3 ms·

Even if Safari catches up, everyone is still forced to use it on their iPads and iPhones as their mobile browser rendering engine and no competition is allowed

Even if Safari catches up, everyone is still forced to use it on their iPads and iPhones as their mobile browser rendering engine and no competition is allowed in that space. So, it will still be "the new IE" but worse than the old IE since competition is locked out at the OS level.

shmerl 10y ago
Indeed, that's a nasty problem. One of the reasons I have little respect for Apple.
jms18 10y ago
> and no competition is allowed in that space. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ios/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ios/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chrome-web-browser-by-google/id535886823 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chrome-web-browser-by-google... http://www.opera.com/mobile/mini/iphone http://www.opera.com/mobile/mini/iphone I cannot agree with "no competition is allowed in that space." Edit: I just saw the remark for "mobile browser rendering engine" -- that is true.
- shmerl 10y ago
  > I cannot agree with "no competition is allowed in that space." Since it uses Apple's engine underneath, you can't work around their ban on free codecs in the browser for example. Same goes for support for multiple HTML5 features (how about MSE for starters?). So it is clearly anti-competitive.
- Keats 10y ago
  They still have to use Safari behind the scene.
- bad_user 10y ago
  Not being allowed to run your own engine actually has deep ramifications. For example Firefox on iOS cannot support plugins, whereas on Android it does since the beginning. It also means that Firefox cannot compete in supported web standards or performance or whatever you can think of. And once upon a time these alternative browsers weren't even allowed to run the same JS engine as Safari, which meant they were forced to be slower. This changed fairly recently, somewhere around iOS 9. Also other browsers on iOS are more restricted than Safari. For example those Safari content blockers don't work in Firefox. So given Firefox's inability to provide plugins, this means that in Firefox you are forced to load and see annoying ads, whereas in Safari you don't have to. On Android, Firefox is actually a good alternative to Chrome, albeit less well integrated, but then I can't imagine using a mobile browser without uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, etc. But on iOS the alternative browsers like Firefox are nothing more than dumb shells around restricted functionality. I'm using Firefox on all of my desktops (MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu), I'm using Firefox on my Android device. Guess which browser I'm using on my iPhone? ;-)

shmerl 10y ago

Indeed, that's a nasty problem. One of the reasons I have little respect for Apple.

jms18 10y ago

> and no competition is allowed in that space. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ios/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ios/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chrome-web-browser-by-google/id535886823 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chrome-web-browser-by-google... http://www.opera.com/mobile/mini/iphone http://www.opera.com/mobile/mini/iphone I cannot agree with "no competition is allowed in that space." Edit: I just saw the remark for "mobile browser rendering engine" -- that is true.

shmerl 10y ago
> I cannot agree with "no competition is allowed in that space." Since it uses Apple's engine underneath, you can't work around their ban on free codecs in the browser for example. Same goes for support for multiple HTML5 features (how about MSE for starters?). So it is clearly anti-competitive.
Keats 10y ago
They still have to use Safari behind the scene.
bad_user 10y ago
Not being allowed to run your own engine actually has deep ramifications. For example Firefox on iOS cannot support plugins, whereas on Android it does since the beginning. It also means that Firefox cannot compete in supported web standards or performance or whatever you can think of. And once upon a time these alternative browsers weren't even allowed to run the same JS engine as Safari, which meant they were forced to be slower. This changed fairly recently, somewhere around iOS 9. Also other browsers on iOS are more restricted than Safari. For example those Safari content blockers don't work in Firefox. So given Firefox's inability to provide plugins, this means that in Firefox you are forced to load and see annoying ads, whereas in Safari you don't have to. On Android, Firefox is actually a good alternative to Chrome, albeit less well integrated, but then I can't imagine using a mobile browser without uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, etc. But on iOS the alternative browsers like Firefox are nothing more than dumb shells around restricted functionality. I'm using Firefox on all of my desktops (MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu), I'm using Firefox on my Android device. Guess which browser I'm using on my iPhone? ;-)