[HN Gopher] Google and Mozilla are working on iOS browsers that ...
___________________________________________________________________
Google and Mozilla are working on iOS browsers that aren't based on
WebKit
Author : Liriel
Score : 741 points
Date : 2023-02-07 10:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| josephcsible wrote:
| As much as I hate Apple's walled garden, I have to admit that the
| inability to do this is the only thing stopping Google from
| having complete dominance in the Web browser space.
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| This is a false dilemma.
|
| The choice isn't Apple's walled garden OR Google's web
| dominance.
|
| The choice is: Apple makes a broken browser with no available
| substitutes to make more money off the app store, OR they will
| need to actually invest in their browser and compete with
| Google.
|
| The EU has wisely decided that Apple forcing people to use a
| broken browser is anti-consumer.
|
| So now, Apple will need to compete in the browser space as
| well.
|
| It's amazing how fast Apple has started to fix it's many
| problems in Safari all of a sudden, <sarcasm>I wonder what the
| reason could be...</sarcasm>
| acdha wrote:
| You're greatly overstating the problem of using Safari.
| Google's devrel team has astroturfed a lot about that but if
| you're the average working web developer it's been easy to
| support all of the evergreen browsers for years - the big win
| was dropping IE11 support -- and you'll see a significant
| performance or battery life win by dropping Chrome, which the
| average user will appreciate a lot more than not having
| WebMIDI or sites nagging them to enable push notifications.
|
| The mistake here is seeing only one company abusing its
| market position when it's really two. While I don't like how
| Apple handled this -- Firefox deserved better -- it's also
| the case that Google used their dominant positions in search,
| email, maps, and video to promote Chrome. I'd be a lot more
| comfortable allowing Chrome on iOS if it was accompanied by
| regulatory action banning that and requiring Google to do
| real QA on other browsers and not use proprietary Chrome APIs
| on their production sites, which held back Firefox and Safari
| performance on YouTube for ages because they were using the
| web components standard instead.
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| > if you're the average working web developer it's been
| easy to support all of the evergreen browsers for years
|
| All the browsers bar Safari.
|
| > you'll see a significant performance or battery life win
| by dropping Chrome, which the average user will appreciate
| a lot more than not having WebMIDI or sites nagging them to
| enable push notifications.
|
| I think the average user would much rather have a browser
| that follows web standards.
|
| Why?
|
| Because 90% of the apps on the app store could just be
| websites instead.
|
| And what difference does that make?
|
| Apple can't take a 30% cut off a website.
|
| > I'd be a lot more comfortable allowing Chrome on iOS if
| it was accompanied by regulatory action banning that and
| requiring Google to do real QA on other browsers and not
| use proprietary Chrome APIs on their production sites,
| which held back Firefox and Safari performance on YouTube
| for ages because they were using the web components
| standard instead.
|
| This has nothing to do with Chrome, or allowing Chrome on
| Safari. It has everything to do with the developers at
| youtube not updating their own service. Any regulations/QA
| would need to lie with the youtube team, not the chrome
| team. iOS users shouldn't have to suffer being locked to a
| historically bad browser because of it.
| acdha wrote:
| > All the browsers bar Safari.
|
| > I think the average user would much rather have a
| browser that follows web standards.
|
| Which specific unimplemented standards are preventing
| your work? I've opened plenty of bugs in all of the major
| browsers and it's decidedly not the case that they're
| mostly Safari.
|
| Last year's interoperability push ended with a noticeable
| lag for Chrome:
|
| https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable
|
| > This has nothing to do with Chrome, or allowing Chrome
| on Safari. It has everything to do with the developers at
| youtube not updating their own service.
|
| Yes, we know. Now think about whether it's possible that
| working at the same company might make them less quick to
| prioritize work which undercuts a key selling point their
| company spent billions marketing. It's not like the
| YouTube developers didn't notice the big effort to put
| Chrome banners all over the site was a management
| priority.
|
| Anyone who remembers how Microsoft products used to have
| weird bugs when used in non-IE browsers knows how that
| could end.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > Which specific unimplemented standards are preventing
| your work?
|
| Still no proper Opus support, where it was available in
| Firefox 10 years ago.
|
| Also bugs. My experience is that it's a common occurrence
| that I make a change, and it works correctly in Firefox
| and Chrome, but it breaks in Safari and I need a
| workaround just for it.
| rvz wrote:
| As soon as this happens, Google Chrome will be the winner
| with the other Chromium-derived browsers on phones for iOS.
| This has also already happened on Android when the user has
| the choice.
|
| This will just cement the Chromium dominance and the EU has
| made that worse.
|
| Firefox is no where near competitive enough to unseat Chrome
| or Safari.
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| > As soon as this happens, Google Chrome will be the winner
| with the other Chromium-derived browsers on phones for iOS.
|
| Not necessarily.
|
| Just look at how well Safari has started doing all of a
| sudden in the Interop 2022 report:
| https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022
|
| Safari went from worst to best in cross-browser issues.
|
| The fact of the matter is, the year that Apple realised
| that they weren't going to be able to escape or hold up the
| EU's coming regulations to open iOS to other browsers,
| Safari suddenly became important again.
|
| Why would they do this if they were just going to concede
| the web to Google?
| adrr wrote:
| Why would a user pick Chrome over Safari? From a software
| development standpoint, maybe Apple would stop tying browser
| versions to the OS if they had competition. Safari is IE all
| over again with users stuck on older versions because they
| can't upgrade their OS.
| luckydata wrote:
| because it's integrated in my Google ecosystem and I for one
| like it that way.
| [deleted]
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I actually hope Google gains complete dominance over the Web,
| and that in response, a meaningful coalition of powerful
| companies moves to do something better.
|
| The whole thing - web browsers, web servers, HTML, CSS,
| JavaScript, etc - is so incredibly stupid, from a regular
| person's point of view. Programmers _love_ all this shit,
| because Programmers just want to sit in a cave and play with
| their legos. But normal humans just want to _do_ something.
| They just want to compute X, or move Y, or talk to Z. They don
| 't want to hear excuses from Programmers about how hand-
| crafting 15 bazillion frameworks in googledy-gook languages is
| The Future. They do not care. They just want their life to be
| easier. And it takes a metric shit-ton of bullshit to make the
| Web useful enough to just get shit done.
|
| Start a server. Install an operating system. Install a web
| server. Install an application. Design an HTML, CSS, and
| JavaScript web application user interface. Design a server-side
| application processor. Handle the storage, indexing, retrieval,
| transformation, authentication, authorization, encryption,
| deployment, backup, load balancing, and everything else. Learn
| 30 different tools and systems and frameworks and 10 different
| languages and 500 different paradigms and make something so
| complex that Leonardo would call you a genius if you could
| somehow explain it all.
|
| All for little Jimmy to tell his teacher he's got the measles
| and is staying home from school. Or Margaret to order a
| replacement driver's license from the DMV. Or Kumar to order a
| pizza.
|
| There are much better ways we could be using technology to
| solve people's problems than the jumble of bullshit we have
| today. But the jumble is propped up by trillions of dollars,
| hundreds of millions of jobs, and entire nations worth of
| infrastructure. Until one player dominates it all and controls
| it, nobody has a reason to upset the apple cart.
|
| I hope Google does become the evil empire, so the rebels will
| see the chains on their hands and finally begin the fight.
| edude03 wrote:
| Yeah I'm really worried it's going to lead to, or at least
| encourage a browser monoculture like back in the IE days. I
| idly wonder if being the default will cement safari as the most
| popular browser on iOS though.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I'm optimistic about Google. I think SJZilla is gonna have to
| make a performant browser first.
| koshergweilo wrote:
| What is SJZilla
| jocaal wrote:
| Some combination of social justice and mozilla
| YPPH wrote:
| I am happy with Apple keeping WebKit as the only option. Although
| it might seem counterintuitive, it is good for competition.
|
| If we aren't there already, we are at a real risk of Blink having
| a complete monopoly like IE had in the early 2000s.
|
| It's good that web developers need to think about other browsers
| and not just target Chrome.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Monopolization of WebKit on iOS does not cause competition. You
| are deluded.
| boywitharupee wrote:
| If anyone's interested in following progress of or building this:
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=141170...
| JohnDeHope wrote:
| Technical question: What would a third party browser rendering
| engine allow, that using the safari renderer doesn't? I figure if
| you make a browser by just wrapping the safari renderer then you
| can make it do whatever you want it to. Why does the renderer
| make such that big of a difference?
| kevingadd wrote:
| Actual extensions (like ublock!), bleeding edge/experimental
| web features like new webassembly or web APIs (firefox and
| chrome usually implement these before Safari does), stuff Apple
| has decided to sabotage because it threatens the app store
| (like fullscreen).
| scarface74 wrote:
| Safari has supported "actual extensions" for two yeass.
| jwitthuhn wrote:
| Yes but their API is very limited and by design doesn't
| allow a good ad blocker like ublock to be built.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The actual "extension" framework does. It's used by
| 1Blocker. Not just the "we send you a JSON set of rules".
|
| But on the other hand, if you care about your privacy,
| why would you trust a third party to intercept all of
| your web traffic?
| saagarjha wrote:
| The extension framework lets you provide a JSON set of
| rules. There's nothing more than that.
| scarface74 wrote:
| This is not true
|
| https://developer.apple.com/safari/extensions/
|
| https://backstage.1blocker.com/how-to-block-youtube-ads-
| in-s...
| saagarjha wrote:
| You are always welcome to run arbitrary JavaScript in the
| page. However, this does not mean the APIs other
| extensions use to block resource loads will work.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So it went from "it only supports JSON" to "yeah it
| supports more. I just don't know if it will actually
| work. Because I haven't looked into it's capabilities"
| saagarjha wrote:
| ...I have written Safari web extensions, I know what they
| can do :/
| scarface74 wrote:
| What ads aren't being blocked by 1Blocker? I don't see
| any ads day to day browsing.
| saagarjha wrote:
| That's a different question than was being asked. The
| current API does not really allow for anything like
| uBlock to exist. I expect if Chrome moves to a similar
| interface sites will start serving ads that 1Blocker will
| not be able to stop.
| commoner wrote:
| > But on the other hand, if you care about your privacy,
| why would you trust a third party to intercept all of
| your web traffic?
|
| uBlock Origin is free and open source, and its code is
| thoroughly reviewed by many contributors every release. I
| trust uBlock Origin over a filtering mechanism built into
| a closed source browser such as Safari.
| scarface74 wrote:
| WebKit is also open source and you can see exactly how it
| works.
|
| But did you personally download the open source version
| review the code and install it?
| commoner wrote:
| WebKit may be open source, but Safari is not. The
| interface to access Safari's content blocking settings
| and the platform on which Safari content blocking
| extensions are built are both closed source, so your FUD
| about "intercepting web traffic" would be more
| appropriately directed at Safari than at uBlock Origin.
|
| Yes, I have personally downloaded the uBlock Origin
| source code. I have also reviewed the code and suggested
| improvements. However, I don't even need to download the
| code to realize the benefits of uBlock Origin being free
| and open source. Even if I hadn't downloaded the code,
| there are many other users and contributors who have
| reviewed the code, and you can confirm this by taking a
| simple look at the activity in the GitHub repos.
|
| https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
|
| https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues
| scarface74 wrote:
| So you think there is sone great conspiracy and that
| Apple is secretly tracking your web browsing history. But
| it only happens when you install a third party extension
| that sends it a bunch of JSON rules and that it went
| through the trouble of having two content blocking
| implementations that work 'em the same way - one in
| Safari and one in WebKit?
| commoner wrote:
| > So you think there is sone great conspiracy and that
| Apple is secretly tracking your web browsing history.
|
| What are you talking about? You are the one who accused
| other developers of that. Let me quote you again:
|
| > But on the other hand, if you care about your privacy,
| why would you trust a third party to intercept all of
| your web traffic?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34699213
|
| My point is that because uBlock Origin is free and open
| source, anyone can see that it is not tracking users
| maliciously. On the other hand, Safari is closed source,
| so your FUD would be more applicable to Safari. There is
| no easy way for users to verify how a closed source
| browser such as Safari implements its content blocking.
| In terms of transparency, uBlock Origin is strictly
| superior to Safari.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > In terms of transparency, uBlock Origin is strictly
| superior to Safari.
|
| Until you use an app with a web view...
|
| But tell me what can't I block _in your experience_ with
| 1Blocker on Safari?
|
| If we are comparing ad blocking extensions. We know that
| there is no possible method for a third party ad blocker
| on iOS to intercept your traffic.
|
| You're comparing an ad blocker to a browser.
| commoner wrote:
| You're changing the topic. You originally accused
| developers other than Apple of maliciously intercepting
| web traffic. I responded that your FUD is actually a
| greater concern with the closed source Safari than the
| free and open source uBlock Origin. What you're saying
| now about ad blocking coverage and web views is
| completely irrelevant to the invalidity of your original
| argument against an open browser ecosystem on iOS.
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| The difference is, webkit doesn't have an army of angry
| weaponised nerds that will go out of their way to remove
| every single unwanted pop-up and ad imaginable the second
| they appear.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Yes because people who care about unwanted advertising
| and tracking by a phone with an operating system built by
| an adTech company whose default browser doesn't allow any
| type of ad blocking...
| [deleted]
| oittaa wrote:
| Please, link to the source code of the latest Safari
| build.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > web APIs (firefox and chrome usually implement these before
| Safari does)
|
| What you meant to say: Chrome implements its own non-
| standards against strenuous objections if both Firefox and
| Safari.
| kevingadd wrote:
| I said what I meant to say, I've literally drafted web
| standards before and Safari is often the last to implement
| them. I'm not talking about WebUSB or WebGoogleAnalytics or
| whatever
| robertoandred wrote:
| So what are you talking about? Sticky? Has? Subgrid?
| hra5th wrote:
| MediaSourceExtensions (https://caniuse.com/mediasource)is
| one good example of a useful API which has been supported
| by roughly ~every browser for years except for safari on
| iPhone.
| dmitriid wrote:
| On that page it says that media source was implemented in
| 2014, on year _before_ Firefox and Edge.
|
| I guess in your world "every other browser" is Chrome.
| And, sure enough, there are some parts of the API that
| are only implemented by Chromium-only browsers, and are
| not implemented by either Safari or Firefox.
|
| So, what other untruths you're going to tell us?
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| Don't forget about the times where Safari implemented
| standards wrong, or changed the standards after the fact.
|
| Viewport units have been around for a decade now, and
| Safari still can't get them right.
|
| For example:
|
| Let's say we want to make a chat window, where a user can
| type in an input field at the bottom and little message
| bubbles appear above. Sounds like a job for flexbox and
| viewport units.
|
| Okay, we'll have one flexbox div container with it's
| children being the chat messages and the input which get
| aligned to the bottom. Now we'll position the container
| so it takes up the full page using viewport units (e.g.
| take up 100% of the viewport's width, and take up 100% of
| the viewport's height).
|
| Oh no! When the user scrolled through the messages, the
| browser's tab bar appeared and instead of calculating
| that 100% of the viewport is 100% of the viewport, the
| viewport isn't being updated, and now the input field has
| been scrolled out of the page.
|
| That's okay, we'll just use the new dynamic viewport
| units which specifically account for the problem that
| Safari had invented, and which only took 8 years to come
| out.
|
| Okay looks good, time to send a message.
|
| Oh no! When tapping on the field input, now the keyboard
| covers up field so we can't see what we're typing.
|
| >_<
|
| Good work Safari... Real good work...
|
| When I say I want something to take up 100% of the
| viewport, I mean 100% of the viewport.
| creatonez wrote:
| Firefox addons on iOS, ported directly from the desktop
| versions with no modifications, will be possible. Gecko has a
| lot of under-the-hood knobs and dials that simply don't exist
| in Webkit, but are needed by the addon ecosystem.
| gnicholas wrote:
| That would be great! Is it currently available on FF for
| Android?
| Mogzol wrote:
| Yes, you can run standard desktop Firefox extensions on FF
| for Android. There was a whitelist of extensions Mozilla
| allowed you to install though, I'm not sure if that still
| exists on the most recent versions.
| toastal wrote:
| The hoops are far too technical, finicky, and poorly
| documented for the average user to curate their own add-
| on list for Fx. It's a real shame since I think a lot of
| it is to make sure the add-on's UI is responsive, but
| many of most used add-ons on desktop have no UI to speak
| of (like redirecting AMP links, skipping short links,
| etc.).
| gtk40 wrote:
| You can use uBlock Origin on Firefox for Android. The
| biggest feature I miss when I switched to iOS, although
| I've found Orion beta also has this feature and is decent.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| Have you seen Orion browser? Simply go to either the Chrome
| or FF addon store and install whichever extensions you want.
|
| (Some obviously work better than others)
| nicoburns wrote:
| Some big ones:
|
| - Push notifications
|
| - Offline storage that doesn't disappear after 7 days.
|
| In other words it could actually make "PWAs" viable for a lot
| of use cases.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Every single time I've been asked to allow notifications on
| the web it's been for spamming.
| kelthuzad wrote:
| Ok? that's why you have the option to disallow them!? I for
| one use web-apps that I need notifications from, it's a
| crucial feature which Apple has sabotaged on purpose for no
| other reason than self-interest.
|
| If you personally don't want to use a feature, that's fine,
| but you're putting out a statement like that as if no one
| should be allowed to use that feature because some devs
| tend to use it for spam. It just takes like 2 or 3 clicks
| to remove rights of notification from a specific app, so
| it's not a big deal either way.
| nicoburns wrote:
| It would be possible to only enable them for Web apps
| you've explicitly installed / added to your home screen
| shmerl wrote:
| Codecs and formats that Apple tries to ban, touch events API
| that Apple tries to ban, support for DASH that Apple tries to
| ban. And so on.
|
| Basically anything that Apple tries to ban for anti-competitive
| reasons. Once this blocker is removed, no one will care about
| Apple bans anymore.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > Codecs and formats that Apple tries to ban [..] Basically
| anything that Apple tries to ban for anti-competitive
| reasons.
|
| Opus support: Firefox: 2012 Chrome:
| 2014 Safari: Unsupported
|
| AVIF support: Firefox: Oct 2021 Chrome:
| Aug 2022 Safari: Oct 2022 (but incomplete and buggy)
|
| AV1 support: Firefox: 2019 Chrome: 2018
| Safari: Unsupported
|
| WebP support: Firefox: 2019 Chrome:
| 2014 Safari: 2022
|
| WebM support: Firefox: 2014 Chrome:
| 2013 Safari: 2022
|
| Ogg Vorbis support: Firefox: 2009
| Chrome: 2010 Safari: Unsupported
|
| FLAC support: Firefox: 2017 Chrome:
| 2017 Safari: 2019
|
| Basically any codec/container that's open and/or royalty-free
| Apple isn't very keen to support, and if they do they always
| drag their feet.
| thiht wrote:
| Why do they drag their feet so much regarding open codecs?
| It seems like they just need to take an existing dependency
| and integrate it in their browser, that doesn't seem like a
| lot of work. Maybe I'm completely wrong about that? Are
| there hidden complexities? Maybe they want to implement the
| codecs in-house? Royalty/licensing issues?
| dontlaugh wrote:
| They want to only offer good options, to guarantee a
| certain UX. All of the codecs they do support have
| hardware acceleration and tend to be among the best in
| their class. Why would they duplicate functionality they
| already have?
|
| I agree it's annoying on occasion.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > They want to only offer good options, to guarantee a
| certain UX. All of the codecs they do support have
| hardware acceleration and tend to be among the best in
| their class. Why would they duplicate functionality they
| already have?
|
| This is provably false though. For example, they support
| Opus bitstreams either through WebRTC (because it's
| required) or inside their own buggy special-snowflake
| .caf container (so they _do_ support the more
| "expensive" encoding/decoding part of Opus that could
| benefit from hardware acceleration), but they don't
| support Opus audio _files_ (that is, the '.opus' Vorbis
| container which everyone uses to hold Opus audio, which
| is the "easy" part of supporting Opus and doesn't benefit
| from having hardware acceleration because there's nothing
| to accelerate there).
|
| And they control their own hardware for how many years
| now? Their A4 silicon first appeared in 2010; they could
| have easily added whatever hardware acceleration they
| want to, but they chose not to.
|
| Frankly I'm not sure what their motivations are. I guess
| they just don't care?
| dontlaugh wrote:
| I'm trying to say they don't care about anything other
| than the "blessed" path. Anything else is by accident.
| They couldn't see a point to opus files, so they didn't
| bother.
| shmerl wrote:
| They are more malicious being part of MPEG-LA themselves
| (later they decided to join AOM though). So their
| attitude to codecs is not accidental.
| choppaface wrote:
| Well there's setting the default search engine. That's not part
| of the rendering engine, but remember when IE6 was so much
| better than Netscape? Or vice-versa? If content is way better
| from one part of the internet, then users will select that
| corner for search too.
|
| WebGPU is key. Apple has been dragging their feet here while
| their AR / ML teams catch up to the rest of the industry.
|
| 8thwall (https://www.8thwall.com/projects) has some pretty good
| demos of completely cross-platform AR/VR stuff. All this gets a
| ton better if iOS somehow supports WebGPU.
|
| And then there is user fingerprinting and ads stuff. A ton of
| fingerprints today are from CSS quirks and the like. Renderers
| can favor or disfavor these things.
| randyrand wrote:
| - Web Bluetooth.
|
| - Web USB
|
| - Web NFC
|
| - Web Notifications
|
| - Web Midi
|
| - Offline Storage
|
| - Gryo, Accelerometer, Magneto, Proximity
|
| - Vibration feedback
| swamp40 wrote:
| I seriously doubt Apple will ever allow web browsers direct
| control of their hardware.
| randyrand wrote:
| The web browser is just an app (possibly side loaded). Apps
| already have all of this.
| monocasa wrote:
| A lot of that is already exposed to developers.
| swamp40 wrote:
| Yes, but each app is approved by Apple before being put
| on the App store. Direct BLE and NFC control have lots of
| spoofing "dangers" and privacy issues.
| smoldesu wrote:
| What if it's my hardware?
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| You don't own Apple products, they own you.
| mr_toad wrote:
| And on the downside a malicious browser could ignore same
| origin policy and other security measures.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Chrome-only non-standards that even Mozilla is against.
|
| Oh. And Web Midi? The moment Firefox implemented it they
| discovered its used for fingerprinting, and Chrome allows it
| by default:
| https://twitter.com/denschub/status/1582730985778556931
| pertymcpert wrote:
| Just write an app, Jesus.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| Just give Apple 30% of your money for something that's
| essentially just a website, great idea!
| Spivak wrote:
| Good lord people really don't get how Apple makes money.
| Have you ever wondered why apps like Jira, Github, or
| Notion aren't loudly complaining about the 30% App Store
| fees? It's because they don't pay them. How? By not
| actually _selling_ the service in the app.
|
| If all you want is an app for your users to use, you
| won't pay a dime outside of the developer fee. If you
| want people to discover your app in the app store,
| download it, and then pay you then it's a 30% cut.
| [deleted]
| alerighi wrote:
| Why if you can do that in a browser? Isn't much simpler? I
| don't want to install an app for every stupid thing. It's
| just simper to open the browser at a particular URL. The
| browser is a runtime environment capable (with PWA, that
| are not supported on iOS) of doing 95% of things a native
| app can do with decent performance without needing the user
| to install anything at all.
|
| Anyway nowadays apps are even built with web technologies
| (such as React Native), would just be simpler to have only
| the web version, a single codebase that can be used with an
| iOS device, an Android device, a PC, a smartwatch, a TV,
| whatever. Distributing an app is a pain, especially for
| iOS, you have to submit it for review, Apple has to approve
| it, you cannot do certain things, why? I get that on
| Android is simpler, just install the APK and done, but
| unfortunately there are a ton of iOS devices out there.
| palata wrote:
| Many native apps are better. Of course web people like to
| use web tech for everything. I like native mobile
| (kotlin/swift) a lot better for mobile dev.
| kyriakos wrote:
| You can write Web apps. The Web is a fully capable
| platform.
| toastal wrote:
| And buy Apple devices to build, release, and test? That's
| expensive considering I can just open Epiphany in a mobile-
| sized window to see how WebKit renders.
| rektide wrote:
| Your scope is way way off.
|
| It's far from just the render engine that's being constrained.
| The whole virtual machine is restricted. The DOM, the js
| engine, the wasm engine, anything at all running or touching
| web code is locked the heck down.
|
| There's a couple places browsers can add or supplant web
| platform features, but it largely prevents browsers from doing
| much at all to add to the web platform in any way.
|
| In the rendering case, there's always work on css features &
| especially tuning that the browsers are up to. Just being
| faster, lighter weight, having more or better tuning is a great
| capability, a place where more than one small in-group should
| be able to experiment & improve & explore.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > It's far from just the render engine that's being
| constrained.
|
| It is unclear whether this would still even be the case.
|
| My understanding is that it's a _policy_ limitation
| preventing third party browsers on iOS. But there's also iOS
| security policies preventing JIT to have a _fast_ browser.
|
| I cannot imagine Apple opening up JIT-capabilities to all
| developers on the app store. I wouldn't be surprised if they
| didn't relax this at all. Perhaps they will they grant
| entitlements for JIT to a select few.
| eklitzke wrote:
| I agree that whether or not they'll allow JIT is an
| orthogonal issue based on security policies, but I don't
| think it's out of the question.
|
| The security argument to not allow a JIT is that mapping
| code segments as executable+writeable opens up a lot of
| interesting attack vectors, and therefore allowing JIT
| weakens security. This is true of course, but the argument
| is a bit dubious for a few reasons. The first of which is
| that the OS is supposed to have sandboxing mechanisms that
| don't allow escape from the sandbox even if something goes
| wrong, and therefore prohibiting a JIT shouldn't be
| required in the first place. Furthermore WebKit itself has
| a JIT (whatever Apple calls their JS implementation), so
| iOS is already vulnerable to these kinds of issues in some
| sense. Finally, in general you can write and link in
| arbitrary code into your program (in read-only sections of
| memory), so attackers can already write exploits in
| C/C++/asm/whatever.
|
| Obviously Apple needs special consideration for WebKit
| itself since the WebKit rendering engine is linked into a
| ton of applications, so a security issue in WebKit is a
| major problem because it affects many programs on the
| phone, including a lot of first party applications. But
| this wouldn't be the case with a third-party iOS browser,
| since even if Apple allows you to install a third party
| browser, they're not going to allow you to replace the
| system webview implementation with a third party one.
| Therefore a bug or security problem in
| Firefox/Chrome/whatever should be limited to just that app,
| and wouldn't have the same scope as a WebKit vulnerability.
|
| Apple is notoriously restrictive so maybe they won't change
| their policies. On the other hand I think the current
| technical argument for not allowing third party programs to
| have JIT code is pretty weak, so I could definitely see a
| different decision being made at some point in time,
| especially if there was pressure from the legal team (e.g.
| due to things like EU anti-trust regulations).
| scarface74 wrote:
| Apple disables JIT on Safari in high security mode. Apple
| knows that no browser can be secure when using JIT.
| rektide wrote:
| This is a pretty big claim. It's not that the browser
| can't be secure. It's that Apple might not have total
| control & oversight over what is executing. And that
| Apple won't pursue further to find out: they just make
| their job easy for themselves by arbitrarily saying all
| code that runs must be reviewable in the app store.
| That's not a mark on other people's JIT engines: it's a
| mark on Apple's willingness to
| understand/pursue/investigate. At great cost to the
| consumer, in this case.
|
| I don't want to be slanted in only one direction, so let
| me share the other side of the coin: in the new Web
| Extensions spec that Google has built from the ground-up
| by fiat (mv3), they too ban dynamic code of any kind: all
| code must be built in to the extension. And the extension
| can't be any kind of virtual machine, can't execute any
| kind of programmatic system within itself. Because Google
| too is a murderous shitty coward that hates the world,
| that hates potential, that wants to limit freedom, that
| curbs what is possible, under exactly the same premises
| of being for our security, but which also obstructs
| massive classes of very basic very simple very generic
| software that poses a threat to these sizable
| corporations ability to stay in absolute control.
| Generally I'm pretty ok with Google's behavior, but this
| particular vicious turn of events deeply deeply against
| the web & possibility makes me lower them to the same low
| dog piece-of-shit fuckwad coward shitsmear con-man that I
| have long seen as a fairly distinclty Apple low lying
| cowardice. For your protection is a vicious piece of shit
| lie, and end of basic liberty. Shame, you vicious piece
| of shit fucks, shame!! You call it security, but you are
| just not willing to actually do the work to understand or
| look at & investigate: you make an easy fiat rule that
| excludes countless valid & good uses, because it makes
| your life easy & benefits your systems of control, lowers
| user-agency. It's directly agains the end-user, and yet
| they say it's for our benefit: this is the worst kind of
| lie.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| For what it's worth, in-process Webkit views do not have
| JIT enabled.
|
| Edit: in fact, you can't even use the in-process
| UIWebView any more - App Store doesn't accept submissions
| with them since 2020
| https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=edwud51q
|
| The replacement WKWebView enables JIT because it's in a
| separate process, with the view painted back into your
| app.
| jraph wrote:
| If only a real Firefox for iOS 9.3 was released. It would make
| the unused iPad 2 I retrieved way more useful than it is now.
| That could be the thing that would motivate me to create an Apple
| account to download it. And, I bet, would reduce e-waste by a lot
| by allowing older iThings Apple is not willing to support anymore
| to be useful again.
| shmerl wrote:
| Good. But Apple shouldn't get away with just allowing it. They
| should pay for violating competition law for years. Otherwise
| this law is a joke.
| the_solenoid wrote:
| I see this argument all the time - how is it anti competitive
| if you have to buy a device from apple to use the apps?
|
| Its not like anyone can just make an iphone, it's not like the
| PC market, it's not even like the macOS market.
|
| If people (consumers) in general gave a rats ass about it they
| would pick an alternative. It's not even on their radar. Price
| is 95% of why androids sold at all, and they had all the time
| in the world to make something better.
|
| I personally love the idea, but professionally hate it. IT
| shops chose apple for it being locked down, and burdening 3rd
| parties with extra support costs if the platform is wide open
| is a crappy thing to do.
| realusername wrote:
| The anticompetitive aspect is obvious, right now Safari
| development picked up full steam again after years of being
| half abandoned. Because of regulations, they can't just
| afford to rely on the browser monopoly anymore.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Here's a video of the GeckoKit demo:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE-4b082Upw
| chadlavi wrote:
| oh good I can't wait to have to support more mobile browsers,
| great
| fleddr wrote:
| When you pay close attention to things like web standards, one
| would have noticed how during the last 2 years the Webkit team
| seems to have woken up from a decade-long hibernation. They're
| actually releasing things, and in a pretty decent pace.
|
| As the article implies, very likely due to regulatory pressure
| building up. And that tells you everything you need to know about
| Apple's stance on the web: they hate it, as they hate anything
| that is interoperable and uncontrollable. They'll starve the web
| to the maximum they can get away with and now that maximum is
| reducing, hopefully.
| [deleted]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The most interesting thing for me is that iOS Safari has said
| they will support push notifications this year.
|
| And I get it, most of us don't like push notifications, and on
| the web even more so. But lack of push notification support is
| the one thing that was forcing a lot of developers from just
| doing a decent progressive web app and instead forcing them
| into the App Store. I'm interested to see the growth in PWAs
| once iOS finally supports web push.
|
| And just to try to head off the "but native apps are better"
| arguments in advance: yes, they can be, but I hate having to
| download apps from a company that I'll have a very short-term
| relationship with (or sometimes even a longer relationship).
| E.g. I recall.going to a charity event and having to download a
| (pretty poor) app for their silent auction. Only reason it
| needed to be an app instead of a website was to send pushes
| about being outbid, the auction ending, etc
| klabb3 wrote:
| If the web was developed today, it would be rejected from the
| App Store. And while I agree that Apple was first, others
| followed suit and the spirit of _something like the web_ is
| terrifying to established tech monopolists. Just read the Gates
| emails about the web from the 90s.
| fleddr wrote:
| Yep, the web sets one free, there's no lock-in, no
| permission. We can't have that.
| srcreigh wrote:
| It is rejected currently and any dynamic app browser is
| banned too.
|
| No idea how this wasn't immediately quashed by regulation.
| It's a 15 year long version of the M$ antitrust lawsuit.
|
| The reason it's not blocked is probably because Apple browser
| seems close enough to "the web" as we know it.
|
| The web should be a lot more advanced today than it is, and
| Apple is to blame for that. Blocking progress for over a
| decade.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| safari has been implementing new spec faster than firefox in
| some cases! they've really gotten their act together
| Gigachad wrote:
| A lot of the specs firefox hasn't added are of questionable
| value like WebUSB which exists to make chromebooks less
| useless.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's a different thing. Apple doesn't care about implementing
| them whereas Mozilla wants to strangle Google with their bare
| hands and would rather die before they implement them out of
| principle.
| fleddr wrote:
| That's what I said, Webkit has _recently_ sped up their
| development, for all the wrong reasons.
|
| As for Firefox, as much as I sentimentally align with it and
| still use it, it's a dead browser. I have access to some
| analytics of websites with a billion+ views/year and it
| doesn't even show up. It has like 0.5% market share on
| mobile.
|
| They're irrelevant in this iteration of the browser wars.
| psxuaw wrote:
| Maybe Firefox usage statistics could be distorted, because
| of its various mechanisms of blocking trackers.
| rerdavies wrote:
| It would surprise me greatly if Firefox were sending
| invalid User-Agent headers.
|
| User-Agent headers are mandatory; and it would be
| counterproductive for everybody, including Mozilla, if
| Firefox were sending invalid User-Agent headers.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| For years I sent a blank UA string. It worked
| surprisingly well until about 2010. Only real issue was
| some Tomcat servers would just barf out stack traces.
|
| UA switcher is a pretty popular addon in the Mozilla
| ecosystem. So it may well be more popular than UA stats
| alone can surmise. (Though probably not enough to matter
| to businesses too lazy to test anything besides the top
| two.)
| moffkalast wrote:
| According to Mozilla only like a third of all Firefox
| users have installed any add-on _at all_. So multiply the
| number by 150% and you have the highest possible Firefox
| usage rate.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Maybe Firefox usage statistics could be distorted,
| because of its various mechanisms of blocking trackers.
|
| I didn't think that that blocked the user-agent header.
| But I guess I could be wrong.
| [deleted]
| floatinglotus wrote:
| I don't want alternate browsers for one small device.
| [deleted]
| palata wrote:
| I do.
| antman wrote:
| Let's hope they also add extensions. In the meantime let's hope
| mozilla readds extensions in android in a meaningful way which
| might stop its downward spiral
| petarb wrote:
| I assume this might be available on the alternative app stores as
| a result of EUs rulings on anti-trust?
| vbezhenar wrote:
| If Safari weren't shoehorned through iOS user throats, webkit
| would cease to exist.
|
| Right now web developers are forced to support webkit because
| they can't tell iOS users to install Chrome for better
| experience.
|
| If they could, they would drop webkit and provide blink-only
| experience. Many websites do that to Firefox nowadays.
|
| And if webkit can't render website, Apple would replace it with
| blink. So Safari would become another Chromium reskin and Web
| would finally settle on a single engine.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| > Web would finally settle on a single engine.
|
| You say that like it's a desirable thing? Being a spec with
| multiple implementations is a feature of a good platform, not a
| bug. It pushes the Web towards consensus-driven evolution
| rather than design by one actor (in the past, Microsoft; now,
| Google).
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I have no idea if it's a good or bad thing. Having single
| engine for a web developer is a good thing. Having no
| competition is a bad thing. Having engine controlled by a
| greedy ad-driven corporation is a bad thing. Blink is open
| source and theoretically could be forked by anyone, so that's
| a good thing. Blink is the most advanced engine, so that's a
| good thing.
|
| It's better than IE situation, that's for sure.
| palata wrote:
| That's a misconception of the open source dynamics. You
| can't just fork a Google-backed project and expect people
| to follow you.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _having single engine for a web developer is a good
| thing_
|
| How many page views are by web developers?
|
| How many by users?
|
| So, wrong definition of good. Good isn't for the tiny
| amount of time something is being made, it's for the most
| of its life it's being used.
|
| Beyond that, if you have no idea, perhaps you haven't
| viscerally experienced the IE and Netscape eras, and the
| awfulness of a single engine.
|
| Blink/Chromium is objectively worse on a number of
| dimensions I care about, important dimensions "good" for
| users.
|
| > _Blink is open source and could be forked by anyone_
|
| As is WebKit, and Blink is a fork of the WebCore component
| of WebKit, which was originally a fork of the KHTML and KJS
| libraries from KDE.
|
| Other browsers can still leverage WebKit, see Orion which
| also runs Chrome and Firefox extensions. It uses WebKit
| features ahead of Safari:
|
| https://blog.kagi.com/orion-features
| [deleted]
| cageface wrote:
| If Apple wants to position WebKit as an important independent
| implementation of web standards it needs to run on more than
| just Apple hardware. I shouldn't have to own a Mac an an
| iPhone to test my code on Safari.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| Why? All that matters is user count. Who says it needs to
| be cross platform?
| tormeh wrote:
| Honestly I think this is bad. We'll end up with Blink everywhere.
| mirthflat83 wrote:
| Yep. We will end up with a singular "standard" set up by
| Google.
| emodendroket wrote:
| From the perspective of users or developers, what's bad about
| this? I mean, we generally take it as axiomatic that it must
| be bad, but the dream of anybody being able to come along and
| make a Web browser is long dead.
| petesergeant wrote:
| That the network effects of everything only being tested on
| Chrome will mean that for some sites you have to use (eg
| Government, e-commerce you can't do without), you'll no
| longer have a choice of browser, and that that dominant
| position will be maintained even if Chrome starts to really
| suck, or Google decide to lean in to "you need a trackable
| Google account to use this".
|
| Google releases Chrome in order to show you ads.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I am not 100% convinced that the existence of Safari
| exclusively on Apple platforms is all that effective at
| preventing this -- for instance, if you don't
| particularly care about mobile users you're pretty much
| already living in this world today.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > if you don't particularly care about mobile users
|
| I think this is a small share
| emodendroket wrote:
| Maybe, though maybe less so for business Web apps or
| other boring uses.
|
| Either way, monopoly or oligopoly can also have salutary
| effects. Flash was a complete blight on the Web and all
| it took was Apple saying "no, we aren't going to support
| that" and it disappeared practically overnight. Chrome's
| been similarly effective in pushing forward some basic
| security measures. Hard to imagine this happening in a
| world of 50 different browsers with roughly equal market
| share.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I don't think anyone's talking about another elephant in
| the room: Facebook could very easily make their own
| framework for embedded web browsing and get all of their
| tracking ability back.
| emodendroket wrote:
| They'd still be behind Apple with OS-level insights that
| they claim the right to use in their own ads.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Browsing web with firefox + ublock origin feels like liberation
| postalrat wrote:
| Only because webkit sucks.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Mostly because Google will plaster its web properties and iOS
| apps with calls to install Chrome, like they did on desktop.
| emodendroket wrote:
| That wouldn't be that effective if people tried Chrome and
| thought it sucked.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| It doesn't matter that they can, and want, to invest as
| much as they do today in the browser space. Microsoft's
| IE was also the most competitive until it killed off the
| competition, then they decreased quality.
|
| Back then the decrease in quality was by way of not
| developing new features, or developing them in a quirky
| way, that was all well form them because they didn't want
| web applications to displace native Windows applications.
|
| The decrease in quality you may see from Google may come
| in privacy, they'll be able to tighten the surveillance
| as much as they want once no website you care about works
| outside of Chrome and you can't switch.
| emodendroket wrote:
| If they turn the screws then perhaps people will begin to
| care about alternative browsers again like they did when
| IE was a going concern.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Yes and it was incredibly difficult to displace the
| monopoly of a vendor that had incentives to make their
| product, ultimately, unattractive in every regard.
|
| Imagine now the network effects and a browser that
| actually keeps up to date, they'll just have won, period.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Honestly I think this is bad. We 'll end up with Blink
| everywhere._
|
| That could happen, but alternatively we could get Browser War
| III1, in which Apple reintroduces an extremely competitive
| Safari for Windows in order to counteract the Blink (Chrome,
| Edge) hegemony. That would not be great news for Firefox,
| though.
|
| 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
| dmitriid wrote:
| > in which Apple reintroduces an extremely competitive Safari
| for Windows in order to counteract the Blink (Chrome, Edge)
| hegemony
|
| And they are going to compete against Google's search, gmail,
| youtube (and their respective apps forcing chrome) exactly
| how?
| CharlesW wrote:
| I don't think they need to worry about this -- traffic from
| Apple devices is oxygen to Google, which is why Google pays
| Apple $15 billion per year just to be the default web
| search provider.
|
| But Apple has been quietly working on a search backup plan
| for _many_ years, and they 've been in the email business
| for longer than Google's existed. (I migrated a couple
| decades worth of email from Google Workspace last year, and
| I haven't regretted it so far.) I don't think building a
| YouTube competitor would be interesting for them.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > I don't think they need to worry about this -- traffic
| from Apple devices is oxygen to Google
|
| Which remains there when people switch to Chrome
|
| > But Apple has been quietly working on a search backup
| plan for many years, and they've been in the email
| business for longer than Google's existed
|
| Ah yes. They will just flip on the non-existent rumored
| Google-level search and the non-existent public email
| service to take on Google monopoly in search and email.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It would need a good client. WebKit browsers exist on Linux,
| but almost nobody uses them due to their shoddy support for
| extensions and general lack of care put into cross-platform
| support. If you've got WSLG or a Linux machine laying around,
| go try the Epiphany browser - basically what would happen if
| you ported WebKit to an OS-native GUI with minimal
| modifications. It's pretty unusable compared to Firefox or
| Chrome, on every hardware/software combo I try.
|
| I'd love to see "Cross-platform Software Dev"-era Apple throw
| their hat back into the ring, but putting Safari on other
| platforms is a big commitment if you want to take it
| seriously.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| GNOME Web seems decent enough for me. Last time I tried
| using it the main issue was the lack of Widevine and
| similar DRM... if it weren't for that there's a good chance
| I'd be using it on my Linux machines because a GTK browser
| feels a good deal nicer on a GTK desktop than XUL and
| whatever the UI layer for Chromium is called.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I like the UI and overall design philosophy, but WebKit
| seems to be too neglected on Linux to be a reliable
| experience. The difference in text presentation between
| GTK/Cairo and WebKit itself was really jarring, and
| something I'd bet you'd notice on Windows too. That could
| be fixed with a well-made client, but it's a lot of work
| that I doubt Apple wants to go through.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > The difference in text presentation between GTK/Cairo
| and WebKit itself was really jarring, and something I'd
| bet you'd notice on Windows too.
|
| When Safari for Windows was still a thing, Apple actually
| ported a good chunk of Cocoa along with it to support it,
| including text rendering. This meant that while it was
| still supported, Safari for Windows had some of the
| nicest looking text of any Windows web browser.
|
| Based on Apple's more recent Windows releases which are
| built around WinUI, if they were to bring back Safari for
| Windows they'd probably take a more native approach,
| though.
| XorNot wrote:
| I am cheering on Mozilla doing this. They are the only bastion of
| a free internet left: we _need_ a browser option, a good option,
| which isn 't beholden to advertising dollars at every turn.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Safari, especially on iOS is the new IE.
|
| What I really like to see next to this is the requirement that
| when I tap a link in an app that it opens in the default browser.
|
| Too many apps, such as Reddit open with the WebView of Safari,
| which sucks. I'm not signed in there, it doesn't add to my
| history, and most importantly, they get to inject a whole bunch
| of tracks that I don't want. See [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32514793
| tristan957 wrote:
| Doesn't Android open the Chrome web view too? On F-Droid I
| think you can get a Bromite web view, but I'm not sure how
| these web views work, and if I can get a Firefox one.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| When you open a link in an app, you're often directed to a
| Custom Tab (you can recognise them by the menu in the upper
| right corner being the browser's). Those are handled by your
| default browser. I'm using Firefox Focus in that capacity and
| it works great.
| smm11 wrote:
| Doesn't matter. Google is done. Mozilla's thing will be trying to
| out-race Apple on Privacy. Mozilla should stick with WebKit, only
| allow more granular control.
| summerlight wrote:
| I don't know any details on this project, but what I read from
| space between lines is that this could be a handy tool to have a
| better position on the annual negotiations of default search
| engine setup. If you can have just a 5% discount from Apple by
| having this choice, the whole engineering cost would be
| immediately paid off.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Would love to have real Firefox on iPhone. I hope Chrome gets
| banned from the App Store though.
| vhanda wrote:
| Could you please elaborate why you hope 'Chrome gets banned'?
|
| I understand not being fond of the its ubiquity, especially
| with many Websites now requiring Chrome. And Google is
| _allegedly_ abusing their dominant position. But banning it?
| Why?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Browser monoculture = shitty internet future.
| lxgr wrote:
| And the solution to that is (almost certainly illegal,
| under the new regulations) market manipulation by a direct
| competitor?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Hey I'm just dreaming here, not like offering legal
| advice.
| kelnos wrote:
| So the solution to a browser monoculture is to... approve
| fewer browsers? Seems backwards to me.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Yes, that's right. Not fewer at random though.
| RedComet wrote:
| Hopefully Mozilla takes security seriously with mobile Firefox,
| finally. Otherwise Apple will appear justified in their
| regulations. The Android version of Firefox doesn't even support
| IsolatedProcess yet.
| thinknubpad wrote:
| The Android version of Firefox does support NoScript and ad
| blocker extensions, though.
|
| Releasing it on iOS would be huge. No more almost-functional
| Safari ad blockers with multiple pricing tiers! No more all-or-
| nothing JavaScript toggle button!
|
| Honestly, the only thing keeping me from iOS is its inability
| to run a browser with a decent extensions ecosystem.
| MariaElisabeth8 wrote:
| [dead]
| amelius wrote:
| > Apple could still conceivably impose limitations on the way
| these browsers work
|
| God damnit it's my device.
| vehemenz wrote:
| But it's not your decision to buy an Android phone?
| kevingadd wrote:
| A significant % of people who buy iPhones are not able to
| make a truly informed decision about this at the time. They
| find out way later what the actual consequences of apple or
| google's walled gardens are, and can only escape the garden
| if they have an android phone with an unlocked bootloader
|
| It's not cheap to swap ecosystems
| tehwebguy wrote:
| > A significant % of people who buy iPhones are not able to
| make a truly informed decision about this at the time
|
| I mean the devices change year to year but are people
| seriously finding themselves surprised by what iPhone can
| do but Android can't or vice versa?
|
| If we were talking about a college tuition loan or a
| mortgage then yeah I'd say `not able to make a truly
| informed decision about this at the time` but this is like
| the lowest stakes decision possible no?
|
| > It's not cheap to swap ecosystems
|
| Is that true? Seems like there is always a nearly free
| phone deal out there and your network will probably migrate
| everything for you anyway.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > If we were talking about a college tuition loan or a
| mortgage
|
| Why are you giving examples where all of the terms are
| explained completely, up front, by law?
| kevingadd wrote:
| Walled garden policies make full migration not possible,
| at least for free. Things like your music library,
| ebooks, in-app currency, etc are often not allowed to
| move.
|
| If I were to move to iPhone now, I'd have to spend at
| least a hundred bucks finding and buying alternative
| apps.
| saurik wrote:
| FWIW, in my case, I would also lose access to all of the
| books, music, movies, and--very notably--apps that I have
| purchased over the years.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Music you purchased has been DRM free since 2008.
|
| Most of the studios participate in MoviesAnywhere meaning
| a movie purchased on iTunes automatically shows up in
| your Amazon, Google, Vudu, etc library.
|
| How many apps that you purchased that have an Android
| equivalent aren't based on cross platform subscriptions?
| scarface74 wrote:
| Where is this narrative coming from? Only about 20% of App
| Store revenue coming from non game in app consumables (came
| out in the Epic Trial) and the other big money makers are
| from services like Netflix and Spotify where you can easily
| use your app cross platform. Even Apple Music is available
| for Android.
|
| Most users aren't complaining about any "walled garden"
| kelnos wrote:
| Buying an Android phone certainly allows you to run other
| browsers that use their own rendering engines, but Android is
| hardly open; you are still restricted in many ways from doing
| what you might want to do, with little recourse. Installing a
| third-party OS image is possible, but then removes your
| access from some things that you might still like (any app
| that requires SafetyNet to pass, for example).
|
| The bottom line is that there is no open phone platform out
| there that even remotely provides feature parity with Android
| or iOS. Anything you do is going to be a trade off, and for
| some people, there is no way to satisfy 100% of their needs
| and wants. That doesn't mean we aren't allowed to complain
| about the bits that can't be satisfied.
| detaro wrote:
| And if they'd bought one, and were unhappy about some aspect
| of that, you'd be here and write " _But it 's not your
| decision to buy an iPhone?_". We don't live in a world were
| you can get your perfect choice with no compromises, and
| having made a compromise does not imply that you can't
| criticize decisions made by the system you choose.
| irrational wrote:
| You could have chosen any device. This is just the consequence
| of choosing the wrong device (for you).
| amelius wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo
| detaro wrote:
| And you have no way of knowing if a "non-wrong" device exists
| for their criteria among the "any device" they could have
| choosen from.
| irrational wrote:
| It is simple, choose an Android device. There are many
| premium android devices.
|
| If you don't know by now that on iOS devices all the
| browsers are running the same engine under the hood,
| especially on a tech site like HN, then there isn't much
| hope for you.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > It is simple, choose an Android device
|
| They don't have to do that though.
|
| Instead, they can wait for the EU laws to force Apple to
| allow them to do what they want, with their device that
| they own.
| detaro wrote:
| Again, you are assuming that "choice of browser engine"
| is the only basis for the choice.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm a reasonably-satisfied Android user, but Android is
| nearly as locked down as iOS. Sure, I can (and do) run
| "real" Firefox on my Pixel, and can (and do) side-load
| apps, but there are quite a few things I can't do.
|
| For example, my Pixel 4 just fell out of Google's 3-year
| support period, so I no longer get security updates. I
| would be completely happy to run LineageOS or some other
| alternative that would extend the life of the phone with
| regular updates, but I can't if I still want to be able
| to use Google Pay and other apps that require the phone
| to pass SafetyNet. Those sorts of apps are a part of my
| day-to-day, so being unable to use them would be a
| showstopper. (I've read various things about tricking
| apps into believing the phone passes SafetyNet, but none
| of the methods seem particularly reliable, and for every
| user who says it works, there's another person who
| couldn't get it to work.)
|
| So sure, it is technically possible for me to treat the
| phone as "open" and run whatever OS image on it I want,
| but then I become restricted in other ways as to what I
| can do on it. Maybe you don't care about being able to
| pay for things using your phone (etc.); that's fine. But
| I do, and I consider it a critical feature these days.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Doesn't Google services work with GrapheneOS?
| lxgr wrote:
| Given that there isn't an individual vote on each property of
| a device/ecosystem, iOS is probably the least evil rather
| than a completely optimal choice for many (if not most!)
| users.
|
| Just imagine that type of reasoning applied to other parts of
| life, like politics, work, interpersonal relationships...
| "Love it, change it, or leave it" has three components, not
| two.
| saurik wrote:
| People in this situation could also have chosen to not buy a
| cell phone in the first place, eschewing that benefit for
| using landlines or cordless phones; and yet, I don't think we
| would consider that a reasonable limitation, right?
|
| Clearly, then, there is some line that we must draw where
| people are buying something they think they want and yet
| should still get to have full access to, and I don't see why
| it would correlate with Apple vs. Google.
|
| In my case, I barely wanted a phone: I want a good camera
| attached to a good touch screen; I have requirements past
| that largely dictated by size, weight, and durability. That's
| the device I am looking for.
|
| The devices which satisfy my needs are mostly from Apple or
| Samsung, both of whom lock down their devices. (Can I install
| an alternative browser on a Samsung Android device? Sure. But
| is it my device? No. No it is not and it has never been, by
| far. Samsung is only ever so slightly better than Apple with
| respect to that shit.)
|
| The reality is: every device should be open. It shouldn't be
| some trade-off in the space where you don't get to have a
| device with any of the other key properties you want just
| because it is _always_ a better business model to build a
| walled garden and then shill your services, charge a usage
| tax, or run advertisements.
|
| That said, in a world where it _is_ allowed to build closed
| devices, and it _is_ some random set of tradeoffs that we all
| have to tolerate, we have to get to complain about it,
| because then it is just yet another property of the device,
| and we get to complain about all of the shitty decisions we
| had to put up with, whether that 's the pricing, the
| functionality, the quality, the experience, the "tactile
| feel"... or whether it is open or not.
|
| So like, I don't really see the framework in which this one
| axis is something where people don't get to complain because
| "they should have gotten some other random shitty device that
| isn't at all what you wanted but was open"... this seems to
| just be some broken narrative--mostly pitched by people who
| clearly aren't also tracking the anti-trust work against
| Google and haven't been a part of the fight to jailbreak all
| of the random locked down Android devices--pitched by people
| who seem to just like locked down stuff and Apple's
| puritanical control over morality :(.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| These people don't even want freedom. When I read their
| posts, I almost can't believe they're not bots created by
| Apple to promote and normalize their interests.
|
| I just wish their shitty decisions didn't affect me.
| Unfortunately they do.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Where in your mind does an OS cease its responsibility to
| maintain device security and performance standards?
| amelius wrote:
| The part of my mind where customers are unhappy about the way
| these things are artificially locked to the device vendor.
| scarface74 wrote:
| How many consumers outside of the HN echo chamber are
| complaining?
| the_solenoid wrote:
| zero.
|
| This whole thing feels like a lobbying push, and to be
| frank, I am more worried about the monied interests who
| might have bought this kind of lawmaking and what their
| end game is.
| [deleted]
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Two engines down from three.
|
| One to go until the next IE.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| It'd be cool if the Android version of Firefox got some UI love
| to bring it back to where it was before they force-updated folks
| to the "phone only" UI.
| omniscient_oce wrote:
| Is there a way to have tabs at the top of the browser? I like
| that about Chrome on my tablet, I can just hit the tabs at the
| top to swap, whereas on Firefox you need to hit the Tabs icon
| at the top right that brings up the switcher, then find the one
| you want and click that.
| toastal wrote:
| Did you even try looking? Settings > Customize > Toolbar. The
| settings list is not long on Fx mobile and the ability to
| change the position has been there since the day of the UI
| refresh.
| sfink wrote:
| The question was not about bottom vs top, iiuc. It was
| about having the tabs always visible vs behind a tab
| button. As far as I can see, there is no way of doing that.
|
| Not that I would want it, myself, since my current counter
| is 48 tabs and I don't want a bunch more hit regions when
| I'm thumb-browsing.
| toastal wrote:
| It appears I did miss a part of the question. My tab
| count is [?] because I'm over 99 and tabs are unloaded.
| At that rate, if I were on a tablet or something, I'd
| prefer access to TreeStyleTabs or the like anyhow because
| horizontal becomes a squished mess. I assume the ctrl+tab
| as well as alt+{1-9} shortcuts still work.
| sp332 wrote:
| I'm not sure you read the whole question.
| foepys wrote:
| You can swipe over the address bar to switch tabs like you
| can switch apps by swiping across the bottom of the screen.
| Maybe this helps?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| No, not since the phone-only-ui release. Vivaldi's quite
| decent though.
| joenathanone wrote:
| I fond it to be pretty buggy, often the address bar will
| disappear and not come back when scrolling. Also they really
| need to add pull to refresh.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Pull to refresh is working for me both on nightly and
| release. What is not working for you?
| superfrank wrote:
| On Android? I just opened FF on my phone (v109.2.0) and
| pull to refresh does not work
| cpeterso wrote:
| Pull to refresh is currently only enabled in Firefox
| Nightly on Android. There are still some open bugs to be
| fixed related to pull to refresh gesture breaking some
| websites.
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| Pull to refresh was one of the reasons I moved to Firefox on
| Android. I hate it.
|
| I can't count how many times I just wanted to scroll up and
| ended up refreshing the page.
| rokweom wrote:
| How about - hear me out - have an option to enable or
| disable it? Crazy idea, I know.
|
| (I'm not aiming that comment at you, but rather at
| developers making software less and less configurable)
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| Indeed! I don't know now, but Chrome didn't have that
| option at the time.
| glass3 wrote:
| >It'd be cool if the Android version of Firefox got some UI
| love to bring it back to where it was before they force-updated
| folks to the "phone only" UI.
|
| Since this is open source, everybody should be able to adjust
| the UI to their liking. However, there are too many obstacles
| for this to be a valid option. What would be needed to make
| this possible? I think Firefox could become much more popular
| if the users could collaborate easily on designing the
| interface.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| First and foremost, a complete redo of how the project is
| run. But if you want to take that on, you know where to find
| Mozilla's issue tracker.
| berkes wrote:
| What project where "the users collaborated to design an
| interface" has ever lead to a good design?
| dotancohen wrote:
| VIM
| goodSteveramos wrote:
| Why doesnt mozilla work on a privacy protecting replacement for
| third party cookies? Because they are funded by google.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| They did. _about:config - > privacy.thirdparty.isolate = true_
| throwawayapples wrote:
| at least they made that really easy to find and do.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Follow the money.
| dralley wrote:
| It breaks things because a lot of websites expect it to
| work. If websites stop working then Mozilla will lose
| marketshare even faster. Still, it's not that difficult for
| people who know what they're doing to find.
| kelnos wrote:
| I see a _privacy.firstparty.isolate_ , but no _thirdparty_
| variant. Was that just an error on your part, or is it a pref
| that needs to be manually created, even?
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > _Was that just an error on your part_
|
| Yes, sorry about that. It's _privacy.firstparty.isolate_
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Because Firefox has a tiny user base and nobody is going to
| follow their standards as long as other browsers do enable
| third party cookies. Also, there are alternatives to third
| party cookies for most use cases, they're just more difficult
| to implement.
|
| Neither Google, nor Microsoft, nor Apple seem to care much
| about re-engineering third party cookies. Until that changes,
| any attempts from Mozilla to change the standards is a waste of
| time and effort, really.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Apple and Mozilla did a lot to restrict the scope of third-
| party cookies: isolation, partitioning etc.
|
| It's hard to change them without breaking most of the web.
| baq wrote:
| 1% of a billion is 10 million.
| kevingadd wrote:
| What makes you think we need a replacement for third party
| cookies when we can just disable them?
| orangecat wrote:
| Yeah, I've never understood this. Disabling third party
| cookies is the first thing I do with any new browser (uBlock
| Origin is second). It takes 30 seconds and very rarely causes
| problems.
| yorwba wrote:
| You might be interested in learning about state partitioning:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/State_P...
| [deleted]
| atarian wrote:
| There is no way Apple is going to allow for this.
| Kelteseth wrote:
| They must, see
| https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_22_...
| amelius wrote:
| They can still bully others by e.g. putting memory
| restrictions on other browsers.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It seems that the way iOS implements W^X protection would prevent
| a performant JS JIT from being created. It will be interesting to
| see if/how this is worked around.
| mmis1000 wrote:
| Basically every JIT javascript engine now use W^X protection by
| default. So it is probably a non-issue. I think the problem is
| 'does apple even allow you to toggle the w and x bit?'.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Regulations would force Apple to provide the same entitlements
| it uses to JIT code in Safari to other browsers.
| saagarjha wrote:
| W^X (with permission flipping) is fine for JIT, the problem is
| that Apple doesn't really allow these kinds of JITs on the App
| Store.
| fomine3 wrote:
| It seems that _pthread_jit_write_protect_np_ isn 't public on
| iOS so perhaps JIT can't be implemented regardless of
| AppStore
| saagarjha wrote:
| The implementation of that is not actually very difficult
| to do yourself (though I wouldn't recommend it). The
| problem is you can't actually flip the mask to execute
| unless you have permission to JIT which Apple currently
| doesn't provide to third party apps.
| radiKal07 wrote:
| As they should. Great stuff - even though I will keep using
| Safari, I love seeing more options
| elnatro wrote:
| Do we know if Apple have a calendar for allowing different web
| browser engines in iOS?
| stefandesu wrote:
| Nope, but if Google and Mozilla are putting this many resources
| into it, they might know more than we do, and I could imagine
| this coming with iOS 17 in September.
| lopis wrote:
| The EU has passed a law forcing Apple to open up, threatening
| fines up to 20% of their revenue [0]. They have until (the end
| of?) 2024 to follow up.
|
| [0] https://techhq.com/2022/12/apple-bows-to-eu-demands-with-
| pla...
| nashashmi wrote:
| An anti antitrust move?
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Here's a demo of the Gecko port from some years ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE-4b082Upw
|
| Most of the code needed is still in Gecko's repo at
| https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/uikit but
| probably doesn't build anymore. Would not be surprising if
| someone had an up to date branch in a private tree somewhere
| though...
| leoc wrote:
| The arrival of third-party app stores will make it possible to
| run GPLed apps on non-jailbroken iPhones, right?
| noirscape wrote:
| Most likely, yes. The entire iOS GPL ban to my understanding
| only exists due to a combination of an iOS App Store policy
| that's weirdly enforced (who is surprised...) and the fact that
| Apple's own code signer is required to be able to distribute an
| iOS app, and that one is proprietary because Apple, which means
| you can't use other people's GPL libraries in your apps.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| It's highly likely that apps will still required to be signed
| by Apple, even if distributed outside the Apple App Store,
| just like Gatekeeper on the Mac.
| oneplane wrote:
| I don't think the license matters at all, but you may not be
| able to upload something you can't prove ownership of, and
| there is still the notary requirement to run, it only changes
| the distribution channel after all.
|
| What you could maybe do is do reproducible builds, staple the
| notarised x509 on it afterwards. Then you can 'prove' it is the
| same app, but still have the signed version in distribution.
| saagarjha wrote:
| You can do this already.
| leoc wrote:
| It does looks as if the situation is a lot more complex than
| I thought I remembered. Apparently the uncertainties seem to
| affect GPLv2 code more?
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Finally!!! Full firefox is the step that my iphone needs to be
| barely usable
| lynx23 wrote:
| Oh yeah, bye bye Accessibility! Firefox has become mostly
| unusable under Windows if you are using a screen reader, in the
| past 2 years. And Android took almost a decade to catch up to
| what Apple did with iOS. So I am guessing, this new browser will
| need at least 5 years to be looked at by blind users :-)
| beltsazar wrote:
| That's unfortunate, but you don't have to use Firefox. I don't
| understand why some people think more options are bad. You can
| still use Safari or Chrome.
| blub wrote:
| Chrome is spyware under a different name and they won the
| desktop market by sabotaging Firefox and taking advantage of
| their search monopoly by blatantly advertising their browser.
| Most developers focus on the technical features and miss what
| giving such a bad actor a chance to monopolize another device
| category means.
|
| Firefox is barely alive because of mismanagement and Google's
| dirty tactics. If one could give access to Firefox while
| blocking Chrome that would be ideal.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| Chrome won because the alternative at that time was
| Internet Explorer. And it's an excellent thing that it has
| won.
|
| There are plenty of Chrome based alternatives that are not
| spyware of you are bothered by that.
| berkes wrote:
| That's blatantly untrue.
|
| _Firefox_ won from IE. it successfully broke the IE
| monopoly and gained significant market share. Then, years
| later, chrome entered the stage and conquered both.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| I don't know in which world you live, but in the world I
| live common people (that is, non computer nerds) all had
| Windows and all used Internet Explorer. A few had Firefox
| or Opera or MacOS, but they were a little minority.
|
| Then came Chrome.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| It definitely varied a great deal depending on where you
| were. There were entire countries with Firefox at 70-80%
| before Chrome got pushed, though.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| there's a cool animation here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4wWdmfOibY
|
| Yes, Firefox usage peaked at about 20%: surely not
| negligible (didn't know anybody myself using it !). As
| for geographical distribution, I could only find this:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-
| share#monthly-2009... The data goes back up to 2009,
| which was quite a peak period for FF...
|
| Sure FF has played an important role in the browsers war,
| but it hardly broke the monopoly, or at least it did not
| do it alone (Safari and Opera started to gain a
| significative share at the same time).
| jeroen wrote:
| IE usage shrank from 90% to around 60% before Chrome even
| existed.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Brows
| er_...
| josephcsible wrote:
| > If one could give access to Firefox while blocking Chrome
| that would be ideal.
|
| But then you've stooped to their level.
| blub wrote:
| That may seem wrong only because you're thinking about
| things very literally. In reality it would blocking a
| known monopolist with a track record of bad behavior from
| monopolizing another market and allowing everyone else
| including Firefox to take part.
| ChickenNugger wrote:
| This is one thing that the big dogs, Microsoft, and Apple have
| been good at since the early '90s. For all their faults, they
| take accessibility seriously.
|
| I know a blind guy who uses iPhones _exclusively_. How he
| manages to understand speech that fast is beyond me, but
| dedicating resources to accessibility when it 's such a tiny
| market share is nice of them. But now that I think about it,
| are they being mandated under ADA? I honestly don't know.
| lynx23 wrote:
| No, they are not being mandated. It basically boils down to
| Jobs declaring that accessibility is an exceiption to ROI.
| IOW, realising its a kind of social responsibility. Besides,
| Microsoft took a long time to provide something by default,
| they let other third parties sell screen readers for big
| money to poor people. Apple always did both built-in, the API
| _and_ the screen reader (frontend). Microsoft created
| Narrator, their own front-end, just a few years ago.
| ChickenNugger wrote:
| My memories of Windows' screen reader telling me "MY
| ROFLCOPTER GOES SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI" when I was a teen may
| have exaggerated Microsoft's efforts.
|
| But at least it was there.
| int_19h wrote:
| There is still a lot of work for the OS to do to enable
| those third-party tools. Stuff like this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Active_Accessibilit
| y
|
| It may well be that Apple is special, but in general, large
| software companies are motivated to care about
| accessibility primarily by the prospect of lucrative
| government contracts, for which there are usually mandated
| (by law) accessibility requirements. The problem for
| smaller companies is that accessibility doesn't scale down
| well - you need a lot of upfront investment (education,
| processes, testing etc) to get anywhere at all at first,
| but then all that remains useful for many more projects to
| come.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| And there's still a lot of work for the third-party tools
| to do, too.
|
| https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/5186#issuecomment
| -20...
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381888
|
| https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/pull/9933
|
| I read somewhere that screen readers look for a flashing
| vertical line, to detect the caret position in systems
| that don't expose it via the OS's APIs. I can't find a
| reference for that right now, though.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I tried to Google what Jobs said about accessibility... I
| only found what Tim Cook had to say:
|
| "When we work on making our devices accessible by the
| blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI (...) The company
| does a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We
| want to leave the world better than we found it."
| rappr wrote:
| Because it was Tim Cook that made accessibility a
| priority, not Steve Jobs.
| lynx23 wrote:
| Cook is just walking the road which has been paved by
| Jobs...
| smoldesu wrote:
| If only Jobs had the foresight to put other social
| responsibilities before ROI...
| matwood wrote:
| > is an exceiption to ROI
|
| I'd argue that accessibility helps everyone, and is thus a
| positive to ROI. You know those low contrast
| text/background sites everyone here complains about? Yep,
| those are not accessible, and probably end up with less
| readers as a result.
| trymas wrote:
| > Oh yeah, bye bye Accessibility! Firefox has become mostly
| unusable under Windows
|
| Same on macos. Cannot use Firefox, because it does not work
| with Macpass.app [0] autotype - to my understanding because
| Firefox does not support (some) macos accessibility
| settings/features. For me the UX with Firefox is just the worst
| compared to competition. It's noticeably slower, uses much more
| CPU - thus makes the laptop hot, fans constantly kick in and
| drains battery. A lot of (all of it?) non-native GUI components
| makes the experience not good.
|
| Arguably this could be old information, because my gripes are
| from many years ago, though I try it every year or so - but the
| situation is still way behind everyone else.
|
| I support the Firefox's message, even donated to them couple of
| times, even though don't use their product, but at least on
| macos - experience is too bad for me to use it.
|
| [0] https://macpassapp.org/
| gostsamo wrote:
| I'm writing this comment with a screen reader on firefox. Not
| sure what your issues are, but the accessibility has been
| rather stable for me after they fixed the quantum disaster.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| I look forward to seeing if any of the dire predictions from
| Apple fanboys who once vehemently opposed this sort of thing will
| come true. Will confused proverbial grandmothers get tricked into
| using firefox and then pwned by scammers? Will everybody abandon
| Safari and give Google a total browser monopoly?
|
| Guess we'll find out!
| crazygringo wrote:
| That is a total strawman, and please don't use the perjorative
| term "fanboys".
|
| Not many Apple fans have ever defended Apple's exclusivity on
| the browser engine. It's long been an annoyance, honestly.
|
| But it also has never had anything to do with scamming
| grandmothers. That's always been an argument for not allowing
| arbitrary untrusted app downloads and/or 3rd party app stores.
| Nothing to do with browser engines, where Apple's (weak)
| argument has always been about the risk of unknown browser
| vulnerabilities allowing malicious code to escape the app
| sandbox.
|
| And if iOS browser share winds up mirroring macOS browser
| share, then it'll go to about 2/3 Chrome.
| snailmailman wrote:
| My "confused proverbial grandmother" has already been tricked
| away from using safari. She does all of her web browsing
| through the Google app.
|
| Not the Google Chrome app. The Google app. :facepalm:
|
| I've tried to explain why this isn't necessary but as far as
| she knows, google is the internet. And I cannot say anything to
| convince her otherwise. After all, every search in safari will
| re-advertise to her "hey you should be doing this in the google
| app" and she will click the button without even thinking.
| echelon wrote:
| I'd like to take a moment to appreciate how we're afraid of
| which search interface Grandma uses.
|
| A hundred years ago, we'd be worried about getting knifed by
| strangers, bear maulings, starving to death, being homeless,
| eating food laced with botulism and lead, influenza,
| tuberculosis, diphtheria ...
|
| Things are pretty good.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| To be fair, I think the origin of the worry may be that the
| elderly and less technically inclined are prone to being
| taken advantage of (rightly or wrongly). You're very
| correct that things are better than ever, as it were, but
| vulnerability seems to have endured in some ways.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Just like mine, who also accesses her photos by unlocking her
| phone, going to the camera app, and then to her photo roll.
| She never goes to the Photos app directly.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| My wife seems to only use the Google app as well. The G app
| has a confusing multiple back button design. The normal
| safari back button takes you back to Google homepage and the
| other back button iPad the bottom in your history. Whenever
| she shows me something in the Google App I always pick the
| wrong one.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I don't make the connection between "Apple fanboys" and
| preventing a Chrome monopoly. Surely one's opposition to a
| monopoly is independent of one's choice of operating system.
|
| But yes, most likely this will result in a Chrome monopoly.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| It's just a strange notion that we will fight google monopoly
| by _forcing_ people to use Safari.
| vehemenz wrote:
| It would be strange to force Apple to allow its competitors
| to establish footholds on their own platform, against their
| will, only for a Chrome monopoly to emerge months later. A
| web monoculture will be harder to undo than enacting
| smarter antitrust legislation.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > to establish footholds on their own platform, against
| their will
|
| Well that's because the phones don't belong to Apple.
|
| Instead, once a consumer purchases it, the phones belong
| to the user, who should be allowed to do what they want
| with their own property.
| [deleted]
| mrtksn wrote:
| > Will everybody abandon Safari and give Google a total browser
| monopoly
|
| This one is scary. People who don't know history like to think
| that IE was a backward browser and MS forced it upon people but
| what actually happened is that IE was very innovative until
| Microsoft diverged from the standards and lock people into it.
| When the ecosystem(websites) integrates enough that your
| platform(the browser) is the only way to run all that(through
| Google services for Chrome?), they stop innovating and start
| monetising.
|
| "Works with Chrome" is the new IE, not Safari.
| nicoburns wrote:
| The difference being that Chrome is open source (ok fine,
| Chrome is closed source but the important parts like the
| rendering engine are open source as Chromium). So they can't
| lock anyone into anything. If they try that they'll just get
| forked. Indeed we _already_ have Edge as a well-maintained
| fork.
|
| Which isn't to say that Safari and especially Firefox aren't
| important drivers of competition. But the situation is
| nothing like the situation with IE.
| ssss11 wrote:
| There is lock in it's just more subtle than the IE
| situation. Have you seen the chromium codebase?
|
| It may be open source but no individuals or small teams
| would be able to manage a competing product, you'd need
| huge investment to compete. There's a barrier to entry all
| the same.
|
| Plus keeping up with the constant updates while trying to
| build a competitor...
| shkkmo wrote:
| This point doesn't make any sense.
|
| The standards and functionality that are required in a
| modern browser are already far beyond what "an individual
| or small team" could build from scratch.
|
| The existence of Chromium absolutely makes it much, much
| more feasible to launch a Chrome competitor than if
| Chrome was entirely closed source.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Anything forked from Chromium can't be significantly
| different from Chromium, because any change of that
| nature increases divergence from Chromium and makes it
| more difficult to keep pace with the firehose of changes
| being pumped out daily by Google's massive Chrome/Blink
| team. It means that forks can never be anything but
| mostly-cosmetic reskins unless the party forking sinks
| resources equally large as Google's into the fork, which
| gives Google power to shape the web as they please
| unopposed.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| > unless the party forking sinks resources equally large
| as Google's into the fork, which gives Google power to
| shape the web as they please unopposed.
|
| I imagine even this already very unlikely outcome would
| also depend on said fork having a big slice of market
| share before they even try to drift away from Chromium,
| otherwise it won't have any effect and will likely die
| exactly because of said differences.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| That's true. No matter the situation, the fact that
| Chromium/Blink is open source changes little due to the
| sheer amount of power Google wields.
| shkkmo wrote:
| There are several chromium forks that do more than just
| "cosmetically reskin" the browser and they definitely
| don't have teams as big as Google's.
|
| Additionally, nothing forces a company/group to merge
| that "firehose of changes". If google ever oversteps
| sufficiently, there is always the possibility that
| companies that are maintaining forks will stop
| integrating those changes.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > There are several chromium forks that do more than just
| "cosmetically reskin" the browser and they definitely
| don't have teams as big as Google's.
|
| Very few of the changes in even the most diverged of
| Chromium forks change anything significant about Blink,
| which is really what matters. The bulk of differences are
| tied up in the bits wrapping the engine.
|
| If forks don't keep up with Google's changes they're
| putting their users at risk of getting hit by 0days and
| other vulnerabilities.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Very few of the changes in even the most diverged of
| Chromium forks change anything significant about Blink,
| which is really what matters. The bulk of differences are
| tied up in the bits wrapping the engine.
|
| That's because they don't need to because there's nothing
| wrong with chromium. In the hypothetical situation where
| Google goes rogue and messes with chrome to the point
| that forking is required, this would be done differently.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Google going rogue isn't the only concern. It's also that
| in a Chromium-dominated world, there is no room for other
| parties' voices in shaping the web. Google gets what
| Google wants, regardless of whatever protests Mozilla,
| Apple, Microsoft, or any other organization might have.
| esperent wrote:
| Right, but it doesn't need Google or Microsoft scale to
| compete.
|
| Firefox is a clear example that a smaller organization
| can manage the complexity of a modern browser.
|
| There's plenty of other examples too - like linux - which
| show hugely complex open source projects are possible.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Firefox is great, but it's barely hanging on at ~4%
| marketshare. That might skewed by Firefox users having
| tracking mitigations set up, but the result is the same
| regardless: devs and the suits above them calling the
| shots will see the tiny usership and ask why they're
| spending _anything_ on supporting it. It's barely
| competing at all.
| taftster wrote:
| Yes, but in the case of both Mozilla and Linux, they had
| a huge running start and have developed their moats (for
| what they are) over a long period of time.
|
| A new organization coming in fresh and thinking, "hey I
| know what, let's fork Chromium", does not seem like a
| very long lived effort. I also don't see any new
| operating systems coming out from an unknown team anytime
| soon.
|
| The open source projects you use as examples are
| entrenched, and it's going to take a major shakeup and/or
| cracks in the large organizations for something new in
| the browser or operating system space to emerge.
| sbuk wrote:
| Chrome uses the blink engine, which is a fork of Webkit,
| which is open source.
| kimixa wrote:
| Which in turn was a fork of khtml
| babypuncher wrote:
| I always knew Konquerer would eventually take over the
| browser market.
| sbuk wrote:
| I don't see what relevance this has to the discussion.
| dcow wrote:
| You don't see how adding another parent node to browser
| engine code lineage is relevant in a subthread about
| browser engine code lineage?
| sbuk wrote:
| I'm the OP. I'm questioning the relevance, which is in
| response to the assertion that _" The difference being
| that Chrome is open source (ok fine, Chrome is closed
| source but the important parts like the rendering engine
| are open source as Chromium)"_. _My_ aim is to point out
| that WebKit is also open source, and that the engine
| being touted by the GP is actually a fork of Webkit. Its
| provenance in this case irrelevant.
| kimixa wrote:
| Just pointing out there's a whole family of HTML engines,
| and Webkit wasn't the origin. It's also likely that it's
| the reason why Webkit is GPL, and we're able to have this
| discussion.
|
| In my experience, Apple haven't exactly been very open-
| source friendly - I know working with them there's a
| rejection of any GPL dependencies, even if well separated
| and unmodified, or even just tools used in the build
| process if they're GPL3+.
|
| I don't doubt if Apple developed a html engine from
| scratch it would use a different license, and the entire
| landscape of browsers would look very different today.
| MayeulC wrote:
| About as relevant as the parent... Not very relevant, but
| since the parent gives a short overview of browser engine
| history, we might as well point out that it started with
| the then-excellent khtml from the KDE project, that
| powers konqueror. That's little known, and a very
| interesting history tidbit.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| Up until forking, Google was the largest contributor to
| Webkit. Google made Blink open source as well.
| scarface74 wrote:
| WebKit is just as open source as Blink.
| [deleted]
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Have you ever seen a serious "fork war"? Open Source may be
| possible to fork, but that isn't a guarantee that
| everything will be hunky dory after a hard fork. The drama
| and chaos of "we need a trustworthy fork" after a bad actor
| does something unsociable can be awful (especially if that
| bad actor remains in play). Security/safety/IP audits of
| past code pre-fork after a major fork has become necessary
| isn't free or cheap and takes resources. Drama can draw
| weird boundaries between project attempts and create a lot
| of internecine fighting among the "survivors" of the
| "upstream crash". There's so much sociopolitics that may be
| involved. Open source projects still involve a lot of
| people, at the end of the day, not just code. Open source
| applications _have_ died in a fork war.
|
| The situation is different from IE, but there's still a lot
| of similarities and open source isn't necessarily the balm
| it appears to be. They code may still "be there", but code
| still needs people to believe in it/trust it/work on it.
| cptskippy wrote:
| > But the situation is nothing like the situation with IE.
|
| Google isn't trying to kill the web and grow desktop App
| development, so yes it's different. And also people weren't
| complaining about Internet Explorer while it was innovative
| and competing against Netscape Navigator with annual
| releases. It was after 5 years of stagnation, not
| supporting new W3C standards, and unfixed bugs.
|
| Google learned from Microsoft's mistakes. They participated
| in standards, they update often, and resolve bugs quickly.
| Everything Microsoft didn't do.
|
| They also implement new features outside of standards but
| just as temporary experiments mind you. If developers
| happen to adopt them and implement them on their sites,
| well Google's hands are tied and y'all might as well make
| them standards (e.g. SPDY, QUIC).
|
| Or, because the control the standards process they can
| propose a change to a private list, push it to WHATWG and
| get representatives from Apple and Firefox to pull it into
| the "living" standard without any public discourse or
| feedback (e.g. removing alert();).
|
| This isn't to say everything they're doing is bad, but that
| doesn't mean they aren't working in their own self
| interest.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Of course they can, it's about the marketshare and not the
| code. They can make some part of the browser running in
| their cloud services and no matter how much you look into
| the Chromium code the websites which support this will run
| in Chrome only.
|
| Why would websites support this? Well, it can provide good
| rankings in search or some other goodie like speeding up
| the loading times through Google CDN or something and works
| for %90 of the people(because they use Chrome). Once enough
| websites integrate this, it's over.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > If they try that they'll just get forked.
|
| "just"
|
| Will they also "just" fork search monopoly, and web's most
| visited properties like youtube?
|
| > Indeed we already have Edge as a well-maintained fork.
|
| Indeed we have a Chrome re-skin with very few differences
| because even Microsoft couldn't maintain a browser.
| warning26 wrote:
| Sure, but forcing people to use Safari against their will
| isn't the right way to approach that problem.
|
| If Google is indeed leveraging their market position in an
| anticompetitive way to push Chrome, then they should be
| stopped from doing _that_.
| mrtksn wrote:
| They surely can get a few billions of a fine in 10 years.
| benced wrote:
| Allowing a dominant OS to foist a bad browser on all of us is
| not a good way to prevent a dominant internet search company
| from potentially foisting a bad browser on all of us.
| dcow wrote:
| Safari is just as bad about not following standards though. I
| could sympathize a lot more if your argument was between
| Firefox and Chrome/Safari. In my mind Chrome/Safari are the
| hegemony.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I agree that Safari should do better but Embrace, Extend
| then Exterminate is a real thing and lacking functions is
| not the same as having alternative "standards".
|
| "You need to download Chrome" is the scariest thing these
| days, especially if you see it in Firefox.
| klodolph wrote:
| I don't know why you think that, it certainly sounds wrong
| to me. Like, not just wrong in a technical sense, but like,
| crazy wrong.
|
| Did you live through the IE5 and IE6 days? Does the term
| "quirks mode" mean anything to you? Do you remember how Mac
| IE was completely different from Windows IE? Internet
| Explorer, back in the early 2000s, was a serious support
| burden for anyone doing web development at the time. Around
| 2010, Google dropped support for IE6 (in apps like GMail +
| Youtube) and a ton of other sites followed suit. It made a
| big splash across all the news sites and all the web
| developers breathed a sigh of relief, because they could
| say "we're dropping IE6 support because Google did."
|
| Meanwhile, there was a parallel world of IE-only sites.
| Some of them were built on future widespread web
| technologies like DHTML, others were built on stuff like
| ActiveX. ActiveX ended up in the trash bin (where it
| belongs) and DHTML became normalized. It was... common, and
| annoying, to deal with corporate sites that only worked in
| IE, and then build your own site and fight to get it
| working in IE. It was not a fun time to be a web developer.
|
| Maybe 6 or 7 years ago, I remember that Safari was missing
| some of the newer features that Chrome or Firefox had, but
| when I investigated, it usually turned out that I was using
| some future/experimental feature in Chrome or Firefox, and
| it wasn't a problem with the standards-compliance of Safari
| per se. Or sometimes I was relying on behavior that was not
| part of the standard at all). Nowadays, my sense is that
| Chrome tends to have more experimental stuff available and
| a better set of dev tools, but otherwise, most stuff works
| in Safari or Firefox with little to no modification.
| dcow wrote:
| Things work but all too often the page renders
| differently. On top of that Safari only supports the part
| of web standards Apple agrees with. It may look like
| Safari supports something and then you get into it and
| they support like 10% of the standard, or the full
| standard but only on Tuesdays. It is rather annoying.
| bityard wrote:
| > what actually happened is that IE was very innovative
|
| We remember things very differently, then.
|
| IE was hardly innovative, unless you count things like the
| <blink> and <marquee> tags, and the ActiveX which their
| blatant attempt to tie the web to Windows.
|
| The other thing IE was known for was missing, incomplete, or
| out-right broken support for extremely basic HTML, CSS, and
| Javascript functionality that other browsers had no issues
| with. Leaving web developers to scatter their code/markup
| with IE-specific workarounds. Compounding this problem was
| lack of regular releases and updates. Except for security
| fixes, Microsoft considered IE to be part of the OS and
| refused to issue updates for it between OS releases, for the
| most part, which is why IE stuck around so long.
|
| Nobody _wanted_ IE. It was just there as part of the OS at
| the same point in history that Internet access became a
| mainstream thing.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| They created AJAX so they could do office email client in
| the browser. That was pretty game changer for web.
| tempestn wrote:
| You're just talking about different time periods. IE was
| innovative back when it supplanted Netscape. Then it
| stagnated.
| sbuk wrote:
| You used AJAX-based websites, right? _That_ was first
| available in IE. Initially, IE unto version 6 was
| _extremely_ innovative. Then Microsoft won, and they
| stopped trying.
| mrtksn wrote:
| No, the innovation was things like XMLHttpRequest which
| allowed for the early "single pages web apps"
| nicoburns wrote:
| Yes, and contenteditable which allowed for rich text
| editing.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Also `box-sizing: border-box` was how IE designed CSS box
| sizing (to be simpler to math for the CSS writer rather
| than simpler math for the Renderer programmer). The fact
| that it is now just about "required" boilerplate in most
| CSS reset/normalization steps to throw in a `* { box-
| sizing: border-box; }` rule to opt in to "do it the IE
| way" is a massive, vestigial, lasting testament to IE's
| innovation in CSS in the early CSS standards.
| nashashmi wrote:
| They innovated on the side of the user. Not the rendering
| engine. I loved the IE interface.
|
| But if one window crashed, the whole IE crashed. Then
| Firefox tabbed browsing took over hungry for system
| resource. But at least it didn't crash, right?
|
| I remember IE research pane. Innovation in the browser
| became from a toolbar thing. Remember google toolbar? It
| was the number one bar in many countries.
|
| But then Firefox extensions took over hungry for system
| resource, but not like Chrome hungry.
|
| IE had addons. Some of them slowed the browser. And it had
| plug-ins.
|
| It had everything independent innovation needed to thrive.
| It just didn't have any vision for the "open web". No one
| understood what that was then anyways.
|
| And where ie could not innovate on the web, they used
| active X plug-ins. This was the Microsoft way. You can't
| blame them for being themselves.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Agreed that IE did innovate at its time.
|
| "It had everything independent innovation needed to
| thrive. It just didn't have any vision for the "open
| web"."
|
| But it didn't had an open source core and was windows
| only. The vision was microsoft only (forever).
|
| "This was the Microsoft way. You can't blame them for
| being themselves. "
|
| So the argument is, "yeah, Microsoft is a big monopolist
| who do everything they can, to lock people on their
| system, you cannot blame them for it, this is just the
| way they are"?
|
| Either way, in this case luckily their monopol strategy
| failed and IE died because of it.
| nashashmi wrote:
| > But it didn't had an open source core and was windows
| only. The vision was microsoft only (forever).
|
| Right. I never would have understood the love for open
| source if Microsoft hadnt left so much thirst for deeper
| complex innovation in my mouth.
| berkut wrote:
| IE 4 and 5 were innovative (IMO as someone who used both at
| the time - 1998-2000 - and actively converted family
| members to IE) compared to Netscape: it had a cache which
| worked consistently (important in 28.8 modem times) -
| Netscape would ignore the cache in some situations, i.e.
| resize the browser window and it would re-download images,
| even though it had them in its cache, and also IE had
| things like smooth scrolling which helped make things
| "nicer" to scroll and feel better from a UI perspective,
| and things like "make favourites available offline"
| feature, where it would download a bunch of full pages
| (whilst you were dialed up), and you could browse them
| after you disconnected.
|
| After IE 6, things when downhill fast with the stagnation,
| but before that point, IE was a good browser.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The biggest issue with IE is it was HEAVILY integrated
| into windows. That in turn made it really slow to move.
| To get IE 6, you needed windows 2000, to get IE 7/8, you
| needed XP, to get 9+ you needed Vista.
|
| That particularly became a problem because the time gap
| between XP and Vista was huge (and a lot of people
| skipped it and went to 7/8/10). In the meantime firefox
| and chrome came up and started innovating rapidly. Chrome
| started it with the evergreen model and FF quickly
| adopted that model.
| anthk wrote:
| IE6 worked in w98 too.
| summerlight wrote:
| Two different contexts here: Google still has a major
| dependency on the web so we cannot pull its money out of the
| platform that easily. Also, everyone nowadays understands how
| important platform control is and MS made a significant
| mistake before. If Google abandons the web then some other
| random corp will pick it up. Why would Google allow that? A
| market monopoly is not something passive which can be
| retained that easily.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Chrome got popular because IE grew to be terrible and Firefox
| became bloated and slow over time. Opera was a decent
| alternative but their alternative renderer couldn't keep up.
|
| If Apple keeps their browser compatible, I doubt they have
| much to fear. Linking users to the app store because your
| site doesn't work is a great way to drive them away from your
| website, I doubt there will be much push for installing
| Chrome.
|
| Currently, Chrome for iOS has a slither of the market share
| that Safari has. Most people don't even know you can install
| another browser at all. Unless Apple makes/keeps their
| browser uncompetitive, they won't lose a serious amount of
| market share.
| timeon wrote:
| Firefox did not became bloated. It was plugin based. Chrome
| came with new concept (tab=process) and marketing. That is
| it.
| mrtksn wrote:
| > and marketing.
|
| If I recall correctly, Google was paying 1$ per install,
| so everyone was promoting Chrome and Chrome was actually
| better than Firefox.
|
| Firefox then made a lot of missteps, tried to make a push
| open video and audio codecs for idealistic reasons and
| lost. They also failed to catch on Chrome's performance
| for quite a long time. They spent a lot of resources into
| experiments that went nowhere.
| luckylion wrote:
| Don't forget that batteries will drain immediately, another
| often-stated argument for why Safari needs to be the only
| available browser.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| The difference in battery usage is very noticeable on macOS.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I use Brave and don't notice a difference at all. Is it
| only supposed to be happening on Chrome/Firefox, or any
| non-Safari browser?
| acdha wrote:
| It's a Chrome problem with Firefox somewhere in the
| middle. It's like 4 hours battery life difference on an
| M1, too, and since I use a hosts file for ad blocking I
| don't think it's just that.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| I use Firefox and it's fine on the battery.
|
| I have used Arc browser for a bit. It's Chromium-based.
| It didn't seem to have a bad effect on the battery.
|
| I haven't used Chrome in a few years now, but it used to
| be a major CPU, memory and battery hog. I don't know how
| it fares these days.
| Spivak wrote:
| I don't know if that's a good reason but it's definitely a
| true reason. Chrome on Android devours power.
|
| The thing people are worried about is being forced to use
| Chrome and Chrome being a worse experience than Safari. If
| web developers en masse say "oh thank god finally we can drop
| support for Safari" then we're in a worse situation for
| everyone involved. We've done nothing but trade a lack of
| choice for a different lack of choice and ensured that the
| already dim situation for web apps being ported to non-Chrome
| browsers will get even worse.
| luckylion wrote:
| Would Safari on Android (and with the same features) eat
| less battery though?
|
| I agree in general regarding it being better if multiple
| engines are available. On the other hand, when I build
| something, and I'm developing it on Firefox, it usually
| just works on chromium-based Browsers. Safari tends to be
| the odd one out that has some weird behavior, although it's
| much less common and much less bad than it was in the IE
| days.
|
| Also: not having to buy a Mac every few years just so I can
| test things in Safari sounds sweet, too.
|
| Web developers wouldn't drop support for Safari as long as
| a significant amount of users use it (and especially not if
| those users are premium users, which they tend to be:
| higher disposable income, better trained to pay for things
| etc), so I don't think that's an actual risk. At least for
| anything I'm involved with: we'll drop Firefox before we
| drop Safari, and we pretty much keep Firefox only because
| some developers and some PMs are using it.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > Would Safari on Android (and with the same features)
| eat less battery though?
|
| Yes, probably. WebKit browsers on other platforms like
| GNOME Web/Epiphany on Linux is easier on battery than
| Chrome or Firefox. WebKit is generally speaking more
| efficient than Blink and Gecko.
| someNameIG wrote:
| On macOS where you can get the full Chrome experience Safari is
| still dominant with 60+% marketshare. I presume it will be the
| same for iOS.
| jiripospisil wrote:
| Source?
| crazygringo wrote:
| That's incorrect.
|
| On macOS, Chrome is dominant by far, with 66.22% as of
| January 2023.
|
| Safari is 2nd place with 27.72%.
|
| https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-
| share.aspx?options...
| acdha wrote:
| That site's methodology skews towards people who hit their
| monitoring service's customers' sites. That doesn't mean
| it's wrong but just limited to a certain corporate vantage
| point -- every time I've compared it to server traffic it
| dramatically understated Firefox and, to a lesser extent,
| Safari. This got worse after tracking protection and ad
| blockers became more widespread.
|
| Currently I'm seeing Safari and Chrome at roughly 50:50 and
| 60:40 for visitors across some large public sites. That's
| the reverse of what NetMarketShare has, but agains I don't
| think that's malice or error as much as different
| perspective.
| mr_toad wrote:
| That's higher than Chrome's market share on mobile
| according to that site. Seems dubious.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Yes I think so. I predict that Apple will stop neglecting
| Safari now that they're forced to compete, and also that most
| users will stick with the default anyway.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Yes because of the great choice of browsers on Android,
| companies of all sizes are eschewing native apps and
| telling Android users just to use their website. On the
| other hand they are being forced to create apps for iOS.
|
| Oh wait. That's not happening at all.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| On Google's android, everybody uses Google's browser. On
| Apple's iOS, most everybody will use Apple's browser.
| alexklarjr wrote:
| The thing I was never understand how can one use chrome
| on android when its not allowing ads blocking? Zillions
| of notifications and pop ups, fraud ads that have more
| space than information you want to read. Trackers that
| slow down your pages and destroying battery by sending
| every move to google several times a second. Constant
| redirects to google store, constant attempts to subscribe
| you to mobile provider premium services. Android users
| living in spyware hell.
| dmitriid wrote:
| That's why Google's apps ask you in which browser to open
| links, with Chrome being the first, and default, choice.
| And conveniently "forgetting" the user choice.
|
| Don't forget about Google search which will push Chrome
| every chance it has. And Youtube.
| vetinari wrote:
| As someone who has used Firefox on Android as the default
| browser for years, one thing that I must say is that
| Android never conveniently forgot my choice.
|
| Which cannot be said about Windows.
| dmitriid wrote:
| I'm not talking about the OS. Google's _apps_
| conveniently forget the choice on iOS. Less aggressively
| in the past few months (probably caught by Apple), but
| still.
| vetinari wrote:
| Oh, I didn't know that on iOS the apps is responsible for
| picking another app to open an resource.
|
| In Android, the app just throws an intent to open
| something, the OS opens the list of app capable of
| handling it, the user picks the wanted one (either 'only
| this time' or 'use this as default next time'). The OS,
| not the app, then remembers the choice.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Oh, I didn't know that on iOS the apps is responsible
| for picking another app to open an resource.
|
| I don't think they are responsible, but you can invoke a
| specific app if you need. Google's apps keep showing this
| sheet with "browser choice" quite often, conveniently
| forgetting that the user keeps setting "don't ask me
| again".
|
| The choices are: Chrome, Google, Safari, Default system
| browser.
| scarface74 wrote:
| What does that have to do with the narrative that PWAs
| are a great alternative on Android yet no company seems
| to take advantage of the fact and they still all create
| an iOS, Android and web app?
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed. Don't overestimate the power ofr 15+ years of
| conditioning. People aren't suddenly going to switch for no
| reason.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not post in the flamewar style? It's not what
| this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Finally. Can't wait to use my favorite extension UBO.
| zefei wrote:
| Some comments seem to be optimistic about the potential change
| from Apple. But once Apple relax webkit requirement from app
| store, it will mean all "do not track" cookie enforcement would
| be easily worked around.
| raro11 wrote:
| What do you mean?
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| How would Apple enforce "do not track" for non-webkit
| implementations?
|
| Chrome and Firefox might certainly implement it into their
| browsers, but can we expect Facebook, for instance, to do it
| in their in-app browsers?
| raro11 wrote:
| Did not think about in-app browsers. Good point
| smoldesu wrote:
| The default can still be Safari, not "all" enforcement will be
| worked around. We simply can't trust Apple to do the right
| thing without supervision, though. As we've seen with the App
| Store, Apple uses these positions of de-facto authority to
| disempower the user and reinforce their own profit margins. We
| let them fly by the seat of their pants for too long,
| regulation is long overdue for this business (and app
| distribution sector as a whole).
|
| If you want to opt-in to Apple's protective blanket, do so.
| It's not an excuse to weld over the safety hatch for the rest
| of us.
| zefei wrote:
| The default _browser_ will mostly be Safari. But the moment
| webkit requirement is relaxed, all in-app browsers for
| Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, etc will be replaced
| with their own forks without any respect for "do not track".
| They will become the second most used browsers on iPhone, not
| Firefox or Chrome.
| [deleted]
| smoldesu wrote:
| Seeing how this didn't really happen on Android, Windows,
| Linux or MacOS, I don't think there's any evidence to
| support this theory.
| [deleted]
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| I am deeply interested in Orion [0], the browser developed by the
| team behind Kagi search.
|
| It is not widely used, but it's quite impressive. I feel this is
| the time for a better browser for the masses. I am not sure
| Google + Mozilla are the right actors to bring it alive.
|
| [0]: https://browser.kagi.com/
| dotancohen wrote:
| The minute that browser has a Linux build I'm going to try to
| make it my default browser. I have not been this excited for an
| unreleased software package since KSP 2.
| someNameIG wrote:
| What surprises me about this is that they have only started this
| recently. At least with Google I thought they probably had an
| internal build of Chrome for iOS using Blink, even just for
| testing.
| orev wrote:
| I agree. I don't believe for a second that Google hasn't had a
| secret build of Chrome for iOS going since the iPhone came out.
|
| Firefox, I can see them having one in a somewhat working state
| but probably not completely ready without needing some work to
| polish it.
| bgirard wrote:
| A Mozilla engineer had a working toy build in ~2011 and it
| didn't take them a lot of work from what I recall when they
| showed me.
| christkv wrote:
| They already have an android version so I can't imagine it
| will take them long to port it.
| bpye wrote:
| I suspect the macOS version is more useful for that than
| the Android version.
| spandrew wrote:
| Cross browser compatibility is already such a slog. This is going
| to make that much worse. Maybe that's OK given WebKit's firm grip
| on things.
|
| I've been using Arc browser since December and it's... strange?
| But good. Lots of interesting ideas.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > This is going to make that much worse.
|
| Or it could make things better when everyone starts ignoring
| mobile Safari /s
| malermeister wrote:
| Why would that make it worse? It's not like they would use new
| rendering engines, they'd just use the same ones they're
| already using on desktop. You should make sure your site is
| compatible with those engines anyways.
| nicce wrote:
| It depends. Power efficiency on Safari with iOS is quite
| optimized and many features are integrated to iOS. E.g. some
| authentication workflows to Apple services.
| kelnos wrote:
| Why does that matter, though? Web developers don't assume
| the entire world is "Safari on iOS". They have to handle
| all the various desktop browsers, as well as everything
| that runs on Android.
|
| If it's not possible to do a particular Apple-specific
| authentication workflow in Firefox on iOS, then users will
| fall back to whatever else is already implemented for other
| platforms.
|
| If users don't like how Firefox or Chrome on iOS drain
| their battery, then they'll stop using them and go back to
| Safari.
|
| Giving people more choice doesn't hurt.
| nicce wrote:
| > Why does that matter, though? Web developers don't
| assume the entire world is "Safari on iOS". They have to
| handle all the various desktop browsers, as well as
| everything that runs on Android.
|
| My comment might have been in wrong place, but the point
| was that it is difficult to be competitive with Firefox
| or Chrome on iOS if Safari integrates better on Apple
| systems. And what if implementing these impacts other
| platforms.
| aryeshalev wrote:
| Push Notifications PWA
| twism wrote:
| this is the main if not singular reason why apple prevents a
| standards compliant browser in their app store.
| scottlamb wrote:
| > The correlated activity from Google and Mozilla could suggest
| that they're expecting Apple to drop its restrictions on third-
| party browser engines in the near future, or the companies could
| simply be hedging their bets.
|
| Ugh, imagine being an engineer on the project if it's the latter.
| At a company strategy level, it may be wise to put resources into
| having this ready to go. [1] At an individual level, putting tons
| of effort into something like this with less than average hopes
| of launching seems extremely demotivating (and doesn't look so
| hot for "impact" in perf either).
|
| I wonder how much effort it is combine the iOS UI layer and the
| non-iOS blink layer. I'm terrible at estimating effort even for
| my own projects so it's hard to speculate.
|
| [1] A bit less wise to do speculative projects while
| simultaneously laying off 12,000 people with no warning.
| aikinai wrote:
| Google engineers often spend years on less exciting and
| interesting projects that get canceled or don't succeed. Plenty
| of people would enjoy working on this whether or not it
| launches, and it's also a high-profile bet, so I'd say it's in
| the very top tier of desirable projects.
| tgv wrote:
| > Ugh, imagine being an engineer on the project if it's the
| latter.
|
| OTOH, no users means no bugs.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Yeah. This seems like a dream job for mediocre developers who
| are just at google for the paycheck and the creds. And
| considering the layoffs, they don't seem to have a shortage
| of those.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I'd love to work on this, and I certainly hope I'm not
| mediocre :P Porting projects are always fun.
| TillE wrote:
| Agree, sometimes it's fun and relaxing to have really
| clear, well-defined goals to work towards.
| Birkeholm wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| foobiekr wrote:
| At google the problem will be that the product can't be said
| to have impact.
| conradev wrote:
| > I wonder how much effort it is combine the iOS UI layer and
| the non-iOS blink layer.
|
| These browsers all compile and work on macOS. Getting them to
| work on iOS involves lots of fiddly details like forcing the
| browsers into single-process mode, integrating it with their
| existing mobile UI, etc
|
| but core technologies like rendering won't be much different
| [deleted]
| summerlight wrote:
| The actual launch (or landing) probably doesn't really mean
| much for less senior employees as long as they would get enough
| attention from their management. But for those managers and
| above, it might.
| paxys wrote:
| There was an entire massive team engineers at Microsoft that
| worked on iPhone/iPad versions of Office for many years, and
| every time they were ready for release it was blocked by
| Ballmer. Their work finally saw the light of day the moment
| Nadella took over and was instantly a hit.
| voytec wrote:
| If Apple will be forced by law to allow apps from outside
| AppStore, vendors will possibly have less restrictions.
| atonse wrote:
| As much as I hate the App Store and want competition, for the
| sake of all the non tech loved ones in my life, I sincerely
| hope that either doesn't happen, or that it is difficult
| enough to get people to "add" additional stores.
| KingLancelot wrote:
| [dead]
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| Whatever happened to parental control?
| atonse wrote:
| It's for my parents and others.
|
| I just know the idiots like Verizon will start preloading
| their own App Store on the phone and make a mess of
| things with all kinds of garbage.
|
| I'm shocked at the crap that is preloaded onto android
| phones whenever I see one.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| This doesn't seem to be the practice in a European
| country I live in btw, but I've seen it elsewhere (once
| bought a cheap android phone while travelling).
| r00fus wrote:
| I'm not going to setup parental controls for Aunt Marge
| but sure as hell she'll call me when she installs
| spyware/malware and wants my help in fixing the problem.
|
| I know that's the result of multiple app stores if a
| trusted entity can't/won't police them.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Why does it matter whether project is shipped or not? I work
| for money. I don't have income cut from this project. Whether
| it's shipped or not is outside of my interest. All that matters
| is whether it's good enough to ship.
|
| I'd even say that shipped projects usually are less interesting
| because they're filled with mundane but necessary tasks and
| bugs, dragged by compatibility.
| gameshot911 wrote:
| It's good to work for money, but even better if you can work
| on something meaningful, too.
| bendiksolheim wrote:
| Quite the opposite! I would find it highly motivating to work
| on something like this, even if it was just a 5% chance it
| would make it onto actual phones. You certainly need the right
| types of people who are motivated by the right factors, but
| that is not unique for this case.
| netheril96 wrote:
| Working on a project with only 5% chance of launch is almost
| a guarantee that you will be at the front of the queue for
| layoff when the company decides to do layoffs.
| dheera wrote:
| > even if it was just a 5% chance
|
| It would be more motivating for me if in the 95% event that
| Apple rejects it from the app store, a PR disaster can be
| launched against Apple for it, and instructions are published
| to install it on a jailbroken phone.
| hpen wrote:
| Do you think this would work considering for all of the
| iPhone only WebKit has been allowed?
| United857 wrote:
| Don't even need to jailbreak, nowadays you can
| build/sideload using a free iOS developer account,
| especially if the projects in question are open source.
| noirscape wrote:
| ...which only works for a few days until you need to
| build/sideload again on a free account. (Or a full year
| if you have a 100$ a year paid dev account).
|
| Sideloading isn't a solution because Apple artificially
| crippled it to make it only useful for demoing and
| testing apps, not as a secondary install method.
| saagarjha wrote:
| You'd need a jailbreak to get the ability to JIT
| properly.
| rcme wrote:
| What's the latest iOS version that can be jail broken? With
| all of the exploits on iOS, I'd be pretty nervous running
| an old iOS version.
| jedberg wrote:
| Isn't it a requirement that the iOS be exploitable so
| that it can be jailbroken?
|
| Is your hope that the exploit for the jailbreak is the
| one and only flaw? :)
| rcme wrote:
| True. I guess my point was that, given the insane number
| of zero-click iMessage exploits there have been, you'd
| have to really not care about any of your data to use a
| jail broken phone.
| bawolff wrote:
| Why though?
|
| I mean, i could understand if you were working on some sort
| of research prototype that might fail, or otherwise something
| new and unique, but just porting an existing browser engine
| hardly seems to be instrinsically exciting in and of itself,
| so what would the motivation be?
| capableweb wrote:
| I've worked on these sort of "5%" / "just in case" projects
| before and mainly accepted them because they were deeply
| technical, difficult and I was sure I was gonna learn a lot
| from them, no matter if we got the go ahead to ship them or
| not. Sometimes I was the only one in the company who wanted
| to work on it, while other times it was something everyone
| wanted to jump on, I guess the conclusion is that different
| people find different things interesting. Some people like
| porting software to different platforms for example :)
| sodality2 wrote:
| Well, lots of people find structural problems with a
| massive code base but have no justification to rewrite/make
| changes to it. A chance to revisit decisions might be
| exciting for someone who feels they could perhaps do a
| better job with it.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > I would find it highly motivating to work on something like
| this, even if it was just a 5% chance it would make it onto
| actual phones.
|
| Have you ever put 6-18 months of your life into a project
| that got canned? If you haven't, I'm not sure you should make
| that kind of statement without having actual experience
| knowing what that's like.
| pmontra wrote:
| It happens. Let's not pretend that everything we do changes
| the world or is even meaningful. It pays our bills and lets
| us do what matters to us.
|
| On a less cynical tone, 6-18 months on a project, then we
| change company, or get fired, or the company shuts down for
| good. Some of my startup customers pivoted or shut down. I
| got paid, not my problem.
|
| Anyway, it's better to work on successful projects. They
| expand the business.
| bendiksolheim wrote:
| I sure have. It requires a specific attitude and mind set.
| If you go through those 18 months hoping this will actually
| see the light of day, there's a big chance you will be
| disappointed. If you rather see this as a technical
| challenge, and your task is to prove that it is possible,
| releasing the final product might not be as big of a
| motivator itself. Of course, you might not always know that
| the chance of success is so low up front. If you don't, I
| would guess it is a lot harder.
|
| Kind of a stretch, but all of my hobby projects are like
| this. I have spent years on a TUI library for Swift,
| without any intention of releasing it. I do it to
| understand how terminals and layout systems work. In this
| case I am more motivated by the knowledge gain and
| experimentation than actually having others use the
| product.
| RangerScience wrote:
| Oh, I have!
|
| It's a balance. I more-or-less learned the first time that
| I needed to be getting more out of it than the "release
| success"; nowadays I'd codify a specific part of that as
| "always carve out the time to improve your skills as part
| of the project."
|
| I'm teaching the computer how to do something, at the same
| time I'm teaching myself how to do it.
|
| That said, when that's _not_ possible - At least one
| project had at least a few weeks (it's been awhile) of
| stupid wrestling with undocumented Xcode CLI internals.
| That was nearly completely wasted time. It sucked then, and
| it (dilutedly) sucks now.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I doubt this would require 6-18 months; this looks like an
| exploratory demo rather than an actual project.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Haha, let me count the ways. This describes nearly an
| entire decade at Microsoft for me. It's not that bad. Some
| of those projects were amazing feats and fun to build. You
| eventually develop an "ok, what are you going to pay me to
| build next" attitude.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| Some people may develop that attitude, but I haven't. I
| care a lot about what I build and I care that it's useful
| to people. I am unable to accept putting in tons of work
| only for something to never see the light of day.
|
| A project I put years of my life into got killed off in a
| merger and it's still the most demoralizing event of my
| career.
| [deleted]
| heleninboodler wrote:
| > I care a lot about what I build
|
| Careful not to imply that other's don't. I'm pretty
| passionate about what I build, but cancellation is a fact
| of life. Doesn't mean it wasn't fun to do the building.
| One of my projects at Microsoft was something that was
| always destined to actually be sold by hardware partners,
| and the hardware partners released devices that were far,
| far too expensive so it flopped and the whole thing was
| canned. But we made an excellent product that won some
| awards, and frankly, knowing we killed it on the software
| side is good enough for me.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Seems like a great grift gig to me. Low pressure, possible
| chance of high reward.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| drewg123 wrote:
| I'm looking forward to running "real" firefox on ios. If only so
| that there is another alternative if a page renders poorly in
| webkit.
| coldpie wrote:
| Real Firefox is the thing I miss most when I switched from
| Android. Browsing the web without NoScript suuuucks.
| dcow wrote:
| I really hope firefox retains support for real web extensions
| through this manifest v3 bs.
| godshatter wrote:
| Mozilla makes $400 million a year from Google, would they
| really cut off this revenue stream if Google told them to
| only support manifest v3 or else?
|
| Mozilla should never have gotten into a situation where 90%
| of their funding comes from their biggest competitor.
| sofixa wrote:
| Google _needs_ Mozilla though - Firefox is the last
| remaining Chromium competitor Google can use as a
| counterargument against claims about their de facto
| monopoly.
| rvz wrote:
| Safari (WebKit) is the one that is the last remaining
| serious competitor against Chromium.
|
| Firefox has already lost years ago and is so useless to
| counter Chrome that they have to be funded by Google in
| order to survive. Mozilla's competitiveness for Firefox
| is close to zero.
|
| The EU Digital Markets Act will just further solidify
| Chrome's dominance.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| Even if the DMA somehow results in Blink engine
| dominance, at least the engine is open, so alternative
| freedom and privacy-respecting browsers can build on it
| and patch out any evil features while mostly maintaining
| compatibility. Not a great outcome, but it'd be worth it
| to stamp out closed computer operating systems that don't
| let their users control what software they install. The
| current state of iOS and iPad OS is completely
| unacceptable.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Safari (WebKit) is the one that is the last remaining
| serious competitor against Chromium.
|
| Safari isn't available on platforms other than Apple's
| (which have a minority share of computing devices on the
| market), so it's obviously not an actual competitor to
| Chromium based browsers.
| howinteresting wrote:
| If Chrome were a separate business entity, it would also
| have to be funded by Google to survive. Browsers simply
| cannot make money.
| est31 wrote:
| That's Safari. It has way more users, and website
| creators actually care about providing Safari support
| because they want it to work on the non-technical boss's
| iPhone.
| zargon wrote:
| There's no Safari on Android.
| est31 wrote:
| There's no significant Firefox presence on Android
| either. Sure there is an app, and there are 100+ million
| _installs_ , corresponding to an install market share of
| >4%, but people almost never use Firefox. Usage wise,
| Firefox has a 0.5% market share.
| dimensi0nal wrote:
| people typically want their mobile sites to work on both
| major OSes
| Semaphor wrote:
| Or on Windows.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| Sadly, they're probably headed into a worse situation,
| where they lose most of that 90% of their funding since
| their browser marketshare is at an all time low of 3-4%.
| Renegotiation is this year.
| [deleted]
| drexlspivey wrote:
| You can install both Firefox and Chrome plugins in the Orion
| browser on iOS
| singularity2001 wrote:
| https://orionfeedback.org/d/2568-noscript-extension-from-
| fir...
| djkoolaide wrote:
| That's a disappointing thread to read. "Vlad" didn't even
| bother looking at what NoScript actually does, and why
| it's better than just having a giant on/off switch for
| the entire page.
| [deleted]
| petesergeant wrote:
| > If only so that there is another alternative if a page
| renders poorly in webkit
|
| I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only thing
| standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS
| Safari. Nobody in a suit can make a business case for not
| supporting iOS Safari, given its market share, and also given
| the fact that the entire C-Suite and senior management team at
| any given company are using Safari on their iPhone and iPad. A
| page not working on iOS Safari is a serious business problem
| that people will take seriously, today.
|
| If it gets displaced by Chrome on iOS, with a tiny sliver of us
| using Firefox, I worry "works on Chrome" will be the only thing
| that gets solved for.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| It might make Apple work harder maybe? For instance on my m1
| MacBook Air, safari is vastly better for my battery life than
| chrome or ff for my workload. It makes a _huge_ difference.
| That would make me use it over the others if that's the same
| on the iPhone or iPad where battery life is even more
| important.
| matwood wrote:
| To be fair, Chrome has gotten much better, but Safari is
| definitely the best.
| afavour wrote:
| I'm less sure about that for a few reasons. Biggest among
| them is that (presumably?) in app webviews will still be
| WKWebView, powered by WebKit. So if you want your page to
| load inside Facebook's browser (and you do) you're still
| going to have to care about Safari.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| There is nothing stopping facebook shipping a copy of
| chromium. It's around 400MB already, and they don't seems
| to care
| afavour wrote:
| Fair point. They already do this on Android. For
| compatibility reasons you understand, not so that they
| can track absolutely everything you do, no sir.
| jchw wrote:
| Well, Firefox users may never make up quite as much
| marketshare as it used to, but it does have one advantage:
| we're a lot louder and more annoying than Chrome users when
| stuff is broken. It's a feature! (Okay, I try not to be
| annoying. But I'm pretty sure absolutely nobody is thrilled
| when I report bugs about Librewolf not working. Shoutouts to
| SoundCloud for eventually fixing one of said issues.)
|
| I doubt Safari will actually die on iOS. The truth is, Safari
| on iOS is kinda good. That said, honestly this whole line of
| thinking has gotten pretty tiring. I'm not really sure that
| an Apple/Google duopoly on browsers is really that much
| better than the seemingly inevitable Google monopoly. It's
| not like either of them are particularly good citizens, but
| Apple's relatively small influence has been very negative in
| a lot of ways. I'm not even a huge fan of using regulations
| to solve every problem, but even I must admit that EU
| regulations have done far more to start to reel in Google
| than Apple ever could, anyways. As for poor WebM support and
| pushing wgsl into the WebGPU spec, good riddance.
|
| It's really sad that Google can't be trusted more. There's a
| lot of people there who are doing good work on Chromium and
| other web-related projects, and it's besmirched by greedy
| decisions at worst and optically blind decisions at best.
| When I was at Google, I did spend a bit of my time trying to
| make some intranet stuff work better in Firefox... It's
| probably a token gesture at best, but oh well.
|
| You know we're at a weird point when the underdog competition
| in browsers is Apple, one of the richest and most resourceful
| companies of all time.
| depressedpanda wrote:
| > You know we're at a weird point when the underdog
| competition in browsers is Apple, one of the richest and
| most resourceful companies of all time.
|
| It's not so weird considering the following:
|
| 1. Safari only works on Apple operating systems
|
| 2. Safari development has been seriously underfunded by
| Apple, since Apple wants to keep people in their walled
| garden app store, and web apps, by their very nature, can't
| be controlled by them.
| thrusong wrote:
| I've noticed Facebook (.com, the new one built on React),
| works horribly in Firefox.
|
| I constantly report bugs and issues (with video and
| descriptive written copy) but some have persisted for
| months.
|
| There's one where the CSS breaks if you open a lightbox
| modal and you can no longer click any buttons. Only way to
| fix it is to refresh the page.
|
| They really don't seem to care at all.
| happymellon wrote:
| > Well, Firefox users may never make up quite as much
| marketshare as it used to, but it does have one advantage:
| we're a lot louder and more annoying than Chrome users when
| stuff is broken.
|
| Slack refuses to work properly on Firefox. I don't think
| they care that we are being loud about it.
| jchw wrote:
| To be fair, I'm not even sure if Slack cares about web
| users at all. It just doesn't work that well, at least
| for me. (Though I obviously haven't tried it in a bit, so
| maybe it's good in Chrome now.)
| aembleton wrote:
| I think the desktop slack app is built on electron so is
| built to render properly in chrome.
| jchw wrote:
| It's true, but the Electron app always seemed more full
| featured, and at least for me, I had lots of issues with
| bugginess and slowness in the web browser, even in
| Chrome. I'm not sure why it would be slower in Chrome
| than Electron. Neither are particularly lightweight.
| Maybe it's my fault somehow.
| kroltan wrote:
| With Electron you can depend directly on native libraries
| for handling audio and whatnot, but I don't think that
| explains the whole picture.
| pythux wrote:
| One datapoint: I use Slack exclusively in the browser
| (both Firefox and Brave), and it works well. As far as I
| remember on Firefox there was some limitation on video
| calls but that was arbitrary (user-agent check or
| something like that).
| happymellon wrote:
| Yes, it is just video calls.
|
| I hadn't tried the user agent trick, I was just
| frustrated enough at being on my personal laptop and
| having to join a call then finding Slack was being
| terrible.
|
| And for no apparent good reason other than bad quality
| software.
|
| I only brought it up because it is high profile web
| application that has an arbitrary Firefox limitation, and
| as a Firefox user I will name and shame bad applications.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Slack doesn't work properly full stop. It's a bloated
| unstable mess on every platform. Discord puts it to
| shame.
| berkes wrote:
| What doesn't work properly and are there issues for this
| where I can add my support?
|
| I'm using slack on Firefox daily. Prefer it over loading
| that slow and resource hungry desktop app, if only for
| speed alone. But haven't encountered stuff that works on
| the desktop app, but not in the browser.
| happymellon wrote:
| It refuses calls as "not supported in this browser".
|
| Are you user-agent spoofing?
| shilgapira wrote:
| I'm also using Slack on Firefox and I'm not doing any
| user agent spoofing.
| happymellon wrote:
| Calls?
|
| That's what I had issues with, and what has been
| confirmed by multiple other people in this thread unless
| you spoof your user agent.
| friendlyHornet wrote:
| > Slack refuses to work properly on Firefox. I don't
| think they care that we are being loud about it.
|
| Microsoft Teams doesn't make calls on Firefox, and their
| poor excuse of a desktop client for Linux forces me to
| use the web app on Chromium on my work computer.
|
| Big shout out to Webex Teams, who's web app works
| flawlessly on both Chromium and Firefox but actually
| provides a better experience on Firefox because it's
| easier to make video calls Fullscreen
| thrusong wrote:
| It's funny because I find if I get my sites working
| properly in Firefox, they work everywhere.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| markandrewj wrote:
| If your website only works on one of the browsers, you are
| probably doing something wrong. It is not like it was in the
| 90s, it can pretty much be expected your website will work on
| all browsers, if you are following the current HTML/CSS specs
| and best practices.
| andirk wrote:
| Tell the devs (any here on this thread? Please speak!) of
| _iPhone_ iOS Safari (which is somehow different than iPad) to
| support `MediaSource` and I'll sympathize. They are often
| behind the curve, and with the size of market share they
| have, I'd at least like a timeline of when very popular
| features will be exposed. Until then, they're the new IE to
| me. It's popular because it's the default and that's it.
| nvarsj wrote:
| > the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only
| monoculture is iOS Safari
|
| It's not really a good argument. It should be about user
| choice. If Chrome is better than Safari, and I prefer it, I
| should be able to install it. OS locked down browsers is
| 1990s era MS anti-trust behaviour that significantly reduces
| overall competition.
|
| Mobile is king - if Safari/webkit wasn't so locked down on
| iOS, we may have gotten even a completely different player
| who made a really good mobile browser. Apple's behaviour is
| nothing short of monopolistic and there is no good defence of
| it imo.
| yywwbbn wrote:
| Well IE was just better than the competition. IIRC Nobody
| prevented you from installing alternative browser back in
| the 90s or 2000s
|
| Whether Chrome is better or not is moot if developers
| design to only support it or offer a subpar experience when
| using other browsers
| danuker wrote:
| Anti-trust or not, the authorities are sleeping (perhaps
| paid well to do so). What are you going to do in response?
|
| I would restrict my site to work with even simple browsers
| like Links.
| piva00 wrote:
| I don't know, individual action has very rarely worked to
| meaningfully enact system change.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| But at least you won't be part of the problem, forcing
| people to use Chromium.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Apple 's behaviour is nothing short of monopolistic and
| there is no good defence of it imo._
|
| What if we have a straightforward choice between an Apple
| monopoly and a Chrome monopoly?
|
| I've seen major online shopping websites deploy code that
| meant firefox users couldn't add items to their shopping
| baskets, and then classify it as a low priority bug because
| there was a workaround - using chrome.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Yet you chose to buy an iPhone.
| latexr wrote:
| > It should be about user choice.
|
| As the person you're replying to said:
|
| > I worry "works on Chrome" will be the only thing that
| gets solved for.
|
| In other words: with the choice of using other browser
| engines on iOS there is a real possibility an even larger
| percentage of websites will work only on Chrome, meaning in
| the end user choice will be _reduced_ because either you
| use Chromium (on mobile _and_ desktop) or you cannot use
| anything.
|
| Both situations suck. If Chrome weren't so dominant then it
| would be a no brainer to advocate for more openness in iOS
| browser rendering engines, but as it stands it may be the
| case that not allowing the diversity on iOS promotes it in
| the aggregate. Apple's approach, despite being done for the
| wrong reasons, might be what's less detrimental for the
| web.
| jonhohle wrote:
| What does Apple have a monopoly on? Their own hardware?
| rollcat wrote:
| > It should be about user choice.
|
| Then choose a different mobile OS.
|
| > Apple's behaviour is nothing short of monopolistic and
| there is no good defence of it imo.
|
| What do you actually propose then? Force them to release
| Safari for Android?
|
| Chrome/blink has about 65% mobile market share, Safari has
| about 30%. If you are concerned with monopoly, how would
| enabling Blink on iOS do a single thing to displace the
| _actual_ 600 pound gorilla in the room? Or is monopoly bad
| only if it 's not *your* preferred choice?
| can16358p wrote:
| Agreed. While being forced into a walled garden isn't a good
| thing, it has the current side effect giving iOS Safari a
| significant market share to keep Chrome from dominating to
| become the new IE and have all those "works in Internet
| Explorer 6 with 1024x768 screen" websites again but this time
| for Chrome.
| amelius wrote:
| What if Safari is the new IE?
| KyeRussell wrote:
| That simplistic a comparison is simply not worth
| responding to in any direct way. Safari is Safari and IE
| is IE. there are some clear differences between the two,
| in both mobile market share and total market share.
| That's just the beginning.
| can16358p wrote:
| I get your point. However, unless mobile usage (vs
| desktop) gets to something like 90% and unless another
| 90% of that mobile is iPhone/iPad (vs anything non-
| Apple), Safari dominating like IE did is impossible.
|
| However, for Chrome, it is possible without the walled
| garden (not to defend it or anything, but it is what it
| is).
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Maybe from the perspective of webdevs, from what it
| represents for users, that's Chrome. A Chrome monopoly
| may seem desirable, because they're catering to webdevs,
| but there's nothing they'd like more than having webdevs
| help them lasso all the users they can surveil and expose
| to ads as possible.
| dijit wrote:
| > What if Safari is the new IE?
|
| Let me know when safari has 80% of the browser market
| share.
|
| Even across mobile devices.
|
| EDIT: Guess Chrome has the same marketshare as IE had in
| 2009 (if not a little more), iOS has 18%, everything else
| is a footnote.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/WnAsXId.png
| amelius wrote:
| > I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only
| thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only
| monoculture is iOS Safari.
|
| Unless web admins take action and e.g. show an annoying popup
| about web freedom on iOS and Chrome.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| Internet Explorer used to dominate the market, now it
| doesn't. As it was, so it will be.
| Devasta wrote:
| MS sat on their laurels and allowed everyone else catch up
| though. Through the _living standard_ all google needs to
| do is keep Chrome updating at a frantic pace and no one
| will be able to come close.
|
| If MS doesn't have the capability of maintaining their own
| browser, the chances of someone else entering the market is
| basically nil.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Right, but the years when it did sucked
| viraptor wrote:
| IE dominated because it was the default / only known choice
| for a while. Then Mozilla/FF was huge because of features
| (tabs). Then Chrome was huge because Google had bazillion
| $$$ to burn on advertising it everywhere. I'm not sure how
| we can move away from that local maximum this time.
|
| On the iOS side, Apple had the default + locked browser
| choice. Now they can try to outspend each other with Google
| there.
| matwood wrote:
| When IE 6 came out, it was also one of the best/fastest
| browsers at the time. Heck, it even came with the first
| implementation of what we all call AJAX today.
|
| The problem was that MS declared victory and stop
| developing IE, expecting to use their OS leverage to keep
| others out.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| They lost the favor of web developers, because they
| thought that by pushing a crappy browser they could stall
| the advancement of web applications. They wanted to
| stifle the web and have people use IE the least as
| possible and have developers keep making native
| applications.
|
| Google doesn't have that incentive, it has the incentive
| to make the browser as shiny as possible to keep the
| loyalty of web developers, so that they won't campaign in
| a way that will make fewer people download their ads
| delivery platform. They want people to use Chrome
| chii wrote:
| Presumably, the people who care about web would only install
| firefox on their iOS devices, while the people who don't care
| would just keep safari.
|
| in other words, the chrome share of the iOS market would
| remain small.
|
| So a product manager cannot just say that it works on chrome
| and forget about safari. Unless, somehow, google manages to
| boost chrome's iOS marketshare up and above safaris'!
| dtech wrote:
| I don't know the current iOS Chrome install base, but
| having everything synced is a powerful incentive I'd guess.
| maxnoe wrote:
| > Presumably, the people who care about web would only
| install firefox on their iOS devices, while the people who
| don't care would just keep safari.
|
| Until they get large banners of "Please install the Chrome
| App to visit this web page"
| chii wrote:
| i hope that doesn't happen. And i hope that users would
| rather just not visit those sites.
|
| A lot of sites already try to push you to use their app
| by using the same banner, unfortunately. Time will tell
| if this tactic will be successful.
| the_other wrote:
| Every time I log into a Google web app it tells me to use
| Chrome for a better experience. It's happened in two,
| maybe three browsers in the last month. I have no hope
| for your hope. Google will pummel users into using
| Chrome, relentlessly.
| rahoulb wrote:
| I know a lot of non-technical people who use Webkit-Chrome
| on their iPhones because they (have to?) use Blink-Chrome
| on their computers.
|
| Currently they just accept that "iPhone" browsers don't
| behave exactly like computer browsers, but if Google
| started a campaign saying "now you can get exactly the same
| behaviour on your phone" I'm sure it would influence them.
| int_19h wrote:
| Why would Safari get displaced on iOS, though? Apple users
| tend to stick to first-party software even when options are
| available, unless third-party stuff has a significant feature
| gap (and keep in mind that we're talking about UX here, not
| how many APIs the browser supports etc). Did Chrome overtake
| Safari on macOS?
| Devasta wrote:
| Consider, for example, MBNA in Canada no longer supporting
| Firefox.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32350109
|
| Is the user, just some ordinary joe who isnt especially
| technical, going to switch banks to continue using FF or is
| he going to switch to Chrome and carry on his day? When
| google search, youtube, maps, and a bunch of third party
| sites all start recommending Chrome as well, what happens
| then?
|
| Most websites have financial incentives to only support one
| browser, if they can get rid of WebKit they will, standards
| be damned.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Firefox is off the beaten path. iOS Safari isn't. Someone
| has to be ballsy enough to do make that first call. These
| kids calling it "the new IE" are being dramatic. iOS
| Safari as it is right now is nowhere near what IE was.
| Any meaningful organisation that makes the first call on
| not supporting iOS Safari is...to put it one way...not
| somewhere that I want to work. Because it sounds like the
| prioritises are being set by a nerd with a chip on his
| (yes, his) shoulder instead of what's best for the user
| or for the business.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Google will pay handsomely to a good bunch of "nerds" to
| gain dominance on iOS with Chrome as it did in other
| platforms, and then it will make business sense for
| independent vendors to drop support for anything but
| Chrome.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Google can prompt you to download Chrome in every service
| and every app of theirs you use, and every so often
| "innocently" break some aspect of their services if it's
| being touched by another browser.
|
| I remember back when their enthusiasts here, on HN, urged
| Firefox users to keep an open mind that Google products
| breaking on Gecko regularly was just because they were so
| busy making the web awesome! It was strange back then, but
| also the product of another era of the Orange Site, you saw
| more of that tendency to identify with businesses such as
| Google than with other individual people.
| int_19h wrote:
| And how well do you think something like that would go
| with the iOS target demographic?
|
| Safari is different from Firefox for one simple reason:
| it's bundled to Apple products, which, regardless of
| their actual quality, are perceived as "luxury software"
| socially, and its userbase reflects that. And it's large
| enough that, for most companies actually trying to _sell_
| something, it makes sense to cater to.
| dcow wrote:
| [flagged]
| nerdponx wrote:
| It's not a tired argument, it's a concern. I think they're
| right to be concerned. Good things can have bad side
| effects.
| dcow wrote:
| Its... not an argument? Have you lost your mind? It was
| presented as an argument for why it would be bad to let
| users have freedom to choose their mobile browser. Of
| course an argument can be born out of a concern, that's
| obvious. But you can't just dismiss a rebuttal by saying
| an argument is not real it's just a concern.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Are we reading the same post?
|
| > I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only
| thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only
| monoculture is iOS Safari. Nobody in a suit can make a
| business case for not supporting iOS Safari, given its
| market share, and also given the fact that the entire
| C-Suite and senior management team at any given company
| are using Safari on their iPhone and iPad. A page not
| working on iOS Safari is a serious business problem that
| people will take seriously, today.
|
| This doesn't sound like an argument _against_ the change,
| only a pessimistic outlook for its effects.
| dcow wrote:
| The argument is that the only thing standing between the
| world and a Chrome monoculture is iOS Safari.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Right, both things can be true. Apple has a closed web
| browser ecosystem, and that's bad for users. Opening up
| that ecosystem could possibly lead to even greater market
| dominance by Chrome, which would also be bad for users.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > I worry "works on Chrome" will be the only thing that gets
| solved for
|
| Firefox is my daily driver, and I use their WebKit wrapper on
| iOS, and I have to agree. I'm not looking forward to a Blink
| monopoly in the browser space. The upshot is that we might
| have closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > The upshot is that we might have closer-to-native
| experiences for websites on iOS
|
| Strange. Android is 70% market share. Chrome is something
| like 80% market share (all playforms). Where are these
| glorious "closer to native web apps" we keep hearing about?
| h0l0cube wrote:
| I specified on _iOS_. It would at least be _possible_ on
| iOS if other renderers could be used, and both Firefox
| and Google would certainly have their own incentive to
| make this happen. Google don 't want to undermine the
| Play Store, but they might want to undermine the App
| Store. Firefox have existential reasons for product
| differentiation, though web apps won't get traction
| without broader support by all players.
| dmitriid wrote:
| So many words to avoid the hard truth: web apps suck, and
| "we might have closer-to-native experiences" is bullshit.
| Because, see my comment on Android which already
| supposedly has these "close to native experiences".
| iainmerrick wrote:
| The parent was clearly alluding to "closer-to-native
| experiences" on Android. If Chrome will bring that to
| iOS, there should already be examples on Android.
|
| _Google don 't want to undermine the Play Store, but
| they might want to undermine the App Store._
|
| I'll buy that, but it doesn't seem like a reason to be
| optimistic about the way things might go.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > If Chrome will bring that to iOS, there should already
| be examples on Android.
|
| I think I illustrated that the incentives are different
|
| > doesn't seem like a reason to be optimistic
|
| I did say "we _might_ have closer-to-native experiences
| for websites on iOS " (emphasis added) in my OP. Only
| because it would become possible, not because it would be
| likely
| dmitriid wrote:
| They are already supposedly possible on Android. So?
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Better integration with OS features on iOS devices is
| still an upshot for people who want websites to do more
| useful things with their phones, _if_ that becomes a
| possibility. Might not balance out the cost of having a
| browser hegemony, and it might not be something that's
| specifically useful or interesting to you, but a small
| mercy nonetheless
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Better integration with OS features on iOS devices is
| still an upshot for people who want websites to do more
| useful things with their phones, if that becomes a
| possibility.
|
| Again. "If", and "might help", and something else.
|
| Question is: you have Android with 70% market share and
| all those capabilities you so crave for. Have all these
| nice hypotheticals happened there, or not?
|
| Edit: things devs _think_ "native-like web apps need" vs
| what they actually need:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34517503
| h0l0cube wrote:
| I think we need all the things you mention in that
| comment, and much, if not all, are dependent on the
| rendering engine internals to implement. e.g., Firefox
| iOS couldn't fix it without changes to WebKit
| dmitriid wrote:
| Android exists. Has 70% market share. Has all those
| native capabilities you crave.
|
| So. Again and again I ask the same simple question: have
| all the things you're talking about happened there?
| h0l0cube wrote:
| It just might not be worth doing until browser vendors
| have a consistent renderer across all platforms (true for
| Firefox and Chrome) and until Apple loses its leverage.
| It might also be that it requires coordination and
| cooperation across all browser vendors to a degree that
| is unlikely. I'm not privy to the internal politics, so I
| don't know which is the case
| judge2020 wrote:
| > closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS.
|
| What is native? If a website is explicitly testing for
| Firefox compatibility, they're probably also testing for
| Safari compatibility due to its increased market share.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| It's not so much Safari compatibility, but WebKit
| compatibility. Anyone who wants their website to work on
| iOS has to test against mobile WebKit, regardless if
| their target users are on Chrome or Firefox. If these
| legislative changes go into effect, Webkit market
| penetration will plummet quickly to _only_ those using
| Safari, and Apple will have less leverage to hold back on
| features that don 't suit their App Store profits.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| I know a fair few solo developers that don't test Safari
| compatibility because they don't own Apple hardware. And
| Safari only runs on Apple hardware (with the exception of
| Hackintosh).
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| It will also be great to have video background enabler, dark
| mode and ublock origin extensions like on Android.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > if a page renders poorly in webkit.
|
| what's a URL of a page that renders poorly in webkit?
| GranPC wrote:
| I couldn't link to any websites that render incorrectly under
| Safari on iOS (WebKit) off the top of my head, but I think
| that's rather a side effect of WebKit being the only engine
| available on iOS: I don't want my site to be unusable on iOS
| devices, so I end up spending a lot of time trying to work
| around bugs that only happen on Apple devices.
|
| Sure, this ultimately means that everything Just Works on
| Apple devices... but it's not because their browser is up to
| standards. It's just that I'm forced to make it work.
|
| To me, this is very reminiscent of the Internet Explorer
| situation, where I end up baking a bunch of hacks into my
| code just to ensure it works for the majority.
| meibo wrote:
| Web devs have to deal with Safari bugs all the time, that's
| why you don't tend to see them. Maybe now that there's going
| to be other browser engines on iOS, we can show nice "please
| open this page in Firefox" banners and force Apple to stop
| undermining their browser to push native apps.
| dpcx wrote:
| Those of us that remember "This page works best in Internet
| Explorer 5" are shivering at your statement. I love Firefox
| and use it as my primary browser on my desktop. But
| suggesting to users that they should use that instead of
| fixing issues in your site feels bad.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| There's a subtle but important distinction between "a
| browser misbehaves and incorrectly renders my compliant
| site, and I refuse to make my site wrong to satisfy it"
| and "a browser doesn't render my malformed site the way I
| want it to and I refuse to fix it because other browser
| (incorrectly) renders my site how I want".
| Ninjinka wrote:
| Anything with a high amount of textures in WebGL.
| [deleted]
| imiric wrote:
| I'm not that optimistic that Mozilla is capable of building a
| good iOS browser. It's been a few months since I last used it,
| but the issues of Firefox on iPadOS were not because of the
| engine. Tabs would frequently lose order, closing a tab would
| close some other tab, broken keyboard shortcuts,
| cursor/selection issues in the address bar, random non-
| responsiveness and just janky UI. The issues were so obvious
| that it felt like it was built without any QA process, so I
| resorted to using Safari most of the time, which worked
| perfectly.
|
| Firefox Focus on Android works much better, but it's also a
| simpler browser. I haven't used the full Firefox on Android, so
| can't comment on that.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _It 's been a few months since I last used it, but the
| issues of Firefox on iPadOS were not because of the engine._
|
| You don't actually know that, though, it's entirely possible
| that these issues are caused by having purposely limited ways
| to hook into the engine and system as 3rd party browser.
| eloisius wrote:
| If GP is talking about the same issues that I frequently
| run into, then I'd say that's almost definitely not the
| case. I continue to use Firefox iOS despite these issues
| because I like the shared history and bookmarks with my
| desktop, but they do annoy me on the daily.
|
| A couple off the top of my head...
|
| If you do something to trigger a page load, like open the
| app after it has been suspended, and while the page is
| still loading you touch the address bar to enter an address
| or pick one of your "recently visited" or whatever, you
| will be surprised when the page finishes loading and
| replaces the view. It replaces the view, but you're still
| in the "navigation bar selected" state, so you can get them
| back without hitting the tiny back chevron and tapping the
| address bar again. I doubt this has anything to do with how
| they are forced to hook into WebView. It's just sloppy
| handling of async code.
|
| Speaking of that same view, the top four links shown there
| as favicons are in a constant state of flux. Generally,
| it's HN, Reddit, Google News and whatever else I frequently
| visit, but sometimes for reasons I don't understand they
| get completely jumbled into something else. The icons are
| constantly disappearing and reappearing. It's not a big
| deal, but it feels unstable. I'm not sure why they don't
| just let me pick bookmarks to save on this view instead of
| automatically picking them for me. There are many things I
| would like to have available at a single tap, but I don't
| visit frequently enough to make it into my top four. Like
| trash pickup schedule. I don't read that several times a
| day, but when it's time for the trash truck to come and I
| forgot if today is plastic or paper recyclables, I'd like
| to have that link bookmarked for quick access.
| shantara wrote:
| Unfortunately, I had the same experience with iOS and iPadOS
| versions of Firefox. Very janky, lots of bugs that went on
| unfixed for months and years, and general lack of polish and
| thoughtfulness in the UI. Despite using Firefox on every
| other platform, I had much better experience with Safari, and
| kept Firefox installed only for an occasional password
| lookup.
| jchw wrote:
| Being able to use Fennec F-Droid was my primary motivator to
| switch off of iPhone. It's not perfect, but there are things
| it offers that iOS Safari does not that I consider to be
| absolute necessities for browsing the web. (uBlock Origin is
| certainly one of them, also WebM support.)
| nostrebored wrote:
| WebM is supported on iOS Safari now!
| KingLancelot wrote:
| Since when? I'm on iOS 16.3 and it doesnt support webm
| jchw wrote:
| I've been told this at least three times now on HN over
| the years (pretty soon I'm going to start keeping a list
| of URLs so people know I'm not exaggerating.) Every
| single time it turns out that it isn't actually true.
|
| It was added to desktop Safari. iOS Safari supports VP9
| only in WebRTC. It may have changed, but I can't find any
| evidence that it has.
|
| If you see it working somewhere, it is almost definitely
| using the polyfill[1].
|
| [1]: https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/
| 867-5309 wrote:
| fully supported since Sept 12th, 2022 according to
| https://caniuse.com/webm
|
| edit: on MacOS (not iOS)
| SergeAx wrote:
| Firefox is my default browser on Android for couple of years
| now. It supports uBlock Origin, and I cannot browse internet
| without it anymore. I don't have major trouble with it,
| except 1-2 cases per quarter, when it is faster to open
| Chrome than turn the ad blocking off and then back on.
|
| Another case for Chrome for me is full page translation. It
| is very neat and mostly of decent quality.
| maneesh wrote:
| I've been using Kiwi browser on Android, which allows you
| to install chrome extensions! (Including ublock)
|
| It's a game changer!
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrows
| e...
| turbobooster wrote:
| How is this the first time I heard about this!? Thanks
| Semaphor wrote:
| > hen it is faster to open Chrome than turn the ad blocking
| off and then back on.
|
| Hah, so I'm not the only one doing that :D On Desktop I'm
| fine to fiddle, but on mobile those issues just make me
| start Chrome
| mgiampapa wrote:
| It you go the extra mile and actually disable Chrome on
| Android, even Google apps will start making calls to
| Firefox as the browser. It makes for a much better
| experience, otherwise Google apps don't honor the default
| browser choice in many circumstances.
| oittaa wrote:
| You don't even need to "disable" Chrome. Just set Firefox
| as the default browser. I haven't noticed any Google apps
| that wouldn't respect the setting.
| mfjordvald wrote:
| Google news app insists on opening in a chrome-based
| webview without ad blocking. Large part of why I rooted
| to get adaway.
| oittaa wrote:
| Interesting, Google News app isn't even available here. I
| suppose you're from the US where they can do more shady
| stuff.
| kyrra wrote:
| This is called chrome custom tabs, and there are a number
| of reasons they are better than webview.
|
| https://developer.chrome.com/docs/android/custom-tabs/
| AgentME wrote:
| Firefox for Android supports custom tabs and will be used
| if it's your default browser. The Google News app doesn't
| use Android custom tabs.
| SergeAx wrote:
| I don't have any Google apps with this problem (I don't
| use mentioned below Google News). My biggest problem so
| far are apps without setting "Use external browser to
| open links".
| midoridensha wrote:
| I can't use the internet with Firefox on Android, because
| while is supports uBO, it doesn't support full-page
| translation or Bypass Paywalls Clean.
|
| So instead, I use Firefox Nightly on Android. It supports
| any extension I want to install, not just those approved by
| Mozilla for the Android browser. I would have a very hard
| time without translation.
| nine_k wrote:
| I suspect that few Firefox developers use Firefox on iOS.
| Choosing iOS is usually about choosing a different set of
| priorities.
|
| Android is a very different thing.
| djbusby wrote:
| I wonder how much of the Jank is attributable to FF just
| being a wrapper on iOS?
|
| Like, maybe they had to "start from scratch" there with new
| code and couldn't use all their previous magic (UI, UX) from
| the Desktop codebase.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Trying to reuse their desktop UI code on iOS would be a
| mistake regardless of browser engine limitations
| amethyst wrote:
| FWIW, I noticed all of the same issues when using FF on my
| iPad, but I stuck with it, and it actually got much better,
| and I haven't noticed a UI/UX bug in months now. It's been
| rock solid once they got the kinks worked out, and I've loved
| running FF on all of my devices and having everything synced
| between them appropriately.
| Nursie wrote:
| I use firefox on iOS. I like it because it has integrations
| with firefox's password management, and it feels somewhat
| fire-foxy.
|
| But it is a bit janky and it is strictly worse than the
| android version, and that's because it's layered on top of
| the wrong engine and there's only so much customisation they
| can do to make it more firefoxy.
|
| I really welcome a full-fat fox on iOS, not least because it
| implies extensions like ublock origin, and adblocking on iOS
| is just not as good compared to UBO on android or the
| desktop.
| ben174 wrote:
| Once the native engine is available to the general public,
| there will be more users. When there are more users, there
| will likely be more resources thrown at development.
| Klonoar wrote:
| The issues in question aren't something you'd ignore just
| due to lack of a native engine - Firefox on iOS matters for
| market share reasons, they need to care about that stuff
| _regardless_ of what 's running under the hood.
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| Why hasn't this happened on Android?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Firefox is pretty good on android.
|
| I use it as my main browser and only had to go Chrome to
| open some trash sites (litteral "let me load a bitcoin
| miner in an invisible element" kind of trash)
| leni536 wrote:
| Firefox is the best Android browser, for the sole reason
| of being able to use uBlock Origin with it.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Other browsers on android can do that too. Actually,
| firefox has a fairly restrictive extension policy, while
| browsers like Kiwi let you install any chrome extension
| that you want.
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| But it hasn't resulted in "more users." The marketshare
| of Firefox on mobile is around half a percent.
| californical wrote:
| I really wonder if that number is accurate, or if Firefox
| uses all just have their tracking disabled
| judge2020 wrote:
| > Once the native engine is available to the general
| public, there will be more users.
|
| Why do you think this will happen? The landing page for
| firefox.com above the fold only makes one claim about "a
| lightning fast browser", with their selling points being
| privacy, Firefox View, editing PDFs in-browser, and total
| cookie protection, all of which are possible in the current
| WebKit experience. Either Mozilla really doesn't know how
| to market Firefox, or less people download Firefox if their
| CTA is "our browser engine is better than Chrome".
| lobochrome wrote:
| On the other hand: wouldn't it be nice if Apple would start
| contributing/forking chromium?
|
| WebKit just has too many issues these days...
| dartharva wrote:
| Firefox Android is rather bad at being a mobile browser (it's
| too slow), and if it is any indicator Firefox iOS will likely
| be the same.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| I've only noticed this in very compute intensive SPAs.
|
| But you know what? Having AdBlock makes up for it 10 fold
| because I never have to see ads on mobile FF.
| wpietri wrote:
| Is it? It's the only mobile browser I use. I use it on a mid-
| tier phone (Pixel 5a). It seems fine to me.
| dartharva wrote:
| Have you tried comparing it with Bromite, Brave or even
| Chrome? There is a very noticeable difference.
|
| Also, I think Site Isolation* doesn't work in FF Android as
| it does in FF Desktop. Firefox Android is categorically
| less secure than its Chromium counterparts.
|
| * https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-
| new-si...
| wpietri wrote:
| I have not done much comparison, as it works fine for me.
| I could believe that it is slow _er_ , but I still
| wouldn't call in slow. Perhaps my using an adblocker with
| FF makes it better for me.
| wdb wrote:
| Sounds more like a switch of domination at the iOS platform from
| Webkit to Chromium.
|
| Personally, I am really happy with Safari but I am not convinced
| Firefox make a big dent.
| FoxBJK wrote:
| Wonder how long it'll take for Blink to overtake WebKit on iOS
| in terms of usage.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I don't think it ever would. I think the majority of users
| would stay with the default browser.
|
| I think that within a more tech-aware demographic, they'll
| see more people use Chrome.
| labcomputer wrote:
| A few weeks, at least. By that point, nearly every user
| should have gotten a notification that YouTube, GMail or
| Google Search is 100000% better with Chrome.
| netheril96 wrote:
| On iOS I doubt people use the browser for YouTube, GMail.
| Those have dedicated apps.
| latexr wrote:
| On iOS you can block YouTube ads if you watch through the
| browser. That alone makes plenty of people not bother
| with the app.
| acdha wrote:
| Why do people install those apps? Because the first time
| they visit that site on a new phone it tells them that
| everything will be better in the app, without mentioning
| that this is mostly true only for advertisers.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| And essentially every time you click a link in one of
| those apps.
| warning26 wrote:
| Ehh...I do think the native app often gives a better
| experience than mWeb.
|
| Don't get me wrong, a really well-written PWA with fully
| cached assets is often almost at a native app experience
| level, but that's not usually the case with most mWeb
| implementations.
| acdha wrote:
| For Gmail, perhaps -- I think that's one of the best
| cases for push notifications on the web -- but YouTube
| basically comes down to whether you need large offline
| storage and search is a non-issue.
|
| One thing I noticed about both Google and Facebook's apps
| before deleting them was that in addition to using more
| battery, both were slower in their apps than using the
| web site. That was surprising but consistent & a large
| part of why I ditched them.
| sfink wrote:
| For me, YouTube comes down to the fact that if I use
| YouTube through Firefox for Android, and install the
| "Video Background Play Fix" addon, then I can go for a
| walk with my phone in my pocket and listen to things
| through YouTube without having it pause as soon as the
| screen turns off.
|
| Well, I believe you can do that if you pay for YouTube
| Extortion Edition or whatever it's called. Which I used
| to do, until too many ads still came through and I got
| pissed off.
|
| (Though note: if I got to a YouTube link through anything
| other than going directly to the site and searching, then
| it would open in the app. Which would then pause when I
| turned off the screen. Which was irritating. Fixed by
| disabling the YouTube app entirely. Life is much better
| now.)
| dontlaugh wrote:
| I also use YouTube through a browser. But besides the
| dark patterns and ads, it's still a worse UX.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| So use an Invidious instance. Sure, YouTube blocks the
| subtitles for some of them, but if you need subtitles, it
| only takes a couple of minutes to find one of the new
| subtitles-available instance, and you're good for at
| least a few months.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| That's still a website. I'd much prefer a native app,
| just without ads and autoplay, etc.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| What would an app give you that a website doesn't?
| acdha wrote:
| Ah, that works in mobile Safari without an extension.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Don't get me wrong, a really well-written PWA with
| fully cached assets is often almost at a native app
| experience level
|
| And what would those be? When this question is asked,
| people inevitably bring up Twitter as the shining
| example. And it's just horrendously bad.
| warning26 wrote:
| I've never seen a good major one TBH. The best PWA I've
| ever used, however, is this Palm OS emulator:
|
| https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/
| dmitriid wrote:
| I don't have a ROM to import, but it does look quite nice
| in what's available. Definitely much better than what
| major companies put out :)
| izacus wrote:
| So you're saying that opening the browser market will
| improve data collection and reduce the need to install
| apps, thus strenghtening the web?
|
| Sounds amazing.
| acdha wrote:
| I'm saying that it doesn't do the web a service to break
| one monopoly while doing nothing about the more
| successful second monopoly. I want an open App Store but
| I also want fair competition in the browser market.
| twism wrote:
| but imagine if they didn't need the app
| isodev wrote:
| A browser from an Ad company and ... I don't know what Mozilla
| is these days. Doesn't sound very reassuring. I hope they'd at
| least try to address memory and performance issues from their
| desktop counterparts. One amazing (and unmatched) feature of
| Safari on any platform it runs on is how smooth and battery
| friendly it is.
| rezonant wrote:
| I browse the web most of the day on my Pixel 6 Pro, and
| battery usage indicates Chrome has taken 3% of my battery
| since last full charge. I'm sure iOS has a similar battery
| usage monitoring feature, I'm curious what percent Safari
| shows for you?
|
| edit: and I'm at 13% remaining (blame TikTok), so not like I
| just woke up with a full charge.
| isodev wrote:
| The % is related to the amount of time you spent in a given
| app (and how much battery it consumes in that period). If
| you don't use your browser, then of course, you will not
| see battery use allocated to it.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Mozilla is going to have to pull off some crazy marketing
| genius to have any chance against the coming onslaught from
| Google and Microsoft. Both companies are likely willing to do
| just about whatever it takes to convert that chunk of
| previously inaccessible users... growth opportunities like that
| don't appear in the browser space very often.
| katscradle_1989 wrote:
| The number of people (even in the field) that don't know Chrome
| on iOS isn't actually chrome is staggeringly high. Maybe this
| will change that, lol.
| HNAbusesUsers wrote:
| I once wanted this. Now I realize that this will complete
| Chrome's takeover of the Web, and that sucks.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| How will enabling alternative browsers from Safari's takeover
| of Apple-based products, somehow bring the end of other
| browsers elsewhere? If anything this helps prevent that and
| since Chromium is open source, app creators can distribute
| their own browsers if so desired. Lots of people like to
| complain about the lack of having 100 different browsers to
| choose from with different backend engines, but if it is so
| easy then feel free to get started on it.
| HNAbusesUsers wrote:
| [dead]
| warning26 wrote:
| I think that says more about how awful Safari is than anything
| else. I personally hate Google's anticompetitive nonsense, but
| I hate Safari's glitchy rendering _even more_.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| About time. The way to free developers from the 30% app tax on
| iOS is through the web. Apple has been doing their best to drag
| their heels in order to keep grip over revenue from in-app
| purchases inside their walled garden, but the writing is truly on
| the wall at this point.
|
| As an aside, for anyone interested in WebAssembly and the future
| of gaming in the browser - my team and I at Wonder Interactive
| are bringing the full power of native gaming to the web. We're
| building out a platform and suite of tools that allows developers
| to publish, host, share, and monetize their games directly to
| their players online, without any middlemen.
|
| The current focus is on the Unreal Engine (4.24, 4.27) and UE5
| support which is coming later this year. Other engines will
| follow such as Unity, Godot, Open 3D Engine, and custom engines
| we can provide porting for on our paid plans. We're building out
| a WebGPU backend for UE5, to really enable high end desktop and
| console quality games in HTML5. The goal is to free developers
| from storefronts that charge a 30% tax on distribution.
|
| Further reading, with demos attached:
|
| https://theimmersiveweb.com/blog
| galleywest200 wrote:
| For what it is worth...the rumor mill seems to believe that
| Apple will allow side-loading as of iOS 17.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/14/apple-will-reportedly-allo...
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-appl...
| dsissitka wrote:
| I wonder how difficult they're going to make things.
|
| > To help protect against unsafe apps, Apple is discussing
| the idea of mandating certain security requirements even if
| software is distributed outside its store. Such apps also may
| need to be verified by Apple -- a process that could carry a
| fee. Within the App Store, Apple takes a 15% to 30% cut of
| revenue.
| throwawayapples wrote:
| So, basically they're still the gatekeeper and tollbooth
| operator, but it looks like the opposite. Nicely done,
| Apple.
| iib wrote:
| If this brings us non-Webkit browsers on iOS, I think
| it's still a victory.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They will probably say it's a security threat to prevent
| that :)
| criddell wrote:
| Safari on iOS is basically the only thing stopping the
| future of the web from being controlled by Google via
| Blink.
| jaynetics wrote:
| Even if there is a choice, iPhone users might tend to
| stick with Safari anyway. Desktop Safari's market share
| is about 10%, roughly the same as macOS' market share,
| which seems to suggest limited appetite for browser
| customization.
| gdetassigny wrote:
| One reason for that might be wanting to use the same
| browser across mobile and desktop though. I know I stuck
| with Safari for a while because of that. I'm now on
| Firefox for both Mac and iOS but the iOS experience isn't
| that great.
|
| Once other browsers are allowed on iOS, it's possible
| more users will migrate on both desktop & mobile to
| Chrome/FF.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Desktop Safari's market share is about 10%, roughly the
| same as macOS' market share
|
| Where you're getting these numbers from? Doesn't sound
| right to me, but maybe I just have a biased sample. I'd
| guesstimate that 50% if not more of my friends with macOS
| run Chrome, small percentage (2 or 3) runs Firefox and
| the rest Safari.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Statcounter and other sites show ~10% for desktop Safari,
| and 15-18% in richer countries.
|
| Most people I know with Macs have at least two browsers
| installed, but then most people with Macs I know are
| fairly tech savvy.
| the_solenoid wrote:
| I can tell you, the users on the whole know about as much
| about tech as a luddite from 1867.
|
| I mean, that's a huge draw in the consumer space for
| mac/ios. Remember the scale were at here. Something like
| 250,000,000 ios devices a YEAR.
| freshpots wrote:
| I think they mean market share for all desktop/laptops
| and not just Macs. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-
| market-share/desktop/worl...
| latexr wrote:
| I have never read or heard of anyone using desktop Safari
| due to a "limited appetite for browser customization". In
| every context of every conversation I've witnessed where
| desktop Safari was mentioned, every participant was fully
| aware other browsers exist.
|
| As an example, Safari is the only choice if you don't
| want to give more marketshare to Chromium but also need
| to programatically control or retrieve information from
| your browser. Firefox has no AppleScript support, which
| disqualifies it immediately.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| No. Apple's iPhone app policies on iOS are stopping it.
| Safari on iOS is utter garbage. Once regulation fixes
| Apple's app policies, Safari will have to get better.
| [deleted]
| robotnikman wrote:
| If they really want that to be the case, they need to
| make Safari available on other OS's again
| actionfromafar wrote:
| If they did that, Safari market share would increase
| 0.01% percent or something.
|
| When it was available for Windows, nobody used it, except
| web developers who wanted their website to work on Macs,
| but didn't have a Mac to test with.
| RussianCow wrote:
| I think synchronized bookmarks/history, which didn't
| exist back then, would be reason enough for many people
| to switch. So maybe more like 1%. ;)
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Also, most people don't know what a browser is. They just
| look at Internet, or google.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I used it because I liked the Mac font rendering but I
| had to use Windows for work.
|
| These days with hidpi screens the difference between font
| rendering between windows and Mac is negligible though.
| So that's not a factor anymore.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > About time. The way to free developers from the 30% app tax
| on iOS is through the web.
|
| You mean like all of the developers who aren't creating native
| apps on Android and are creating PWAs?
|
| There are just three issues with this narrative:
|
| 1. It came out in the Epic trial that 80% of all app revenue is
| coming from games.
|
| 2. Most of the other revenue derived from the App Store is
| coming from services where no one pays through the App Store
|
| 3. Large companies have already abandoned in app purchases like
| Spotify and Netflix
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > You mean like all of the developers who aren't creating
| native apps on Android and are creating PWAs?
|
| I'm not sure I understand your wording right... Are you
| saying that devs creating PWAs are "free?" Because it's well-
| known that PWAs has been stunted by Apple and Google. The
| technology is _well behind_ its potential. PWAs could do
| significantly more if they had better access to system APIs.
| p1necone wrote:
| > PWAs could do significantly more if they had better
| access to system APIs.
|
| Isn't the whole point of PWAs that they're easy because
| they're _just_ web apps? If you start using system /OS
| specific APIs you lose all of the benefits except for the
| instant install time.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So now there is a great conspiracy by both Apple and
| Google? Maybe web technologies just aren't as good as
| native?
|
| In the history of computing there has never been a cross
| platform general purpose GUI framework that didn't suck.
|
| Not to mention most Android devices in the wild are low end
| and don't handle complex web pages well
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > So now there is a great conspiracy by both Apple and
| Google?
|
| What conspiracy?
|
| They have huge economic disincentives to further PWAs -
| there is no need for any conspiracy.
|
| In the first presentation of the iPhone, Steve Jobs laid
| out a vision where the smartphone would run _web apps_ ,
| using fundamental web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS). He
| quickly backtracked when he realised Apple could impose a
| 30% tax on transactions in the platform.
|
| > Maybe web technologies just aren't as good as native?
|
| No one said they are, but that's no excuse to drag your
| feet in implementing simple things like push
| notifications.
|
| > In the history of computing there has never been a
| cross platform general purpose GUI framework that didn't
| suck.
|
| What GUI framework? I barely even know what we are
| talking about anymore. You don't need one with PWA -
| again, you're using fundamental web technologies, and
| enabling them to make system calls.
|
| > Not to mention most Android devices in the wild are low
| end and don't handle complex web pages well
|
| So that's another excuse to not further PWAs, huh?
| scarface74 wrote:
| > What GUI framework? I barely even know what we are
| talking about anymore. You don't need one with PWA -
| again, you're using fundamental web technologies, and
| enabling them to make system calls.
|
| Let me ask you this then. Name _one_ cross platform
| framework that wasn't meant to build command line tools
| that hasn't sucked?
|
| QT? Java Spring? React Native? Electron?
|
| > In the first presentation of the iPhone, Steve Jobs
| laid out a vision where the smartphone would run web
| apps, using fundamental web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS).
| He quickly backtracked when he realised Apple could
| impose a 30% tax on transactions in the platform.
|
| He "backtracked" because his "sweet solution" wasn't good
| and everyone wanted native apps and web apps were called
| "a shit sandwich" by developers.
|
| Do you know the history of creating "applications" using
| "web technologies"? They failed for RIM, Microsoft, and
| Palm. Web apps suck not to mention the clusterfuck of the
| front end ecosystem.
|
| Every single platform that went down the "we can do great
| web apps" backtracked. They have never been good enough.
|
| > So that's another excuse to not further PWAs, huh?
|
| You mean making an app that's actually performant on the
| majority of phones out there?
| arcturus17 wrote:
| > He "backtracked" because his "sweet solution" wasn't
| good and everyone wanted native apps and web apps were
| called "a shit sandwich" by developers.
|
| Sure, the 30% cut of all sales was just a sweet
| coincidence.
|
| > You mean making an app that's actually performant on
| the majority of phones out there?
|
| Twitter and Uber have PWAs for countries where low-end
| devices are the majority of phones.
|
| > They have never been good enough.
|
| Complete bollocks, there are plenty of excellent web apps
| out there, and it's one of the most important mechanisms
| for software delivery nowadays, in both the enterprise
| and consumer spaces. You are a fundamentalist and there
| is no point discussing anything here anymore
| scarface74 wrote:
| Were you around back then when developers were clamoring
| for native apps? It came out in the Epic trial that 80%
| of all app revenue came from games with in app purchases.
|
| Besides that, most of the biggest players like Netflix
| and Spotify don't even allow in app purchases.
|
| Where are all of the great web apps _for mobile_? Have
| you tried using any of these web apps on Firefox for
| Android or is Firefox also involved in the conspiracy?
|
| No one is clamoring for cross platform web apps accept
| web developers who want to foster a shitty Electron like
| experience on mobile.
|
| And look at all of the server side work that Uber had to
| do.
|
| https://www.uber.com/blog/m-uber/
|
| And this wasn't done to avoid the "30% tax" since Uber
| doesn't use in app purchases. You do have Apple Pay as an
| option. But that's a standard credit card transaction.
| [deleted]
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > Because it's well-known that PWAs has been stunted by
| Apple and Google.
|
| It is not well- _known_. It is well- _believed_.
|
| I don't believe Apple has intentionally crippled Safari
| just to prop up their native platform. Google are the ones
| who invented the PWA buzzword and spend all their devrel
| effort on pushing. It's hard to believe they would also try
| and hamper that.
| beefield wrote:
| I have occasionally needed to advise mobile users how to
| use a simple web app showing phone's location on a map.
| Sample size is at least tens of people, selection bias to
| somewhat young and active people. Based on this
| "research",for a median iPhone user a location-aware web
| app is simply broken. Without external help, they are
| unable to change the (default/dark pattern, I do not
| know?) setting of not letting browser access to location
| data. You are welcome to come up with reasons why Apple
| has made it so difficult. I have difficulties to think
| other than intentionally crippling web apps.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| There must be a higher bar (making it harder to blindly
| click 'yes') for user consent on the web because there's
| so much less intentionality behind what arbitary code
| your device will execute. Visiting any popular news
| website will run untrusted JS delivered through 10
| different intermediaries in advertisements.
|
| I think any complaint directed towards Apple's
| development on Safari can also be directed towards their
| actual native platform. Terrible/non-existent
| documentation, frequently breaking APIs, and a completely
| hostile app store and bug reporting/feedback process.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The browser asks for the same permission for location
| access as any other app does.
|
| Once you deny it access, you have to go into settings to
| change it - just like any other app.
|
| How much money do you think Apple makes when the same
| probably free website is a free app?
| TylerE wrote:
| That certainly isn't the default.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Any ANY website that needs an accurate location of me is
| a crap website.
|
| There's pretty much no reason why 99.999% of any apps in
| existence need my precise location.
|
| It's not broken at all.
| vuln wrote:
| Privacy?
|
| Not every website I visit needs to know my location.
|
| Not every website with a map needs access to my location.
|
| Only websites I specifically allow to access my location
| should have access.
|
| On the iPhone and specifically safari I've never had an
| issue or a steep learning curve to showing someone how to
| long press the reader view (AA) in the url then select
| _allow location_ or whatever.
|
| I wonder if you sample all had something in common. Did
| they not regularly use this web app? Was this an event
| specific web app? If so it would be nice if the web app
| detected mobile browser by user agent and displayed
| instructions for activating location. Might help reduce
| confusion.
| wolfendin wrote:
| They might be able to _do more_ but that isn't going to
| make them better.
|
| Just look at how reviled Electron is compared to native
| applications.
| pier25 wrote:
| The problem with Electron is that it's bloated by
| including a full browser engine and Node.
|
| A couple of years ago I worked on an app that ran on 5
| platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, ChromeOS).
| Initially we used Phonegap and Electron but then we
| created our own native wrapper that used the OS webview.
|
| Our macOS app went from 100MB to 5MB of download size and
| the memory usage also went down considerably. IIRC
| correctly it consumed like 15MB of memory.
|
| It certainly didn't look native but for our use case
| (education) that was not an issue. We were able to target
| 5 platforms with a very small team and the GUI was a
| single codebase made with InfernoJS and MobX.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Everyone loves to complain about how bloated Electron is.
| No one offers a solution that performs as well in
| supporting all of modern webs technologies.
| palata wrote:
| Make a nice API and let people write client apps that
| connect to it. Provide your official ElectronJS app next
| to that, and let the users choose.
|
| I would definitely not use the ElectronJS Slack app if I
| had a choice.
| scarface74 wrote:
| A better idea is _not to use "web technologies" to create
| a native app_
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| The tech industry begs to differ
| palata wrote:
| Nope, the product managers in the tech industry do. It's
| all about cost (or perceived cost). Web tech is more
| successful because it seems cheaper. Not because the
| resulting apps are better.
| [deleted]
| stock_toaster wrote:
| revenue-per-employee has been at record highs in the
| industry for years now. Maybe companies could hire a
| couple more devs to make decent user experiences and
| native apps, instead of cheapening out and treating
| development like a cost center and using Electron apps as
| a way to just hire fewer devs (at the expense of a worse
| user experience).
| scarface74 wrote:
| Google moved away from cross platform frameworks -
| including its own.
|
| https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/
|
| Facebook moved away from cross platform web based
| frameworks for its apps years ago.
|
| Microsoft's mobile and desktop apps (besides Teams which
| also sucks and VSCode which is pretty good) are not using
| web frameworks.
| jocaal wrote:
| So some of the richest companies in the world chose to
| invest in the more powerful platforms, does that mean if
| you don't already have billions in the bank, you aren't
| allowed to create applications for users on multiple
| platforms? It is an enormous amount of work to learn the
| intricacies of multiple programming languages and
| frameworks and then to get feature parity accross all
| your native applications will literally take you like 3x
| more effort to implement them. Moreover, the reason these
| companies chose native is because it provides more
| features and the reason web technologies can't provide
| these features isn't technical, it's political.
| scarface74 wrote:
| A smaller company's ability to compete is not my problem.
| But why would I want to give any random web page that I
| browse to the same access to my computer or phone that I
| give an app that I choose to download that is much better
| sandboxed?
|
| And most apps that would be suitable for PWAs are in fact
| free. How would Apple or Google benefit financially?
|
| Besides most of the App Stores's revenue comes from games
|
| What happens when either Apple or Google introduce a new
| feature to their native platform?
| throwaway49496 wrote:
| You prioritized app size, and that's great.
|
| People prefer Electron because it gives them a consistent
| environment across operating systems, OS versions/update
| patch numbers, browser versions etc.
|
| If you write your app to work in all possible
| combinations of the above - like you'd write a web page -
| you can use OS web view.
|
| But not everybody wants to do that because it's not as
| straight forward as just writing your app and being able
| to fully rely on your environment. Perhaps you actually
| need features that aren't universally available in the OS
| web view yet, and performance degradation because of
| polyfills is not acceptable.
|
| Also, OS web view is usually locked down more than
| Electron. It's basically a browser without the UI around
| it. Then you need to hack your own native bridge instead
| of just using whatever Electron made. I guarantee your
| version is going to be worse, you simply don't have the
| combined resources of the Electron open source project.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > People prefer Electron because it gives them a
| consistent environment across operating systems
|
| _People_ don't prefer an application that takes up more
| memory, drains battery life and that's not consistent
| with their other apps. _Developers_ may prefer it.
|
| How many users are switching back and forth between
| Windows and Macs?
|
| The same applies in the other direction. When I was a
| Windows user, I hated the iTunes interface because it
| felt like a bad Mac port. I was a former Mac (and
| current) Mac user so I could tell.
|
| Even before that, the Windows QuickTime Player felt like
| a bad port.
| throwaway49496 wrote:
| If the users don't want an Electron app, they won't use
| it and the developers will feel the need to change their
| ways.
|
| Software development is not just about the users. Many
| Electron apps are single dev ventures. It's not easy to
| maintain multiple different platform specific apps even
| for a large enterprise. The larger the app the more
| difficult it becomes.
| palata wrote:
| > they won't use it
|
| Except for all those popular Electron apps with lock-in
| effects, like Discord and Slack.
| throwaway49496 wrote:
| Seems like the users think it's better to accept the
| performance degradation than to switch apps.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > Software development is not just about the users
|
| And this says a lot about why people prefer commercial
| alternatives.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| > Just look at how reviled Electron is compared to native
| applications
|
| I don't notice any issues with Obsidian which I use every
| day.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| If your revenue is under $1m, it's only 15%. If you'd do your
| own payment processing (stripe) and tax consolidation (?), it
| would only equates to about 11%.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/app-store/small-business-program...
| [deleted]
| sandGorgon wrote:
| very interesting times. a few months back, i started contributing
| to a mobile browser app (OPEN-SOURCE) that has an integrated
| wallet. I think browsers are going to have many more usecases
| than just browsing the web.
|
| Payments is going to be a key enabler - web2 or web3.
|
| https://github.com/wootzapp/wootz-browser
| ChickenNugger wrote:
| I think for this to catch on, they're going to have to make a
| real business unit out of it. People are accustomed to their
| money in the bank being managed by humans that they can call. A
| wallet on one browser on one device isn't going to cut it for
| the layman.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| not focusing on money. mostly NFT and web3 usecases.
| return_to_monke wrote:
| > no extensions
|
| why is that a feature and not a drawback?
| sandGorgon wrote:
| target demographic.
|
| its not meant for you. its meant for mobile-only, non-tech-
| savvy people. Think Asia or even the American Midwest.
|
| Not for the HN crowd TBH.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: I hate Safari, it's slow, and I refuse to use
| for anything.
| shultays wrote:
| Is Apple updating their policy or what? What is the point of this
| if it is not going to be released
| gabelschlager wrote:
| Due to upcoming EU regulations they most likely have to update
| their policy.
| rektide wrote:
| Brilliant move. Show what is possible. Let individual developers
| download the source & build themselves, and run it. Make it real,
| make the only obstruction a legal one, one that is increasingly
| full of holes as a small exterior/outside hobbyist community
| bypasses the longstanding trenchancy Apple has dug, has moated
| themselves in with. Give people that first whiff of freedom.
|
| And if someday hopefully some of the anti-trust anti-competitive
| legal moats do get torn down, Google will be ready.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| This has already happened. The walls have already been torn
| down. The EU's Digital Markets Act has made it mandatory for
| Apple to implement those changes by Q1 2024
| voakbasda wrote:
| Anyone care to speculate as to whether Apple will take that
| opportunity to permit users in other regions that same
| liberty? Personally, I would not bet on that outcome without
| similar legislation forcing the issue.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| They probably will. Google "Brussels Effect"
| voakbasda wrote:
| I can see how that applies for hardware manufacturers
| that don't want to build multiple versions of their
| products; however, software can easily be region locked
| using a simple flag without the same economic
| consequences.
| yyyk wrote:
| Note this already happened with some software, e.g.
| Windows EU editions excluding Windows Media Player.
| cute_boi wrote:
| I will just ask somebody to purchase iphone from Eu.
| foepys wrote:
| You might also need an EU iCloud account and an EU SIM.
|
| There are many ways Apple could region lock it and the
| source of the iPhone would probably the least likely.
| sofixa wrote:
| The issue with that is the resulting negative PR. And of
| course other countries are taking notes and sometimes use
| EU regulations for inspiration.
| satellites wrote:
| Most people don't give a shit about 3rd party app stores.
| I doubt 90% of iPhone users even know this is happening.
| (I say this as an iPhone user myself). So, I'm not sure
| negative PR is that much of a motivator.
| hortense wrote:
| No chance of Apple implementing this outside of the EU if
| they are not forced to.
|
| They are getting billions from Google every year because
| Safari is the most used browser on iOS, and they will do
| what is necessary to make this last for as long as
| possible.
| krrrh wrote:
| Chrome for iOS switching to Blink from WebKit will have
| next to zero effect on Safari's share of iOS browsing.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Only if you assume that the change will not cause people
| to switch from Safari to alternative browsers, eg Chrome.
| lxgr wrote:
| As far as I know, JIT is disabled on iOS at the moment, so one
| thing developers would notice right away is abysmal JavaScript
| performance. (Early versions of V8 didn't even have an
| interpreting or bytecode path, to my knowledge, so it wouldn't
| even run without major modifications!)
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Even if Firefox and Chrome used Gecko and Blink with JSC,
| that's still a marked improvement from the state of things
| today. Most of what I dislike about Safari are its weird
| rendering issues, which would be solved.
| isodev wrote:
| Just to be clear though, you will just be getting
| Blink/Gecko's rendering issues instead.
| rektide wrote:
| Ideally or potentially Firefoxes or potentially say
| Servos or any other browser of choice. As opposed to the
| very-low not-so-common denominator of this anti-invested
| in naughty stepchild of the Apple 30% rent-stealing
| profit-garden that is modern Apple.
| rattray wrote:
| You'd be getting the ability to choose which rendering
| issues you went to experience for any given website,
| which is actually quite useful.
| CitizenKane wrote:
| Which is true, but they're much less prominent overall.
| Mobile Safari is quirky to say the least and is truly the
| IE of the present day.
| isodev wrote:
| Are they really? Safari is currently leading Interop 2022
| https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022
| lxgr wrote:
| Given how vast the modern web specifications are, you
| could really be 99% compliant but provide a pretty
| mediocre experience to your users, or vice versa.
|
| For example, I use Firefox as my main browser, and the
| lack of e.g. proper WebAuthN support on macOS has a much,
| much higher impact to me (and is making me consider
| switching), whereas I couldn't care less about e.g.
| WebUSB (which I do occasionally use, but I'm fine
| switching to Chrome for that use case).
|
| To get an accurate picture, you'd have to somehow weigh
| all of these various standards and features in a way that
| not only accurately presents actual users, but also their
| relative importance (i.e. do websites trying to use
| something fail gracefully, or do I effectively have to
| use another browser to get achieve what I'm there for).
| saagarjha wrote:
| That's not how it works; to use JavaScriptCore's JIT you
| need to load up a WebKit web view (which runs in a separate
| process).
| bastawhiz wrote:
| That's objectively untrue. Even the most basic Google
| search shows that this is untrue.
| lxgr wrote:
| Can you show a source, then? I'm also pretty sure JIT
| (i.e. write+execute) permissions are enforced at the
| process level.
|
| Some apps work around this by running JavaScript in an
| invisible WebKit view, but that approach has IPC
| overhead, so is probably only worth it for processes that
| interact with the UI and rest of the app infrequently
| (which is the opposite of what you'd want from a JS
| engine interacting with the DOM).
|
| a-Shell uses it for performant WASM execution of CLI
| executables, for example.
| rattray wrote:
| Stupid question: does JSC have a JIT?
| sophiebits wrote:
| Yes. On iOS you can only use the JIT through an out-of-
| process web browser (WKWebView or SFSafariViewController)
| so it's likely Firefox and Chrome would use non-JIT in-
| process engine (even if that were JSC!) unless the JIT
| restriction is lifted.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I'm sure they'll just use their own bytecode
| interpreters. Blink in particular has one that they've
| worked pretty hard on.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >so one thing developers would notice right away is abysmal
| JavaScript performance
|
| That's actually a good thing! If a substantial chunk of iOS
| users would use third-party browsers without JS JIT, then
| webdevs would be forced to better optimize their sites,
| because the perf ceiling would be lower on these browsers.
| This then would lead to stellar performance for those who
| stick with Safari which _does_ have JIT! Kind of how using an
| M1 is so good today, because there 's still a large number of
| Intel machines out there, so devs can't yet afford releasing
| software that's only usable on M1 from a cpu/energy point of
| view.
| kgeist wrote:
| >performance
|
| In 2021, Microsoft added the "no JIT" option to Edge for
| additional security [0], and here's the quote in their blog
| post:
|
| >We see that most tests see no changes with JIT disabled.
| There are a few improvements and regressions, but most
| tests remain unchanged. Anecdotally, we find that users
| with JIT disabled rarely notice a difference in their daily
| browsing
|
| [0] https://microsoftedge.github.io/edgevr/posts/Super-
| Duper-Sec...
| lxgr wrote:
| Ah, good point - Apple has this too, on iOS [1]!
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/07/apple-expands-
| commitm...
| lxgr wrote:
| Not sure if you're kidding, but if not - why would users
| switch in the first place, if that means abysmal
| performance?
| meindnoch wrote:
| Because Google would be pushing it hard? E.g. when you
| click a link in the YouTube app, it doesn't open it in
| Safari, rather it shows you a "helpful" dark-pattern
| prompt about opening it with:
|
| - Chrome (mind you, I don't have it installed, so this
| would send me to the AppStore)
|
| - the "Google" app (again, not installed)
|
| - Safari (which _does not_ open Safari, rather an in-app
| WKWebView, so that Sundar can still milk your precious
| eyeballs)
|
| - and finally at the bottom the "Default browser app"
| (this is what you want)
|
| Of course, there's no setting to save this choice once
| and for all, so this is done each and every time you try
| opening a link in the YouTube app. Wait, actually, I'm
| 99% sure it would suddenly remember your choice if you
| had installed one of their browsers. From that moment
| they would duly open all links in Chrome/Google, without
| this annoying prompt.
|
| I bet every Google app does this on iOS to get you
| install their crap. Disgusting practice.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| This and the ads is why I use YouTube in Safari now.
|
| It's annoying, as websites always have worse UX than
| native apps.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| > Of course, there's no setting to save this choice once
| and for all, so this is done each and every time you try
| opening a link in the YouTube app.
|
| To be clear, the one in GMail does have a "remember this"
| setting, and _it doesn 't work_.
| saagarjha wrote:
| "Safari" has always opened in Safari for me.
| enkrs wrote:
| They're AB testing. Safari used to open Safari for me,
| but with a new phone now I too get the menu as described
| above.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Google is incredibly aggressive in promoting Chrome yes,
| but every time I've seen "Safari" as an option in a
| Google app it isn't WKWebView, but SFSafariViewController
| which is for all intents and purposes real Safari -- it's
| essentially an out-of-process Safari tab with its own
| separate cookies, storage, etc. Apps using it can't snoop
| on your browsing session and they can't dig around in
| your cookies, etc from standalone Safari.
| kergonath wrote:
| It'd be useful to see the difference clearly as a user.
| Personally I try really hard not to use any in-app
| browser because I have no clue how trustworthy the
| developer is (except for Facebook and Google, for which
| the answer is "absolutely not").
| saagarjha wrote:
| SFSafariViewController is very distinct. Apps can't
| really change its UI at all.
| liuliu wrote:
| I think that you just need a special entitlement to enable
| w+x page. I could be wrong though, haven't dug too deep in
| this.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| no
| rektide wrote:
| Hope so. There should be some developer capability
| somewhere. And we should build for the reasonable good
| future, & show whats possible. Not what we can mete from
| the iron mailed fist of Cupertino in the real world if this
| or that, but what actual good is.
|
| It'd be a mean spirited system to simply mark everything
| no-execute, always forever in any env. But that'd be
| distinct Apple flavored. Think Different, R.I.P..
| dmitriid wrote:
| > And we should build for the reasonable good future, &
| show whats possible.
|
| Android is 70% worldwide market share. Chrome is 80%.
|
| What's stopping you from showing us this good future?
| Where are these glorious web apps?
| lxgr wrote:
| That's only officially available for macOS, I believe: http
| s://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...
|
| I've seen some reports of it also becoming available for
| iOS, but it seems to come and go between minor version
| upgrades and I'm not sure what the current status is.
| saagarjha wrote:
| It's not available for iOS and never has been.
| lxgr wrote:
| Maybe not officially, as I mentioned, but it does seem to
| have been available at least for one minor version:
| https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/06/ios-14-2-brings-jit-
| compilati...
|
| Might have been a bug; might have been a feature
| available earlier than planned.
| saagarjha wrote:
| It's a bug.
| jfoster wrote:
| I don't think Mozilla & Google both start working on iOS
| browser engines just to show what's possible. They might be
| speculatively developing these, but I think it's definitely
| based on an expectation that they have a really good chance of
| shipping these browser engines.
| the_duke wrote:
| There is some important information missing: recent EU
| legislation ( Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act , aka
| DMA and DSA) will force the big providers to open up their
| platforms.
|
| That includes chat service interoperability, allowing app side
| loading and alternative app stores, .... and a mandate to not
| restrict any significant functionality to first party only
| solutions, like JITs on iOS.
|
| So this will become reality soon, at least in the EU.
|
| The interesting thing will be if Apple opens up globally, or if
| they restrict this regionally.
|
| ps: companies will definitely delay and fight opening up however
| they can, but the regulation at least avoids many problems that
| GDPR had and should be easier to enforce.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Can anyone explain how chat interoperability could work while
| maintaining meaningful encryption?
| weberer wrote:
| You send your friend your public key. He sends you his public
| key. You can now chat over any protocol as long as you
| encrypt the payload using your keys.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography
| Kbelicius wrote:
| I don't know but at least now will find out.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > meaningful encryption
|
| I don't think that was table stakes for SMS, iMessage or RCS.
| "Encryption", with the caveat that all first-world law
| enforcement can peek inside if they want, is not meaningful.
| Sorry.
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