3 ms·

Allowing other browser engines would also mean there'd be a lot more room for vulnerabilities that Apple has no control over. That's not to say that Blink or Ge

Allowing other browser engines would also mean there'd be a lot more room for vulnerabilities that Apple has no control over. That's not to say that Blink or Gecko or whatever aren't secure, but if either of these engines introduced any kind of severe holes the consequences could be disastrous (and worse, unpatchable for that segment of folks who disable auto update). Besides that, both Firefox and Chrome on OS X are notorious for power usage issues. There's a very good likelyhood that'd be true under iOS as well and the last thing Apple wants is a bunch of users blaming their iDevices for poor battery performance when the issue is actually web engines that are bad at rationing energy.

0x0 10y ago
Well, the horse's kinda already bolted out of the barn when they allow external scripts to be executed in game level updates or whatever. And any damage would be contained to the app in question... unless the iOS sandbox is a sieve... they do seem to have tightened it up fairly well recently though. You're right about power usage though. Even if they did allow third party engines, they wouldn't allow third party JIT compilers (much bigger attack surface, W|X memory protection is gated behind an apple-only entitlement) so those browsers would be second class citizens battery- and performance-wise for sure.