It is not a fair market since the maker of one of the browsers also owns a significant portion of the websites that people use daily. Now Google has to play nice with Safari to some extend, since the don't want to miss out on the lucrative iPhone market. Once Google can offer Chrome on iOS, they will destroy Safari with the same underhanded practices as they did to Firefox (a pattern of subtly breaking Firefox with Google products).
I don't believe that would happen, firstly Apple would fight back, and secondly the competition authorities would take action against Google.
Google is under scrutiny for its behaviour too.
You can't fight or justify anti competitive behaviour with anti competitive behaviour back.
It will be a sad day for sure.
Apple is not the company fighting for the web or browser diversity, they are the ones holding back.
Complaining about this is memetic rather than fact based.
...because Chrome is a much better browser? That's what you're trying to say?
This is why free markets work and command economies don't.
Search - I don't really see a browser specific optimization potential here.
YouTube is probably mostly app based on mobile.
Gmail and other gsuite apps are also app based on mobile.
I'd be surprised if they cared about mobile Safari support in those much or if it played a big factor.
Using the law to force Apple to run Google software would be an example of a command economy.
This is not theoretical, the playbook is obvious and has been run before, by Microsoft.
Now Firefox is declining into irrelevance. The EU Digital Markets Act demands for Apple to open up to more browsers with just cement Chrome's dominance and make Firefox even more irrelevant.
It outright prevents existence of new browsers and competition and it's a flagship examples of monopolistic corporations killing innovation and competition.
You yourself admitted that free market was required for current iPhone browser to exist and Apple locked out free market.
You're now demanding to be forever locked into an inferior corporate owned product because you're utterly afraid that the better product would win. It's insane.
> You can't fight or justify anti competitive behaviour with anti competitive behaviour back.
The way it seems to me, for this case, is that those two "anti-"s cancel out and leave you with direct competition?
No it doesn't. Tens of new browsers appear on multiple platforms every year, in parallel with Apple's approach. All of them fail to gain significant market share, and most of them are based on Blink.
The bigger obstacle for browser innovation is the complexity of making a modern browser. That complexity is actually partly driven by developers demanding constant feature expansion in browsers. It's been great having web apps explode, but also that makes browsers fiendishly complex.
Can you give an example of a G-suite (or any google product) feature that does not work in Firefox?
YouTube also had an interesting example of the problem: they shipped some code using Chrome's early draft of what became Web Components. Firefox and Safari implemented the standard version, but there was a LONG period where YouTube used a very slow polyfill instead of upgrading to the standard version, causing Chrome to appear to be faster because it wasn't all of that extra JavaScript. If YouTube was an independent company they would likely have fixed a poor user experience much faster.
Some of us are not. Some of us are saying "now is the wrong time to force Apple to open up its platform to other browsers". Safari on iOS is the one browser holding back Chrome from a monopoly for now. If you really want to see an open web, a more diverse web ecosystem, we have to expand the use of _other_ browsers such that there are again multiple, successful engines at the W3C; so that Google can't lock users out of their tools by forcing them to use Chrome. Only then will it be the right time to go after Apple's browser restrictions.
1. Install prompt (the user has to start with the "Add to Home Screen" command)
2. Link interception (i.e. browsing in the normal browser switching to the PWA rather than continuing normally)
3. Shared storage between the normal browser and the PWA
4. Ability to start fullscreen
5. SVG icons
6. Background sync
7. Push notifications
The rest of that is largely a list of things like "Web Bluetooth" which are non-standard Chrome features which Firefox also doesn't implement and often have significant privacy or security concerns.
Do you feel like the current state of PWA's in iOS presents a viable alternative to publishing an app for any real usecase?
As for walled monopoly - what if Apple allowed Firefox with its free extension model - what argument would you come up then? One can easily use ublock origin with Firefox, a thing Apple fears quite a bit - its by far the best ad-blocking and to certain extent tracking technology out there currently. We all know here on HN that Apple is moving to marketing more and more (currently 4 billion/year for them and growing fast), so they will never allow this unless forced by law.
Which is one of those situations where users lose and corporation wins (unless you consider ads and tracking a good thing when Apple does it, but that's... illogical to be polite).
It can’t be that afraid, because you can use the Firefox version of uBlock Origin in the WebKit-based iOS browser Orion[0] right now.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...
Extensions, as originally implemented, are a security nightmare. That's why every browser, including Firefox, is changing the way extensions work. Firefox is keeping blocking WebRequest specifically for ad blocking, but acknowledges the security risk. Apple and Chrome are removing it, which breaks uBlock Origin.
Ironically you don't need to look any further than extensions to see the impact of giving the entire web to Chrome. Firefox said they have to implement Manifest v3 because "support for MV3, by virtue of the combined share of Chromium-based browsers, will be a de facto standard for browser extensions in the foreseeable future." Imagine what Firefox would need to do if Chrome was the only other browser, with near-total market share.
GCP periodically breaks their console logins for Firefox users.
The biggest exception is Web Notifications and while that’s useful the desktop situation suggests there’s more than a little validity to the spam concerns. I would like that for a couple of sites but suspect I’d get really tired of selecting the “never allow” option in prompts.
Of course I would love to see Gecko running on iOS. I just don't like the possibility of Google's browser dominance become even stronger either. It's a hard one.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the term.
The situation is not “Apple good, Google bad” or vice versa. The benefit of the current situation is that places these two huge companies in direct opposition and competition in the browser space. Using the law to force Apple to lose would take that away and cede the entire Web to Google’s control, thereby actually creating a monopoly.
What a bullshit statement that has no basis in reality. I wish high-visibility "thought leaders" would stop spewing this bullshit (but they won't)
Safari is definitely not choking the web platform to death. It's as lively as ever.
What you want is a bunch of Chrome-only non-standards that both Safari and Mozilla vehemently oppose to, and a smattering of other bullshit features under the PWA banner that are coming to the next versions of Safari.
I understand your frustration that you can't use the browser you want on the devices you want. That is annoying. However, *now* is the wrong time to go after Apple. Get more people using other browsers on other platforms first.
Wikipedia suggests this breakdown:
> As of November 2022, Android, an operating system using the Linux kernel, is the world's most-used operating system when judged by web use. It has 42% of the global market, followed by Windows with 30%, Apple iOS with 18%, macOS with 6%, then (desktop) Linux at 1.0% also using the Linux kernel.[1][2] These numbers do not include embedded devices or game consoles.
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... )
Android and Windows make up 4x the number of iOS users on the web. When the % of Chrome users on those platforms goes down, and Firefox and others go up, to a level where any of them could temporarily steer the direction the HTML/W3C standards take, _that's_ the time to go after Apple. Until then, lean on the fence Apple are holding up for you (and getting Google to pay for).
Android and Windows make up four times the number of web users as iOS. That's almost the same ratio (Chrome:others) as browser use across the web. Get a significant proportion of those user to move onto to other browser platforms first, then go after Apple give the final 20% of users more choice.
(based on stats from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... )
With Firefox's declining usage and market share, they are essentially on life support with Google's money since they know they would be completely irrelevant without it.
It appears that [0] has not aged well at all.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
Features HN developers think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": notifications, prompt banners, link interception, Chrome-only non-standards like bluetooth etc.
Features actual users think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": actual native-like experience: responsiveness, smooth animations, polished usable and accesible controls, maintaining scroll position and location in the app, fast scrolling through large lists, no loading states for the simplest actions...
I mean, people people keep bringing up Twitter's objectively bad web app as an example of one of the best PWA apps... Have these people never seen an actual native app?
The moment Firefox implemented one of the many hardware APIs aggressively pushed and promoted by Google, they immediately discovered it was used for fingerprinting: https://twitter.com/denschub/status/1582730985778556931
Chrome doesn't even show a prompt in this case. So much for "control".
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Chrome still allows web developers to enumerate attached MIDI devices without user consent or even a notification, btw.
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