets to maintain market share via absolute, monopolistic control over their OS.
Yes. If you think Safari is terrible and you want to use Chrome on your iPhone then argue that. This incredible reach around that Apple not letting you install Chrome harms browser diversity is ridiculous.
> You clearly believe that if they were forced to compete on equal terms with Chrome, they would loose.
Actually what he said was that they can't compete on equal terms.
If Apple were forced to open it's platform, they wouldn't be competing on equal terms, Google would have a clear advantage. Google can put up Ads for Chrome on all of it's properties for free. Apple cannot put up Ads for Safari on all of Google's properties for free.
What if part of the agreement to open the iOS platform to competing browsers was that all competing browser makers must agree to provide equal advertising time to all other competing browsers across their platforms?
I use it every day and it's fine. It may suck for developers, but I don't care if makes your job making webpages harder or not, just do your job. I like the competition from it whether artificial or not.
> You clearly believe that if they were forced to compete on equal terms with Chrome, they would loose.
Woah there. Will they actually compete on equal terms, or will YouTube/Google/Gmail (the most popular sites on the internet) tell people that not using Chrome is causing a variety of issues.
I don't think Chrome ever really won "on merits", it won on "Google keeps telling me I'm interneting wrong".
Besides that, "better" isn't really a recognizable concept. What you want and what I want are different. And if what I want is a way to prevent ad-tracking, and what Google wants is better ad-tracking, I don't think I win that war of words.
That is, I don't really care what features a browser has if I cannot block ads, and not blocking ads is high on Google's list.
What’s stopping you from downloading Chrome on your iPhone and making it the default browser? They are allowing competition in every sense. They have just managed to keep Safari good enough for typical users not to feel any desire to add another browser to their phone. From a non-developer standpoint, safari is great. From a developer standpoint, I have just as many issues with Firefox having strange quirks.
Switched to Safari a couple years ago and haven’t looked back. Chrome feels like a dinosaur and I miss it only for the dev tools.
Sorry to break it to you, but Safari is the better browser.
I’m glad they limit the engine choice. At least apples authoritarian policies are limited to their own platforms, meanwhile Google is quickly fencing off the web for itself in pure EEE style, with new “standards” flying out as fast as they can tweet them.
Safari is in no way a better browser than any competitor. It is widely known in the web developer community that it is rigged with bugs and lagging behind in terms of features.
I think this is the correct take. Most comments have been developers complaining that Safari doesn't do esoteric task _x_ rather than their clients can't achieve _y_
Apple make products for the top end of customers and they don't want to be dealing with complaints from Grandma about battery life because they hit a series of dark patterns and accidentally installed Chrome and made it default.
They've made it quite clear IMO that pwa style products would be better served by a native app.
It's not important to me that your job is easier. I'm a dev and I deal with hard shit 5 days out of the week. My users don't give fk about that, they only care that my product works on their phone.
Not when Google properties show their “some features wont work on your browser” lies, err, alerts.
~65% of users are not savvy enough to see this as the marketing statement it is, and will treat it as a real reason to get chrome. I’ve watched it happen in front of my eyes.
If only Apple would prevent grandparent commenter from installing browsers with other rendering engines on MacOS too. Why isn't Apple, in its benevolence, restricting browser choice on MacOS?
> Apple not allowing competition is the root of all evil.
There are plenty of browsers available for iOS. In all the ways that matter to consumers, they can choose a browser and the services associated with it.
All the WebKit haters are so loud and driven in their quest to "liberate" others, while the alternative is just looking for the most optimal ways to monetize their browsing habits. Google is the company US legislators need to beg not to collect personal information so citizens can be safe... which makes them much closer to the "root of all evil".
From a consumer point of view, the engine in use is of no consequence. The engine doesn't make the browser. Otherwise, it would be called "WebKit" and not Safari. Users perceive the browser as a collection of UI, look and feel, integration with services, and other ecosystems - all built on top of the engine. All unrestricted on iOS.
What consumers also expect is for things to work. Reliably. I can't wait for pages to start asking people to download browser X because "opinionated" devs decided they only want to support their favorite brand.
It appears the author works for Microsoft, a trillion dollar company that gave up trying to compete against Google and finally just started bundling a Chrome fork.
Microsoft knows from painful experience that monopolistic advertisement pushes don't magically win the browser wars. And they really did try.
For an entrepreneurial forum, it's pretty incredible how frequently magical mind control powers are attributed to marketing/advertising. Anyone who has ever made a real product knows that advertising is not enough, it only works in the long term if your product is actually good and worth using. By this logic, every Google product should automatically win. All they have to do is slap an ad on their homepage and sponsor some installation partnership deals and boom, nothing can stop Google.
They're still trying pretty hard, about one out of five times I try to launch something from the start menu, the search results don't find it or are too slow, and it launches Edge to search for "Fusion 360" or whatever I was trying to open, using Bing.
So far, only Facebook (G+) or Apple (Android) has stopped Google. They've spent the last few years successfully killing travel websites and shopping websites. Unless you have the resources and customer lock-in of a Facebook or Apple, you're probably doomed if Google looks your way.
Nonsense. If the user need can't be satisfied in a search page result, Google is completely impotent. Slack, Zoom, WhatsApp, Stripe, etc. all prove this out.
Before that he made the Dojo JavaScript library (jQuery precursor / competitor).
Alex Russell’s position has always been that web developers (especially library authors) need as many browser features as possible to help them build the most flexible / capable web applications possible. He has consistently pushed for browsers to ship new features ASAP, with the idea that developers can paper over the differences or work around a buggy API, but can’t turn nothing into something. My impression is that he joined Google because he thought that was the best way to further that pre-established goal; it’s not fair to say that he’s just promoting this because he thinks it is in Google/Microsoft/Chrome’s interest.
By contrast, Safari developers’ position has long been that new browser features should be carefully evaluated and then implemented at leisure, because this is a long game and we don’t need rush jobs. Their focus is more on client-side resource use (it’s shocking how far behind Chrome is on this one), correctness of the features they do decide to implement, performance, and user privacy (Google’s whole business model is ubiquitous surveillance).
These two positions are both defensible, but are at odds with each-other. For Safari developers, Chrome trying to ram big piles of half-baked new features down every browser’s throat ASAP is just a recipe for churn, and getting developers to adopt them right away so that users then come complain that “Safari is broken” is endlessly annoying. For Chrome developers (or web developers who want to build on new shiny features right away instead of waiting 2+ years for cross-browser adoption), Safari lagging behind is “holding back the web”.
> correctness of the features they do decide to implement, performance,
If this was the case, I would hate Safari significantly less. If the only issue with Safari was that they didn't implement certain features, that would be fine. I could check the compatibility matrices and just avoid features that aren't implemented. The problem is that every now and then they support something, and it _appears_ to work, but then there's some weird interaction that breaks some interaction and it takes forever to debug.
Sometimes it's reproducible in Epiphany(webkit issue), but other times it isn't. Safari updates their webkit version pretty infrequently so bugs that are fixed in webkit are not fixed in Safari. So the only way to know if it works in Safari is to test in Safari, which requires OSX.
Safari is the new IE. IE had better client-side resource use for a long time compared to firefox/netscape. IE didn't implement new features and they had IE only features just like Safari (you can select text in images in Safari). IE only worked on windows and made linux/osx developers suffer just like Safari makes linux/windows developers suffer today.
License prohibits running macOS on non-Apple hardware.
I'm not sure if EULA is legally binding in EU (and if it can prevent you from using a product), but I think companies would rather avoid this if possible.
When you develop in Chrome of course you’ll feel like bugs only exist in other engines.
Developing on Safari it feels like the opposite.
A few years ago I’d have agreed somewhat, but Safari has accelerated considerably and improved wrt standards. In fact better than Chrome as of late, if you follow the Interop project, and it feels as much.
I primarily use Firefox, but I usually have 3 browsers open: Chrome/Firefox/Epiphany to try and make sure stuff works correctly across all 3 major engines. Unfortunately stuff still slips through into Safari land.
I am not a language specification lawyer. If I hit a difference in behavior, I don't open up the spec to try and figure out who is right and wrong. It's entirely possible that Safari is in the right. But when Chrome/Firefox/Latest webkit agree, and Safari doesn't, I'm fairly confident it's Safari's fault at that point.
But even if it was Safari's fault and I could test that on Linux/Android, that would be fine. The biggest annoyance is that you can't possibly know if what you're doing would work without buying Apple hardware.
> I am not a language specification lawyer. If I hit a difference in behavior, I don't open up the spec to try and figure out who is right and wrong. It's entirely possible that Safari is in the right. But when Chrome/Firefox/Latest webkit agree, and Safari doesn't, I'm fairly confident it's Safari's fault at that point.
This is weird to me. Say if I’m working with Swift, JavaScript, and Java. And only Swift built-in mergesort is the right implementation (say it’s the common case where it correctly implements the mid logic not shown in textbooks). That’s not Swift’s fault, that’s Javascript & Java’s fault for implementing a bad Mergesort.
Personally I find Chrome to be utterly unusable for my browsing habits (hundreds of browser tabs open at once). It glitches, spins up my laptop’s fans like there’s no tomorrow and burns through battery, eats all the RAM it can find, and easily crashes. And that’s without even getting to the privacy discussion.
The existence of a Chrome-based iOS browser would quickly lead web developers to drop Safari and Firefox support (“just install Chrome bro!”) so I for one am thankful that Apple is not budging here.
Their browser is, for me, strictly superior. And their political decisions are the last defense of a multi-browser web.
> The existence of a Chrome-based iOS browser would quickly lead web developers to drop Safari and Firefox support (“just install Chrome bro!”)
Yeah, that would totally happen because websites that force people to install some massively resource hungry and sluggish browser first will obviously out-compete those that don't.
Joe Random web developer doesn’t necessarily care whether the browser he personally develops against is disrespectful of someone else’s client-side resources. He just wants to make his website with as little busywork as possible, and testing every website feature for cross-browser compatibility is busywork. If he can avoid the trouble by telling visitors to switch browsers, he will be happy to do so.
This is not hypothetical: developers have been putting up “this site works best (or only works) in X browser” warnings for decades by now.
No, what would happen is that Apple would actually have to spend resources on competing with other browser engines, instead of holding the web back via monopoly. They certainly have the money to do so.
Actually, if Apple wanted to compete in the browser space, they could do that without allowing other browsers on iOS. Bring Safari to Windows, Linux and Android. Safari for Windows did exist many years ago and I did like it. Apple really gave up on browsers a long time ago and Safari is the new IE.
And yet their monopolist behaviour is the only thing countering Google's monopolist behaviour with Chrome.
I fear witnessing the incoming manifest v3 apocalypse, when Google will nerf adblockers and plenty of other extensions. And all Chromium based browsers will most probably also be affected. So no capable adblockers in Edge/Vivaldi/Opera/etc. either, probably.
Performance wise
Safari web assembly can't possibly compare to chrome enabled simd web assembly.
For anything complex safari's performance is a setback
I do a lot of numerical work in Javascript, and I typically find Safari to be the fastest JavaScript engine on my machine for the code I try (sometimes about the same or sometimes several times faster). Safari’s Javascript performance is pretty impressive.
Web Assembly is a new and rapidly changing feature. SIMD support in Web Assembly is even newer. Neither one has yet been adopted by most websites / web applications.
In a few years I would expect more developers to start adopting these technologies and Safari to have finally gotten around to a SIMD implementation.
Personally I hope the browsers all figure out how to get double-precision FMA operations (fused multiply-add) in wasm.
If Apple cases about privacy then they could deny Chrome in the Store for the specific reason but allow say Chromium or Firefox (or sure they can find some specific reason why Firefox or Chromium have less privacy and why the iOS users are incapable for deciding for themselves to use Firefox).
Wow, explains a lot. It’s such a shortsighted position for a browser - it’s one of the only platforms that literally can’t have breaking changes, and they want to bloat it even more?
The entire problem with the web is they keep adding high level half-solutions over and over, many that intersect and almost none that actually solve things at the right abstraction. What we need is lower level primitives and performance. Instead we got Web Components, a disaster, and seemingly a thousand new CSS features (coming only from Chrome) that serve only to further entrench Google.
Simpler and lower level APIs and ruthless work on performance would have given us a far richer platform to target, leading to better interop with cross compiling native tools, better experiences, and less bloat.
Seems like weekly a Google evangelist tweets a gushing, emoji-laden joyous tweet about a new feature they’re shopping tomorrow adding some super arbitrary thing (the latest is some page transition spec which again is such a half-solution). Extend and extinguish!
>Seems like weekly a Google evangelist tweets a gushing, emoji-laden joyous tweet about a new feature they’re shopping tomorrow adding some super arbitrary thing (the latest is some page transition spec which again is such a half-solution). Extend and extinguish!
They’re going for that juicy promotion, no matter what! The future of the Web be damned…
This isn't true! I've encountered many bugs in safari (fullscreen pointer lock not working on most html elements comes to mind), and they certainly do not value quality.
And he's complaining about Apple, a trillion dollar company that gave up trying to compete against Firefox and IE and finally just started bundling a KDE fork.
The funny thing being that, as it happens, the same corporation that develops and distributes Chrome also develops and distributes a mobile OS that enjoys pretty broad exposure. So, if the best product wins in a competitive marketplace, where is the problem? If the author was right, iOS shouldn't even be a thing. So, is it the customers? Are they just too dumb to give the best product the win, thus strangling browser development by their death grip? Is the principal failure that there's a marketplace at all? Something doesn't add up in the principle construction of the argument.
This make me question the story of Microsoft. MS-DOS, Windows and especially the Internet-Explorer (Trident). All of them won in a competitive marketplace and where of questionable quality and in long term harmful.
I cannot defend Apples locked platform! Yes, WebKit is crucial to the web and also needed on Linux (WebKitGtk, GNOME, Qt-WebKit, Epiphany, RasPi). Actually I'm quiet happy with WebKit but would appreciate always more speed. Feels like a lot of folks use Chrome and expect every other web-browser must use the same engine so they don't need to care about compatibility? Which is bad.
* KHTML - gone
* Trident - gone
* Opera - gone
It is only Blink, WebKit and Firefox. Firefox is also in struggle and Microsoft Teams still blocks it? Like back in 2001. The EU also doesn't require Microsoft to present the modal browser choice dialog anymore. And Google is pushing hard on iOS-users to install their apps. Same on Windows. I would appreciate if politics put strict control over Google, Microsoft and Apple and require them to allow full access without the luring users with locked-down systems, lower fees and other things. I prefer strict control of companies because it worked very well with AT&T until it was broken up.
(E.g., personally, I'm absolutely horrified by the experience of the desktop Chrome UI. Even more so on macOS, where there's a menubar anyways, so why don't use it to make functions accessible? This is really mocking the user. – And no, at this point it's not about screen estate, it's about who's controlling the window, if there's a controllable app with controls worth controlling at all, or just that god-given/sent viewport. Mozilla on Win isn't much better nowadays: even, if you activate menus, there's not much to be found, in contrast to the Mac edition.)
P.S.: Also agree with the statement on developer bias by laziness and locked-in expectations. (As is, Chrome is the new IE. An example may be the storage implementation. Apple's implementation was fully standard compliant, but we must do it the Chrome-way, because Chrome and anything else is a bug. On the other hand, when Chrome messed up the Web Audio API for several iterations, nobody complained. Or, when Chrome messed up repaint of the canvas element, etc, etc.)
"The funny thing is that the author thinks competition in one market would be good, but competition in another market hasn't yet led to the utter dominance of his prefered product. Something doesn't add up ..."
I guess, since the only available browser engine on that one platform is thus broken and unusable, the entire (i)OS should have vanished by now? It's just those stubborn customers, seeking the worse experience possible…
> So, if the best product wins in a competitive marketplace, where is the problem?
Are you aware of how a company with a large market share in one part of a market, can anti-competitively use it's market power to effect another market?
For example, Microsoft could ban all competing browsers from the PC, in windows, and this would likely work to cause more people to use internet explorer, or edge.
This, of course, would be illegal and anti-competitive. But it would work.
This is pretty much why Chrome is perceived as the best product, to the point of being identical to the standard. It's only when you turn away from Chrome as the principal development platform and develop for other browsers first and then checking on Chrome, because, what works on WebKit should work on Chrome, as well, that you start to see its many shortcomings.
E.g., did you know that Chrome doesn't manage to render preformatted mono-space text at a uniform character width, 30 years after the introduction of the "pre" tag, in its +100 iteration? (E.g., Greek characters in formulas. So, where is the problem, there's MathML, a standard since the 1990s and part of HTML5. Oh… So let's add training wheels for Chrome, making each character a span of its own and fixing it in CSS… – To be fair, MathML doesn't enjoy a decent implementation in any browser, but with regard to implementing standards… Or take the implementation of certain UI elements like range inputs: let's make a slider from -100 to +100 preset to 0 in the center. Now +2, a discrete value, is rendered as an accent-colored range of 103 units, which somehow is supposed to make sense, and users become subtly shamed into picking higher values by the means of a more or less colorful experience. No option to disable this utter nonsense and Mozilla even followed on this path, because Chrome is the standard. As a result, if you need a basic, non-biased input, you have to come up with a non-standard implementation of your own, probably involving all kinds of accessibility issues.)
The point being, it doesn't run just one way and it works in multiple ways.
And, BTW, users can choose to use another mobile OS, by the very same vendor bringing you Chrome, and no, you can't run Safari on that OS. And that OS has already more users than the other one.
So then you agree completely with me that apple is engaging is some anti-competitive practices, you just think other people are also engaging in anti-competitive practices.
That doesn't refute my point. You are agreeing with me that yes Apple engages in anti-competitive practices that limit user choice.
So back to the original point. You said this "if the best product wins in a competitive marketplace".
This statement is false because Apple is engaging in anti competitive practices that prevent a competitive market from happening.
So that is "where the problem is". The problem is the anti competitive practices that you agree with me that Apple is engaging in.
Unfortunately not on iOS. They're forced to use WebKit which means Firefox on iOS is essentially just a reskin of Safari without access to any Firefox extensions.
iOS Safari has extensions and content blockers though, e.g. 1Blocker is alright.
uBlock Origin unfortunately isn't viable since it needs to see the data and Apple doesn't permit that. Safari content blockers have to provide a list of rules what should be blocked and Safari acts on it without providing any data back to the content blocker.
Apple only allows inspection of the request, and either block or not-block result to filter out ads. This is very limited, as evidenced by comparing to uBlock origin.
Their reasoning is that they want to make it impossible for an adblocker to collect any data.
But I don't care about that because I would chose one adblocker that I trust (uBlock origin). It's a non-issue.
Now I'm forced to use a multitude of native apps that all have far more data collection and access than webapps.
And then I'll ask the_gipsy how this is different from every other browser under the sun except Safari and Firefox being just repackaged versions of Chrome?
On any other operating system you have Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Firefox, Tor Browser, Webkit-based browsers, Text-only browsers, etc. There are so many options.
But on iOS you can use Webkit or you can go fuck yourself.
> On any other operating system you have Chrome, Blue Chrome, Orange Chrome, Firefox, Green Private Firefox, Old Chrome-based browsers, Text-only browsers, etc. There are so many options.
So the alternative is even fewer and worse options? Even counting brave/chrome/chromium as a single browser, that's 1 browser on iOS vs like 5 browsers everywhere else. Chrome/Firefox are way more configurable with plugins.
I am in awe with the lengths that apple apologists in this thread have gone in order to avoid making reasonable value judgements.
I'm curious, why does this always happen whenever Apple's browser monopoly is brought up on HN?
What is it about Apple in general that makes swathes of people take it personally whenever any kind of criticism is leveraged against that particular mega corp?
Just to be clear, I'm probably close to the farthest from being an apple apologist. I just sense bad things happening to the open web with the current browser usage distribution.
> if WebKit weren't mandated, Chromium would take over
Why do they need to refute it? Nobody can see the future and whether that statement is true or not still does not change the fact that Apple should not be mandating WebKit.
Chromium is open source anyway. What does it mean for an open source project to "take over"? Who wins there? I suppose in this instance that Google wins but so do users. The only loser is Apple because it puts a hole in their prison ecosystem.
I would agree with you if Chromium were the project of a nonprofit, but it’s not. A Chromium-dominated web is a Google-controlled web, and Chromium being open source does nothing to change that because nobody but Google has the same level of manpower, plus it’s ultimately Google holding the reigns. It’s a massive conflict of interest.
And once Chromium dominance has been achieved, there will be no party that can mount a meaningful opposition due to the velocity of Google’s Chrome/Chromium team stacked with the ever-taller demands of web engines. With every feature added Google builds the moat more deep and wide, further ensuring their monopoly will never be unseated.
With all that considered, the only real winners are web devs who only need to care about testing against a single engine (once Safari is out of the picture, Firefox’s ~2.5% marketshare will not be large enough for most to bother with).
Why do we keep moving the goalposts? So it not only needs to be open source but now it needs to be from a non profit? Why does manpower matter? So now all open source software needs to be developed equally by purely non-profit orgs? Malarkey.
We are getting a free and open source browser engine that anybody can fork. Microsoft forked it to create Edge, Brave uses it.
Frankly, I wish Apple would either open source Safari, release Safari on other platforms, or contribute to Firefox.
Edit:
> Chromium being open source does nothing to change that because nobody but Google has the same level of manpower
> Why do we keep moving the goalposts? So it not only needs to be open source but now it needs to be from a non profit
The goalposts were never moved. It's a thing that ardent anti-applers do not understand.
Google is a web ad agency. 80% of its profits come from web advertisement. At the same time they:
- control the browser market
- control the search market
- fully and utterly dominate web and javascript standards committees, and regularly release features based on their own specs and pretend they are standards
See how many conflicts of interest there are?
> Why does manpower matter?
Chrome releases 40 to 100 new APIs with every release (so, every two months or so)[1]. And these new APIs are immediately taken up as gospel and standard by gullible web devs who now claim that all other browsers need to implement them.
This is the question of manpower.
So is this: it is absolutely impossible to build a modern web browser [2]. Microsoft, a trillion-dollar company tried and failed, and is now repackaging Chrome, with minor changes.
> I wish Apple would either open source Safari
WebKit is as open-sourced as Chromium. Safari is as closed source as Chrome.
The goalposts haven’t moved, it’s always been bad for a single company to have critical public infrastructure like the web to themselves. The conflict of interest that results is huge.
Manpower matters because no matter how much Chromium/Blink are forked, forks can’t be meaningfully different because they have to keep up with the firehose of changes Google is pumping out, which also makes it progressively more difficult to keep parts of the codebase that have diverged up to date. It’s a losing battle unless you’ve also got a dev team with the size and scope of Google’s Chrome team, which is a ridiculously high bar.
Even your cited examples of Edge and Brave are only superficially different, with a handful of features switched off compared to Chrome. They bring practically no diversity to the web.
> So now all open source software needs to be developed equally by purely non-profit orgs?
No, this is a special case. Web browsers are critical public infrastructure that’ve been on the precipice of total monopoly multiple times now.
The author has an entire section that says “Apple is anti-diversity.”
If you think Safari is a bad browser and Apple should use Chrome that’s fine! But to twist your argument to make it seem that we will have more browser diversity if Apple lets iOS run Chrome is what I have a problem with.
> spends so little time actually refuting the statement "if WebKit weren't mandated, Chromium would take over"
Does it have to? It's a rather strange claim to advance. I cannot read it as anything other than the recognition that in an open competition, even given the headstart of being the default browser, Safari/webkit would lose to Chrome/blink, which, again, I cannot read as anything other than the admission that Safari is an inferior browser. And if that is the case, if users are not free to choose the browser they prefer, then what good is the argument against the browser monoculture anyway?
I think you put up an impossible task by asking for evidence supporting impact.
The reality is that the highest impact on user share is the default browser.
Shortly after that is habit and user experience and this is what apple controls, it is fairly easy to restrict options for the competition or use dark patterns to impact the ux and apple is using this already to their advantage.
The reality here is that we need to be objective and ask what benefits the user gets from this restrictions and what risks they bring and i think two decades of defaults do make a lot of people ignore that instead of being critical.
Apple is the old Microsoft as far as open-closed-source is concerned, I just ditched Macbook pro for a windows laptop that runs WSL2 at work, my home is pure Linux. I took similar actions against Microsoft/Windows a decade ago, now I think Apple is a much worse Microsoft, browser is just one of its typical behaviors.
What I wish more people acknowledged is that the phrase "improving Safari" is shorthand for "improving Safari for advertisers and developers" not "improving Safari for users".
Yes, it may be true that users experience some benefits, but it is infrequently acknowledged that most users hate popups, hate tracking, and don't want notifications from websites.
Personally, I think Safari is a great browser to consume content with. I am more worried about the Chromium/Chrome domination in the browser world. I typically don't have major issues when developing web applications targeting Safari. The only limitation was push notifications on mobile devices but that's coming. The web workers support is getting better in recent versions.
> so little time actually refuting the statement "if WebKit weren't mandated, Chromium would take over"
The author is not trying to refute this point. He's saying it's a re-wording of "we (Apple) can't compete with better browser rendering engines" and he's right.
It seems dishonest to me when a ex chrome developer complains about apple not allowing other browsers when chromebooks exist, there the browser choice is even more locked down.
To me, I felt this take was so disconnected from my reality as a user that I didn't even know where to start.
Looking at the author bio, I can see he's very invested in the Blink project so it's difficult to shake the feeling that by arguing for "browser diversity", he's simply pushing for increased Blink dominance.
If one truly wanted to get more diversity in the Browser space, the number one objective should be getting Google to divest from the Chrome project. This would finally create space for other players to come in and have real influence over the future of the web.
As it is today, everything Web-related gravitates around what Google wants. Apple is not playing ball, and so Google is getting the community to push regulators to intervene and make them kneel.
Well, that's my view at least, maybe I'm too cynical.
From my perspective as a firefox user, chrome/chromium is the most successful browser because it's the best. Apple needs to resort to cheap tactics to hold onto their market share and create vendor lock-in for their users, which is profitable for them.
Please define "best"? Certainly, it's not the power efficiency. Not memory efficiency either. Performance maybe? But then it's very different from test to test. So, what makes Chromium the best?
I can't speak for the parent, but when most people say this they mean "least likely to break my websites", completely ignoring that this is a symptom, not a cause, of Chrome's dominance. Even my health insurance website breaks in Firefox, and their error message suggests that everyone should just use Chrome. We'll end up back in the early 2000s Internet Explorer situation eventually before the pendulum swings around again.
Did you read the part where I said: "when they are given the option and full power to do so."?
Microsoft, just like Apple, engaged in anti-competitive practices that prevented user choice.
The solution to both of these situations, is either the courts force apple to allow user choice, just like it forced Microsoft, or for new laws to be created to do something similar.
Unlike in Apple's situation, users had the full power of choice of installing a web browser on Windows PCs. They used IE for the same reason people now installing Chrome: it's the browser where the most of the stuff doesn't break.
You did not address the part where I said "Microsoft, just like Apple, engaged in anti-competitive practices that prevented user choice.".
Microsoft was literally brought to court, and a judge said that their practices were anti competitive.
So yes, the legal system said that Microsoft was anti-competitive.
You should go read up on the court case, because it is an absolutely true fact that a judge ruled that Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive practices.
And now there are new laws, in the EU, that will prevent Apple from engaging in anti-competitive practices as well.
are you really afraid of a mobile browser that is only used by ~13% [0] of Global Mobile Devices? ~87% of Mobiles Devices run Android (so potentially use Chrome).
Besides that, do you believe that there is any money for apple to earn by "forcing" safari to its iOS users? I would like to see other browser too, but right now it looks more like Google is forcing Chrome in every corner so they can make money out of it.
I personally don't like Chrome everywhere, it's the same shit we had with Internet Explorer. After some features where added to IE you couldn't use Netscape everywhere anymore. It took us quite a while to getrid of IE again. Chrome is IMHO kind of going the same direction, adding more and more features to let other browser look bad -> and thereby improve/increase market share. But are we really benefiting of a single browser engine? We call Browsers Operating Systems of the Web. Why would it be good to have a single OS?
>Besides that, do you believe that there is any money for apple to earn by "forcing" safari to its iOS users?
Yes. I think limiting functionality in safari is a deliberate tactic to keep users in their app store, where they charge a 30% fee on every transaction.
>Why would it be good to have a single OS?
It would be good to have the whole world on one single OS as long as it's open source. And chromium is open source so this argument doesn't really hold much merit to me. I would completely support a Linux/BSD world domination.
I really don't want to see a single OS, Browser, Anything for everyone.
I generally support the idea of having the choice to select the browser i like, but really hoping we're not again ending up with a single option.
Kind of OT, but i find it confusing that apple is even able to ship Safari with Mac/iOS/iPadOS in Europe, after Microsoft was forced to integrate a "pick your Browser" Screen into Windows. i had hoped that would require every vendor to integrate something like that.
btw, multiple down votes, but a single reaction. Yay, HN at it's best.
> Kind of OT, but i find it confusing that apple is even able to ship Safari with Mac/iOS/iPadOS in Europe, after Microsoft was forced to integrate a "pick your Browser" Screen into Windows
The difference is that Windows had like 95% market share and the iPhone has only 23% market share
More importantly, though, it would also entail Apple allowing other browsers on iOS, meaning that they would have to compete on quality rather than lock in.
The issue is that I, as a dev, am not allowed to use anything not supported on iOS/Safari, since that is half the market in the West. Apple is holding the web back by forcing everyone to adapt to the lowest common denominator, effectively controlling a platform they have no business controlling.
Why aren't you allowed to follow progressive enhancement? How to you handle all the outdated Browsers? And will you next complain about Firefox, cause Google just pushed something new out that isn't supported?
> Besides that, do you believe that there is any money for apple to earn by "forcing" safari to its iOS users?
Google pays Apple between $8-12 billion per year to set Google as the default search in Safari. If everyone switched to Chrome, then that amount would go down a lot (or they could even give it up and let the default go to Bing or something)
It’s not just WebKit. Devs can’t extent WebKit very much. Orion is trying but they’ve barely gotten anything done on the iOS extension side. There are limitations on what you can do by linking into the iOS web browser API, it seems.
I recently switched to Mac with great success. So I decided to try out the iPhone. I hadn’t used one for years and I was sick of Android.
I’m still no great fan of Android. And so many little things are better on iOS.
However, the SINGLE BIGGEST THING is absolutely broken. Browsing on iOS is unusable if you’re used to uBlock Origin. I can run that on Fennec/Firefox. I cannot do so on iOS. I was hoping the content blockers and extensions might come close. They do not in any way.
I don’t even REALLY like FF and I don’t like Android but those are the options if I want browsing that doesn’t suck.
Or maybe I’m missing something and someone can enlighten me before I return the iPhone.
There are a lot of things that are missed by safari content blocker extensions, and it's been getting a lot worse recently. Many obvious ads are not blocked anymore. And I'm using adguard too.
You need the power of a rules engine like uBlock Origin, which is able to do multiple types of filtering, pre and post rendering. There is a reason why uBlock origin insists on that model, because no other model really effectively works.
Eventually although, if adblock becomes very universal, all ads are going to be served internally from the same url / server as the webpage itself, with line noise identifiers and your going to start needing ML content recognition to start blocking ads effectively again.
But we've already had examples of ad-blocking companies doing deals with advertisers to whitelist URLs and I simply don't trust them not to on-sell my browser history.
So you may criticise Apple for their position but I would rather have a 90% effective ad-blocker and a guarantee that my privacy is intact. With so much data reselling going on it's simply not worth the risk.
>But we've already had examples of ad-blocking companies doing deals with advertisers to whitelist URLs and I simply don't trust them not to on-sell my browser history.
Luckily, 100% of those malware plugins can already be avoided by voluntarily choosing to not install them.
This isn't a decision for apple or any other manufacturer to make.
If you need an authority figure to babysit you while you use a computer then you shouldn't be using a computer in the first place, you should be in a nursing home.
it is a weird country that where people are scared that their data is at the mercy of an open source completely auditable browser extension, that adults have the choice to install or not install upon inspection, and oppose to it, but when it's about real threats that actually kill people (including kids) nothing gets done in the name of "freedom of choice" and against "baby sitting by the government"...
Not scared of those extensions. The malicious web sites that force you to install malicious extensions are the problem. The average user isn’t immune to those problems.
I’ve cleaned out enough extension infested chrome browsers in my time…
> The malicious web sites that force you to install malicious extensions are the problem.
while the malicious Company that profits from the 30% cut on in game items sold to kids (and non kids) on their platform, that is ok!
> The average user isn’t immune to those problems.
The average user is not immune to bullets too, we don't force people to wear vests though (even though in USA that should probably be a requirement, given how little they are able to do to stop the shootings)
> I’ve cleaned out enough extension infested chrome browsers in my time…
that's funny, because in 25 years of web browsing and fixing other less tech savvy people's mess, what really changed everything was the invention of ad blockers, like uBlock origin. It immediately made the web a better place, safer, lighter and immensely more enjoyable.
Those "web sites that force you to install malicious extensions" disappeared in an instant and voila, problem solved.
> To be fair most countries deal with this via very strong national gun laws
That's true, but not the entire story.
Most countries don't escalate the issue to the level of public guns VS private guns and don't consider being armed a right, not even for some law enforcement officials.
So the real situation is that people are free to chose to buy arms, but the process is complicated enough that casual shooters won't even bother and criminals, well, criminals don't buy legal weapons anyway.
Most countries disincentivize buying and using guns.
In this context Apple decision is patronizing: you are entitled to spend thousands of dollars on my products because a bank approved the transactions and think you're fit to spend your money however you want, but I'll decide what you can or can't do because even though your government believes you can drive, have a family, raise kids, be a responsible citizen and also shoot guns, I'm sorry to inform you that according to my analysis you're too dumb to use a different web browser than the one provided by *me*. [1]
Even though you're probably already doing it on countless other devices and environments (another smartphone/OS/HW at work/school/library etc.)
Apple is not disincentivizing people from visiting malevolent websites, they are not making it harder for people to be scammed on the web, they are disincentivizing people from using the web because it harms their profits.
In this context, ad blockers protect users, so in theory they should be allowed by Apple that claimed more than once to be sensitive to privacy issues, but they could be used to make web browsing a better experience on iOS, which is against Apple interests. [2]
[1] of course the real reason is they want to control the platform 100% and want every single bit of information to pass through their pipes, not others' pipes.
[2] not differently from what Google does on Android, but at least on Android I can install alternative (for real) browsers. That's why OS vendors should not be allowed to dictate the browser platform, we know it's wrong since 1998 and the antitrust case against MS bundling IE, but here we are again...
After 30 years of surfing porn, warez and dodgy hacking websites I have never been prompted to install a malicious plugin, mainly because decent (ie not Apple's allowed garbage) adblocking blocks it
They just need to agree to work without needing me to supply them the content of every web page I visit and every URL I click. Apologies for putting my privacy first.
And so you get back to the original point above...
> So you may criticize Apple for their position but I would rather have a 90% effective ad-blocker and a guarantee that my privacy is intact. With so much data reselling going on it's simply not worth the risk.
> But we've already had examples of ad-blocking companies doing deals with advertisers to whitelist URLs and I simply don't trust them not to on-sell my browser history.
As I recall, uBlock Origin originated as a direct response to ad-blockers engaging in exactly this behavior.
Content blockers are nice, but I’m going to have to agree they are necessary but insufficient on my phone. uBlock Origin as it exists in say Firefox is pretty much exactly what I want and I’d be able to probably uninstall every other ad-blocking extension. I appreciate that Apple tried this approach initially but it’s time to change course and allow more powerful ad-blockers to also exist.
Yeah but the point of this discussion is that _Apple doesn't even give you the choice here._ If you want to do it this way, please do, but this is not a reason to prevent other people from doing things differently.
Can you give me an example? I use Wipr and I don't see ads when I browse the web. Safari Content Blockers supports CSS queries and URL matching. For where those don't work, extensions can still interact and modify the DOM.
> AdGuard instead works by submitting rules to Safari which is significantly better for privacy and performance.
This is the "Manifest v3" model that Chrome is trying to implement and has been called out by HN as being extremely anti-privacy and a scheme to cripple ad blockers?
With Chrome, it's taking away. With Safari extensions, it's adding functionality that didn't exist before.
Compare 'some ad blocking' to 'no ad blocking at all' - you go from 100% of ads being shown to maybe 5-10% (and a lot of broken sites due to less advanced rules). Still not the ~0% people are used to on an open platform, but the iOS default was worse.
> With Chrome, it's taking away. With Safari extensions, it's adding functionality that didn't exist before.
Except on PC and Android you have the choice of either a) using something else (e.g. Firefox) or b) revert the changes you don't like, compile your own Chromium and use it. Apple doesn't give you any choice on iOS, it's either their way or highway.
Apple is not the savior here. Yes, Google doesn't act in the best interest of the open web, but if Apple was in charge there'd be no open web in the first place.
> With Chrome, it's taking away. With Safari extensions, it's adding functionality that didn't exist before.
Incorrect. uBlock Origin previously existed for Safari, but Safari version 13 removed support for the old safariextz format and the Safari Extension Gallery.
I mean I basically want Apple to do this to any proprietary software and untrustworthy free software, I just want to be able to make an exception for trustworthy free software.
Given what I use my phone for I’m happy enough with the current compromise, so long as I have access to a general purpose computer.
Even if Apple allows other browser engines I think they should still ban Chrome.
Not really. Safari had its own declarative content blocker engine for many years now. Additional, it is moving to the manifest standard for better interoperability with cross-browser web extensions.
You're completely in the right to worry about your privacy. I also agree that submitting rules that the browser can enforce without revealing any data to the extension is the proper API for 99% of extensions out there.
However, uBlock Origin is such an important extension that these limits shouldn't really apply to it. I think it's so useful and important that it should be a standard feature of every single browser out there, if not entire operating systems. The problem is browser makers are deeply involved with advertising and we can't trust them to implement ad blocking features due to conflicts of interest, so we have to trust uBlock Origin for now.
If you use uBlock's advanced mode to default-deny scripts or third-party resources then no other extension comes close. (Except for uMatrix, which is by the same developer.)
It's doesn't do the same job, it's more like manifest v3. Which yes, with current ads that's enough for 99% of them. But especially once Chrome drops support for manifest v2, you'll start seeing a lot more antiadblocks and your rule based adblock won't be able to get around them.
Before Opera gave up and became another Chrome reskin, I had plenty of sites that would not work for me until I switched user agent. The exact same thing would start to happen to all non-chrome browsers (and hell, even some chrome browsers) within months of other engines being available on iOS.
If doesn't matter whether or not your browser works or is even good, if the devs for that website couldn't be fucked supporting anything other than Chrome you are done.
I am sure regulators will eventually mandate other browser engines be allowed, when that happens the most likely course of action from Apple will be to give up too and switch to Chrome, leaving mozilla to be dangled about so that everyone can pretend there is no monopoly.
I see zero value in Mozilla building their own rendering engine when they abandoned all the potentially innovative stuff when they dumped Servo/Rust.
I would switch to Firefox instantly if they chose to replace Gecko with Blink - I'd have a compatible cross-platform browser with decent performance and would be able to install plugins on mobile, etc.
This argument about "monopoly" seems misguided to me. Maybe if you're a standards fetishist and you like having multiple implementations duke it out what's the "correct" implementation of whatever random detail.
I don't really see anyone actually significantly innovating in browser rendering space - might as well reduce it to a commodity that's packaged up and developed in open source by multiple vendors.
The only thing I see from the webkit situation is the whole web being dragged down by Apple protecting their cash cow/making sure web apps can't compete with app store.
Are Web apps competing with Android apps where users can use Blink-based browsers? I’m not so sure about that… I’d like to see some data points that’d prove otherwise though.
I can’t help but think that the article is highly manipulative. It’s hard to argue with the author on the logical points, but they even to go out of the way to avoid addressing the elephant in the room: the fact that Google controls around 90% of the browser technology today. And it’s hardly the “Chrome is a better product” that led us to this situation but rather the aggressive marketing and Googles status as web leader.
Don’t get me wrong, Apple shouldn’t dictate which browser the customers are allowed to use, but personally I am more concerned about web standards being controlled by a single company. Regulators should probably have a look there first. Can’t have meaningful choice in a monopoly.
I find it hard to believe that Apple with it’s shrinking fractional share is legitimately holding back a web utopia.
Android and Chrome are everywhere, if it could happen it just would. It has the market already and that share is growing.
The attacks on Apple locking down the browser engine seem obvious: it’s the next largest chunk of users which Chromium can absorb and a way of taking Apple’s platform out from their control. (i.e It’s about money, not idealism or purity or some saccharin tech empyrean).
The result would be obvious, less browser engines and more control to Google - I think few would argue that less browser engines are a good thing since the whole point of this argument is supposedly the opposite.
As for apple’s security rationale: We frequently see serious security threats across a range of engines, especially Chromium, the argument of limiting that vector on iOS platforms is solid with history on its side. Placing a high risk component in the hands of a different company is beyond
foolish, because in comparison to a desktop computer, the smartphone is a figurative treasure chest.
“- But what about user choice?”
Users aren’t demanding this, and they really do have a choice since picking an iPhone means wading through a sea of Android options at every available price point and screen size.
Which brings me to an ignored point: One really needs to acknowledge that users aren’t dummies and their choice of iPhones isn’t blind chance. The apple ecosystem suits a type of user lifestyle with its low-effort approach to technology.
What actually needs to happen is we stop asking the foxes what the chickens want.
Microsoft was called evil when they packaged IE with the operating systems and used various tactics to promote it's use to the detriment of competition.
But Microsoft didn't even wish to do what Apple has done, to force the users to only use one browser.
I see people defending Apple's anticonsumer practices and I wonder why.
Internet Explorer being bundled with Windows was a different issue back then.
Main problem was that a lot of official (government issued) software required ActiveX to run. Since ActiveX was bundled with Internet Explorer and Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows it was simple chain of dependencies that forced people into buying (not as cheap as today) Windows license. There were even some bribery charges in few European countries but usually towards 3rd party sellers so nothing that could stick to Microsoft itself. [1]
Still that was in a scenario where IE had 95% market share. Today Chrome on mobile has 65% market share. Safari has 25% market share. Most likely (as there is other comment about it in this thread) if Chrome on iOS would be an option Google would push users towards (as both Google Search and YouTube are dominant product and it's easy to provide extra features there) which would bring us to exact situation where Internet Explorer was in Microsoft vs US case.
Funny, though, how the old version of the joke "you either die a hero, or live long enough to become a Microsoft"
If you're interested you could dig more articles like that. Yet, because a lot of those happened around year 2000, searching articles is hard (as DDG for example uses Bing for results, and I can imagine why those aren't showing in bulk) but there are still few that can get you the taste what was the core issue if you're curious enough.
I have an old iPad laying about. iOS 9, with the ancient Safari 9 browser. HN seems to be the only websites that render correctly.
The device itself is snappy enough and I'm well aware of the RAM limitations Apple puts in their mobile devices. However, the entire thing is now useless.
And old Android tab from the same year is slow as molasses (always has been) but runs Android 7 through custom ROMs which lets it use a modern version of Bromite. When it finally boots, it works well enough for casual browsing, especially on lighter web pages.
The old iPad has no such luck. There are no newer browsers available for it, not even after jailbreaking the thing. It's a waste of electronics, really. I accept that Apple won't make a newer version of iOS for such a device, it's received support for much longer than its Android counterpart, but if you're going to abandon a device, at least free it! Open up the sources so people can develop new things for devices you no longer care about!
Yeah, Apple needs to decouple major OS releases from releases/updates to Safari and other Apple apps. Safari is probably the most important here.
But then, Apple also wants to keep keynote events filled with enticing news and updates. So while it may never decouple Messages or Mail or Maps from the OS releases (for different reasons), Safari shouldn’t be that big a deal to separate out if the OS is redesigned.
One of my big motivators for just getting off of OS X was having all the bundling into OSes. Just completely unforced errors meaning that every .0 release would break everything.
Y'all know that releasing one change at a time is going to be way easier to debug/fix than 100 at a time yeah?
I get that this is their "thing", but as a person who was buying Apple devices on account of them working, I would greatly appreciate them actually doing things that improve how well things work, instead of prioritizing marketing.
Since its not clearly stated otherwise, this blog post appears to be written by a manager working for Microsoft on Internet Explorer Edge - which puts a lot of the points under a peculiar light.
I agree Apple shouldn’t dictate which browser you can use on iOS. (The way to resolve that is for iOS to allow alternative stores. It’s fine for Apple to control their store, just not my device.)
But this article is absolutely full of it. This is part 6 of a 6 part series ostensibly on the importance of browser choice, and there’s not a peep about the long-term problems with the dominance of Chrome and the chromium engine, and Google’s de facto control of web standards.
We’re hanging off the edge of a cliff and this guy’s complaining our foot is snagged.
This fake-grassroots propaganda for "browser diversity" (= Chrome monopoly) needs to stop. Apple is literally the last bastion holding up the open web, with everything else - WHATWG, W3C, ga, DoubleClick, AdWords, YT, Mozilla/FF, etc., etc. - being Google/Alphabet or financially dependent on Google/Alphabet.
Not sure what the logic is behind branding Mozilla/FF as somehow an enemy of the open web. If Apple hadn't repeatedly blocked the release of an actual Firefox for iOS you could maybe attempt to argue it, but it existed and Apple didn't allow its release.
I wouldn't call Mozilla/Firefox an enemy of the open web, but they don't contribute to it anymore. As a lifelong Firefox user I say: we're heavily outnumbered. Many devs don't care about FF, so it regularly happens that FF simply doesn't work or only half. Even my newspaper subscription doesn't work on FF. It is simply no longer relevant to any discussion about the web.
BTW, there is a Firefox for iOS, and I use it. It may be a Webkit wrapper, but it surely is a more pleasant experience than Firefox for Android, and I also like it (slightly) better than Safari on iOS. But I'm very casual mobile phone user, so that should not be extrapolated to the web experience in general.
That is not what the parent comment you're replying to said.
They're noting that Mozilla/FF only truly derives revenue from a Google ad deal. They hold no real power with regards to user numbers otherwise. Whether or not their custom engine exists on iOS has no impact here.
No. It wasn't. This is a several-year-long obvious and brash campaign by numerous very loud "developer advocates" and high-visibility developers from Chrome. Of whom Alex Russel (the author of the piece we're discussing) was one of the most visible (he worked at Google for 9 years? More?).
Chrome is by far the largest driver behind "Safari bad, Safari no support standards" of these "grassroots no-name initiatives".
On top of that, Google owns web.dev. And when Chrome releases another half-baked non-standard it's advertised there as "this great new standard now available" that gullible devs buy line, hook and sinker and flock to HN to demand that "the new IE wisen up and implement those things now".
>
Chrome is by far the largest driver behind "Safari bad, Safari no support standards" of these "grassroots no-name initiatives".
No Safari is the largest driver of the "Safari no support standards". It's Apple's choices, not Google or Microsofts or Mozilla's, that make Safari not support standards.
It's not just HID, of course. All/most of the hardware APIs are considered harmful by both Safari and Mozilla. Chrome is shipping them enabled by default, and there's no end to clueless developers moaning about this and calling Safari (mostly) and Firefox (from time to time) too slow in "moving the web forward". Needless to say that all those non-standards are pushed forward by Chrome.
The less obvious one is Constructable Stylesheets.
The spec had an obvious flaw that could lead to easily reproducible deadlocks. And that is on top with other issues with design, API naming etc. A team within Google (lit-html) wanted this feature, so Chrome shipped it against clear objections from both Safari and Firefox. And then refused to move the feature back under a flag because "0.8% of page views in Chrome" were suddenly using this feature. And proceded to gaslight other browsers' developers https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45. See e.g. a response to that https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issu... Of course there's now a "looking ahead" that wants to do exactly what Safari and Mozilla wanted to do in the first place: https://web.dev/constructable-stylesheets/#looking-ahead
In general, Chrome pushes 40 to over 100 new Web APIs with each release (that is, every two months). How many of them are actual standards that had actual input from other browser developers? In how many Chrome actually listened and implemented suggestions? https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
> All/most of the hardware APIs are considered harmful by both Safari and Mozilla.
Well yes. Re https://wicg.github.io/webhid/, there's a risk in allowing apps to talk to hardware. We still let non-web apps do this. We deny by default, and have permissions screens etc where people can allow/reject the access.
Disagreements are a separate issue from Safari's record of shipping broken versions of uncontroversial web standards though. Eg, Mozilla disagrees with hardware support but nobody accuses them of ignoring web standards.
> We deny by default, and have permissions screens etc where people can allow/reject the access.
Yes, we do. And notification/dialog/prompt fatigue is one of many reasons listed behind not supporting these APIs. And at the link to the GitHub issue I provided a timeline of events for this "standard" which is anything but. Why would Firefox or Safari want to implement a standard that they had literally no input on?
> Disagreements are a separate issue from Safari's record of shipping broken versions
You asked for "If there are examples of 'Apple ignoring standards' actually meaning Chrome-only features please tell me one." I provided at least two. There are many others.
> Eg, Mozilla disagrees with hardware support but nobody accuses them of ignoring web standards.
Because it's fashionable to hate Safari with no justification other than because it's a drum incessantly drummed by Google's army of developer advocates. Even though more often than not Safari and Mozilla are in agreement about web standards these days. And are significantly closer to each other in the number of APIs shipped than they are to Chrome: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
Even you didn't know about issues with Chrome's non-standards until I provided you with examples, but "Safari is the largest driver of the 'Safari no support standards'"
The "standards" aren't standards, they're new Chrome features. Most of the time their only utility is to enable more accurate browser fingerprinting. Google feels they can release any half-baked "feature" and declare it a standard thanks to their monopoly.
For one thing, TFA is written by someone whose livelihood is earned at a competing software mega corporation & browser vendor. Their job title is, "Microsoft Partner PM on Edge."
It always strikes me that the angst around browsers comes largely from people who have given up on targeting OS’s for development and use the browser as their OS. You all do realize that if you stop relying exclusively on the JS ecosystem, there is actually quite a bit of choice out there. You know, those native APIs or portable frameworks that some of us talk about occasionally.
I get the economic incentive to develop once and run everywhere, and the education problem where we’ve somehow churned out tons of JS-only developers, but that seems to mean we’ve contributed to the problem that the Apple monoculture is revealing. Perhaps a solution to this is to not rely so much on browsers as our exclusive target platform, and take back some control? Nobody’s making us all move to an exclusively browser centric target for all development…
I get it: native is more expensive, more time consuming, and excludes developers who don’t want to leave the comfort of their NPM/JS world, but it IS an option that one company and one browser engine can’t control. Even if you don’t go full native, there still are things like Qt, GTK, etc. that are at least decoupled from one OS and one engine. Do people really hate the idea of learning the languages and tools required to use those?
Do you have any evidence that the angst you’re talking about comes from people who build tools on the JS ecosystem?
In Danish digitalisation we’ve basically gone the route or having JavaScript (really Typescript) fronts for basically everything and I’ve yet to personally hear anyone working in that area complain about chrome becoming the dominant browser. And why would they? Frameworks like react, angular and vue make the underlying “OS” as you call it unimportant for the most part. Especially now that IE6 is almost dead. And if you do have certain needs that needs to control the environment you can always go the electron route.
You sound like you’re not a fan of JavaScript, which is perfectly fair, but why would you go on a crusade for it? There are enough development jobs around that can keep you working with exactly the language you prefer and never care about any other languages.
If you're developing for the web you probably care a lot about mobile users. If you care about mobile users your alternative options are even more of a walled garden than the web is.
> but it IS an option that one company and one browser engine can’t control.
How is that the case? Especially considering the fact that the company that controls that limited one browser engine also controls the execution of native code on the exact same platform.
I care not as a developer but as a user. If everything on the internet starts saying "Install this one specific program", that's a lot worse for me than being able to run whichever browser implements the privacy controls I prefer.
They'd only be available with an explicit opt-in, so I don't see how. They'd probably only be available for webapps added to the homescreen too, so websites wouldn't even be able to spam the permissions request.
Users don't want notifications from random websites they browse to, but they need them for pwas they install to their home screen which are supposed to have parity with apps
Positives like not having "save" ability on documents? Or not having push notifications so messaging applications, calendars and such is not possible? Both of these can be abused of course, but not having them forces many categories of apps to be native.
I'd hate to have a note taking PWA which data's get wiped every 7 days.
Solutions to this is to sync the data with a server, which then requires an account and user management, privacy considerations, keeping the server alive, backing up data, GDPR fun etc...
Any simple applications becomes a maintenance nightmare very quick.
While there's no browser chrome, it's still not fullscreen like native games can be, without the iOS status bar at the top: https://caniuse.com/fullscreen
The ability to freely run programs on your own damn hardware!
Congratulations, you played a AAA video game on your personal surveillance device by streaming it from someone else's (useful) computer. Very cyberpunk of you! I guess that's why they call this place "hacker" news.
The misplaced assertion, "(p)ut differently; there's reason to think that Mozilla would not have suffered layoffs if Apple were an ally of engine choice" just about tells you everything you need to know about this article (and I'm typing this via a Firefox session as it stands).
Mozilla’s has publicly stated in document to regulators that Apple’s browser engine ban delayed their entrance by 7 years and significantly impairs their ability to differentiate their browser. It’s not a stretch to tie that to the loss of market share on IOS and thus to their revenue.
If you think the assertion is misplaced you need explain why.
1.) thinking they are a activism group that luckily sits on a gold mine of dumb users like me who keeps using Firefox, while in reality they were supposed to continue to provide the worlds best browser as an alternative to the shiny, memory eating, barely configurable spyware that is Chrome.
2.) Competing against one of the worlds largest companies, that actively cross subsidize their nerfed browser and promote for it free at the worlds largest web property with misleading statements like "switch to a better browser"[1], all while regulators have been sleeping for a decade or more.
3.) The tech community who killed IE has not woken up to the dangers of Chrome. Just like IE used to be it looks good, is good enough, works everywhere etc.
[1]: I've tried it multiple times and can confirm that it looks shiny but still cannot do TreeStyleTabs, and in general the whole extension system is nerfed to the point that most "extensions" I could find was either canned bookmarklets or canned web sites.
Have you used Thunderbird lately? Or looked at Firefox OS (now KaiOS) from an developer's perspective?
Mozilla's issues lie deeper than the browser (again, also a Rust developer here) and belie any sort of leadership, technical or product-focused, over a large number of years.
Self-asserting that they believe that they're being picked on, as a reason for rightsizing, is, in my opinion, merely an excuse for a host of other problems.
Apple should clearly open for other engines and stop handicapping the web.
I've had so many users complaining about Safari on iOS over the years that it's insane.
On one of my web apps I've had so insanely many people who tries to get push notifications to work. Despite it being clearly stated in extremely visible red text that push notifications are not supported on iPhones, many users are still contacting me complaining that they can't get it to work, even after installing other browsers.
Even more technical users are tricked by Apple into thinking that they have a choice. Users don't understand that Apple is the problem and instead blames the web sites they are using for the lack of iOS features. This clearly needs to stop.
Safari is also insane when it comes to bugs. Everything from the keyboard not wanting to open sometimes when a text input is focused, to scrolling sometimes not working without reloading the page, to having to quit safari to be able to press the address bar and even a shorter period where some users had to actually reboot the phone to make the browser work again.
These issues seems to be fixed now, but some of them persisted for quite some time(years for some of them). Scrolling is still an absolute shitshow(momentum scrolling animations, switching scroll targets and so on), and that is the most used feature on any browser.
Safari is definetly the new IE, at least on mobile.
Reading these threads is like reading a political debate. “I’m for free speech, but this needs to be banned”, “people have a right to assembly, but I don’t want your parade in my town”, etc
Basically, free software zealots supporting super closed source Apple software and DRMed hardware lockdown because of tribalist bias.
We’ve been through this before with Win95 IE vs Netscape Navigator and Opera. Why are the arguments for freedom of choice on the desktop suddenly invalidated on mobile?
Apple are the vendor-lock-in kings, in pretty much everything. For this reason, try avoiding using their computers and operating systems in favor of more flexible and configurable systems.
One reason I choose Apple is because of this. I know there is one possible egress browser on the platform which goes through the same control channels as anything else whether it’s embedded in an app or standalone. The moment it’s open then every app will ship their own embedded engines which circumvent the controls. Controls being screen time (whitelisting) and centralised blocking lists.
If anyone is not happy they should perhaps go and use Android?
Ah no we banned Android because despite all the security controls it was possible to just browse anything on a kiosk tablet by using the a random link to public internet on the about box of an app which was updated by the vendor.
That's not entirely true though, a lot of apps "embed" Safari which does break things. Such as opening a specific website's links in native app directly. Not all apps allow disabling it either.
I wanted to give the iPhone another try. But the web is just so so unusable. No way to install adblockers or real extensions in general. No push notifications. Just one single engine.
You can install Ad Blockers, I use 1Blocker on iOS. It’s not as powerful as uBlock Origin obviously, but it does a more than good enough job by making the web browsable again at least.
I use a AdGuard Pro, StopTheMadness and a DDG for years now. I don’t miss anything as far as I know. You also have a choice of “different” browser that might offer more.
Either you are trolling, or you are that singular kind of user site marketers dream about, who actually want to enable push notification and receive their spam.
The ad blockers in iOS work fine. I don’t want browser bloat on my iPhone. And I don’t want to be forced to install shitty chrome cos devs are like “oh we can’t make it work in safari”.
Until chrome stops being the IE of the early 2000s I don’t want other browsers on iOS.
Push notifications is THE most important feature preventing companies from building webapps instead of multiple native apps. This is not a coincidence, as native apps bring revenue and drives platform establishment. Push notifications have been available on Android for a decade.
As a user, this is really disappointing, especially when apple boast about "putting the user first" in matters of privacy. Native apps are much more privacy invasive than webapps.
One thing missing in this otherwise awesome discussion among peers is that except for the interregnum for Covid lockdowns, iPhone users are able to walk into Apple stores and get support pretty much on demand and free for any Apple software product. But people (including my mother!) just assume that includes all software on their phone, and sometimes people think it's for hardware as well.
The expectation is that the genius bar resources are built into the purchase of Apple products, which makes it harder to support 3rd party browsers or any other 3rd party products that just "stopped working" or "won't let me log into my bank account" -- again both things that happened with my mother 3000 miles away and I couldn't fix long distance, but the genius bar did for free when she walked in.
So it's a tough choice on that - better to have higher prices and better service, or options that nobody fixes because there is less of a sense of accountability?
The fact that Apple are still not yet blasted by anti-trust for their anti-competitive browser polices shows how diluted and dysfunctional that law became.
> Past swings away from OS default browsers have hinged on the superior features, better performance, improved security, and superior site compatibility. Marketing and distribution play a prominent role but have been indecisive in recent browser battles. The leads of OS incumbents are not insurmountable because browsers are commodities with relatively low switching costs. Better products tend to win.
The point that people pick browsers for "superior site compatibility" is not a minor thing. And it arguably undermines the statement that "better browsers tend to win".
Because "superior site compatibility" is affected by what browsers the majority uses. This can build a moat for a bad browser (IE6) or it can hijack web standardization (chrome).
The second point, hijacking of web standardization, is a more topical problem. Chrome is doing this, and chrome is developed by google. This is allowing google to push changes to how the web works unilaterally. This is bad.
Ain't surprising? Apple doesn't support any kind of choice in their platform. Maybe wait until next major update until you can change some color or something.
Just the mere existence of WebKit keeps up Browser diversity. It's probably the one reason most websites have not adopted a "use Chrome or go away" model. Many were happy to adopt a "be in a country without GDPR or go away" model, so would that really be a stretch?
I do think Apple should lose their walled garden, but it should be pretty hard to "unlock" an iPhone to keep coersion down. Maybe make it slightly more easy if you only trust one extra vendor, like Epic. They'll do it one way or another.
While it's not perfect and AppStore review really needs to step it up, there are still some unique qualities there, especially for people that would never ever "choose" a browser - they just use whatever they have.
There is no choice to defend in Browser Engines. Safari is as good as it gets. For tracking and Dev tools that help in implementing a timely modal pixelperfectly placed to tell me I can subscribe, Chrome takes the crown. All is good.
It's hard to pick sides between two of the most hypocritical companies in the world.
To start with, Apple. It's very much true that Apple has intentionally sabotaged Webkit's potential. By underinvesting, by neglect (not solving bugs, poor documentation) and by blocking a whole series of promising new web features, all under the disguise of "user privacy".
It's not some unfounded wild claim. Somebody like Maximiliano Firtman has been documenting Apple's crappy track record for years:
https://firt.dev/tags/ios/
It's also very typical how after years of neglect all of a sudden Safari has substantial and meaningful releases in recent months. A timeline that directly aligns with dramatically increased regulatory pressure.
Apple doesn't want the web to succeed. It wants to do the absolute least possible to ensure it's tolerable yet can never compete with native apps.
Moving on to Google (Alex Russell is an ex-Googler):
"Past swings away from OS default browsers have hinged on the superior features, better performance, improved security, and superior site compatibility. Marketing and distribution play a prominent role but have been indecisive in recent browser battles."
I find this statement maddening. To a normie, zooming out across all web users, modern browsers are near-identical. They don't do a deep study to compare web browsers in the way us nerds might do. They use the browser that was already installed, got pushed to them, or what their friends use.
Google is able to aggressively push browsers on Android and billion user services like Youtube. Compare this to the reach of Mozilla, which is zero. To dismiss this point and to insist it's mostly "merit" is a lie.
"Destkop OSes have long created a vibrant market for browser choice, enabling many competitors to flourish over the years."
In the article, this quote is preceded with a chart showing the exact opposite:
In this "thriving market", we're back at an IE level monopoly. Mozilla has been bleeding market share for 12(!) consecutive years. It has no reach and most new users are mobile, where it has near-zero presence, so it will continue to bleed further. The rest are Chromium clones.
It's even a lie to call it a market. As the author illustrates, it would cost 400M+ annually to develop a competitive browser. This would still get you nowhere since you need an OS and billion-user services to push it. So it's not a market at all, since you can't realistically enter it.
Anyway, it's still interesting to contemplate which of these two hypocritical companies should win, what would be the best outcome for the web?
In a perverted way, Apple's sabotage of webkit makes them the last man standing in keeping Google in check in not doing any funny business on the web. It is the only sizable counter force remaining.
On the other end, full browser engine competition on IOS could bridge the gap between the web and native apps. Or, it could just mean Chrome overruns Safari and the open web pretty much ends.
In the short term, I prefer the Webkit wakeup call scenario that we now see unfolding. If they continue to lock browser engines yet rapidly change their behavior for the better, this might be best for the web on the short to mid term. It feels very dirty, it's not right, but it might be the best outcome.
That's what you and I would do if we controlled our own wildly popular platform.
This is not communism. Corporations want to make money and control their own destiny.
Why should Apple, a private corporation be fully open? Seriously. I want diversity as well. But will that happen? Will Apple, Microsoft or Google allow just about anything on their platforms??
Heck no. Ain't gonna happen. Our countries are run by companies which are run by humans with a profit motive.
> Corporations want to make money and control their own destiny.
> Our countries are run by companies which are run by humans with a profit motive.
Why should we let corporations get what they want? Our countries are run by companies only to the extent that our democratic governments let them run them. We have the power to overrule companies when it suits us, and IMO we ought to be using that power a fair bit more than we currently are.
If companies knew that the regulators would come down hard on them when they take the piss like this then it wouldn't be in their profit-motivated self-interest to behave like this.
> That's what you and I would do if we controlled our own wildly popular platform.
And FWIW, no it's absolutely not what I would do. I actually have some ethics beyond profit-maximisation thank you very much! Whether such an ethical company would become so powerful in the first place (rather than getting it's lunch eaten by a less ethical one) is an interesting question though, and one of the main reason I think restricting these companies is so important: other better companies can't otherwise compete.
No. And it's a shame that so much ignorance has crept into it.
Microsoft aggressively bullied OEMs like Compaq into not pre-installing Netscape on their computers. They made co-advertising deals worth tens of millions and access to internal programs contingent on it. Bill Gates back then was pretty ruthless when it came to competition.
How exactly is that lesser than Apple not even allowing app vendors to install their actual browsers, instead forcing them to use a subset of an API that Apple itself fully uses? Or what Apple has done repeatedly to Spotify and others? Apple forces Spotify to add a premium to their app price or take a hit in price compared to Apple's direct offering, while explicitly disallowing Spotify to even communicate to customers that a Spotify subscription, which has zero relationship to Apple, can be bought elsewhere? This allows Apple to gobble up millions and probably billions of app store purchases that do not require the app store aside from Apple's bullying of "abide or get off the platform" approach.
Beyond their walled garden that prevents even the opportunity of bullying in many cases, Apple is absolutely one of if not the biggest bully in the entire tech industry.
I'm confused, if Apple opened up to other browsers and software, but then started bullying AT&T to not pre-install chrome or firefox, then they would be in trouble?
But locking the possibility out on hardware is acceptable? Isn't it a much more tyrannical action to have complete control over what software users can install, as opposed to simply using bullying and incentives to argue about what software may and may not be per-installed?
At least on windows I could opt to install Netscape myself even if it wasn't pre-installed, isn't that the much lesser evil?
Exactly ... poor microsoft ... their name is still in the mud coz of that, while chrome is in the place IE was and Apple with its appstore ecosystem are doing worse than what MS did. Windows was more open compared to these phone OSs
> This is not communism. Corporations want to make money and control their own destiny.
> Why should Apple, a private corporation be fully open? Seriously. I want diversity as well. But will that happen? Will Apple, Microsoft or Google allow just about anything on their platforms??
This is a strange comment. The history of personal computing from 1977 - 2007 was mostly open platforms. Apple II was open. Macintosh was open and continues to be (mostly) open. Microsoft Windows has been and continues to be open.
Yes, it happens all the time and profit is of course the goal of a corporation. But we are allowed to call them out when they throw their paying users under the bus, under some disguise or excuse.
Firstly, companies are allowed to make stupid decisions.
Secondly, they can’t be doing everything wrong, given that do they still sell zillions of devices every year.
I think they aren’t working against the interests of their users at large. There are people who don’t like some of their restrictions, and some of them may even have an iPhone, but I think that’s a fairly small vocal minority of their users.
What the writer means is "this policy is BAD", which is a defensible opinion, but for all the effect they're getting here they might as well call the policy "heretical" or "un-American", as those terms were the equivalent in previous eras. But using "anti-diversity" to mean "I don't like" id trying to divert moral outrage at the subject, and this is about Paul Graham's DH0/DH1 level of argumentation (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html), more commonly known as "ur a fag". Less of this, please.
