4 ms·

Browsers on iOS are crippled: no dev tools, no view as desktop, and no alternatives to Webkit. The degree to which this is true is pretty egregious. It has bee

Browsers on iOS are crippled: no dev tools, no view as desktop, and no alternatives to Webkit. The degree to which this is true is pretty egregious. It has been since the beginning. How is it that Apple can keep browsers on iOS this locked down, while there was some sort of anti-trust ruling against Microsoft favoring their own browser on Windows?

Jtsummers 8y ago
Apple doesn’t have the same market share Microsoft had at the time of the 1990s anti-trust case. They haven’t exercised the same level of anticompetitive and monopolistic practices. Get them to 90% of the market share. Get them to cripple other companies by withholding (or threatening to withhold) OEM-priced licenses if they work with a competitor. Get them to drop billions on a broken web browser to undercut their competitors (they lost money on IE in order to cut into Netscape). Then we can go after Apple for their browser (and other) policies.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Get them to 90% of the market share. This is where Microsoft blew it. Instead of taking over all the business desktops in the world, they should've left it just at a huge fraction, but got their customers into their own tightly controlled walled garden. Get them to cripple other companies by withholding (or threatening to withhold) OEM-priced licenses if they work with a competitor. I'm reminded of how they'll not let you publish your app if it uses a different browser engine.
  - Jtsummers 8y ago
    Apple does not have such a sufficient hold on the market that anyone has to target their users for customers. Android has the majority of the market share for mobile devices by a pretty decent margin. Apple has not gone out of its way like MS did to block people from entering the general market (like MS did with BeOS and Netscape), let alone the market on their system. BeOS was going to be sold by Compaq. MS told Compaq that they'd have to pay the higher, direct-to-customer, cost for Windows licenses if they also sold BeOS, as opposed to the OEM license cost. Compaq nixed the deal with Be, because they couldn't afford the hit to their profit margin (PC margins were slim then, though they got tighter in the future). MS spent the money to develop IE, and then a billion dollars marketing it. And they gave it away for free. Why? Because Netscape offered the potential (though still in its infancy) for web apps that would reduce/eliminate the market for native applications, which MS relied on. Not because MS sold applications (they did, and do, of course), but because they sold the OS that most native apps ran on. Apple may eat up a lot of profits (30% cut) and restrict a lot of options (can't use third party browser engines, limits on use of embedded languages and side loading applications). But they aren't pulling off half the shit MS did, and have nowhere the influence to do it if they wanted to (w.r.t. market share).
blakesterz 8y ago
How to request the desktop version of a website in mobile Safari... Visit the affected site in Safari. Tap and hold the Refresh button in the URL bar. Tap Request Desktop Site. The website will then reload as its desktop version.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  The most amazing thing about your comment, is that it appears that you think it's a reply to my comment.
  - sctb 8y ago
    You're doing the uninformative rudeness thing again. Please don't.
- Bluecobra 8y ago
  In many cases I found that this doesn’t seem to work. For example, reddit.com will only load the mobile version.
- _asummers 8y ago
  That’s not what they referred to. That’s still loading the built in version of WebKit. On Android for example I can download Firefox and Chrome and they run on their own rendering engines.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    They said both: "no view as desktop, and no alternatives to Webkit" It has view as desktop, it doesn't have alternatives to webkit.
    - nsxwolf 8y ago
      It doesn't work for many responsive websites since you can't spoof your screen metrics.
irrational 8y ago
I imagine it is because the percentage of people using iOS is so small that it can't be considered a monopoly or worthy of anti-trust by any stretch of the imagination.
geofft 8y ago
Side note, several of these restrictions are App Store restrictions and not OS restrictions - i.e., with Xcode but without a jailbroken device you can run custom browsers just fine. But there's no market / user base because Apple limits how many devices a developer can install test versions of apps on, so nobody has bothered to build such a browser, as far as I know. I'd love to see an open-source project that helped you get set up with Xcode on your own device (or your favorite cloud Mac host... I wonder if you can make Travis work for this, honestly) with your own developer key, so you can build non-App-Store permitted apps for your own small number of iOS devices and not run into the private distribution limit.
- Nullabillity 8y ago
  That's a distinction without a difference, since (as you mentioned) iOS is set up to discourage third-party distribution at every turn.
spdustin 8y ago
Because iOS only runs on Apple devices, that’s my interpretation.
coldtea 8y ago
>How is it that Apple can keep browsers on iOS this locked down, while there was some sort of anti-trust ruling against Microsoft favoring their own browser on Windows? Windows was a monopoly. Back then Windows was 96%, Mac 4% and the rest OSes negligible. OS X is hardly 40% of the market (and no, you can't have a "monopoly" on your own platform, as in "but Apple sells 100% of iOS devices"). But even the near 100% of Windows wasn't the actual problem, even with MS bundling the browser. What got MS in trouble with antitrust laws was both having the monopoly AND abusing it by forcing vendors (Dell and co) into special deals.
kitsunesoba 8y ago
I’ll start supporting support for third party web engines on iOS when Google and Mozilla start putting efficiency first and whizz-bang features second. I have zero desire to be forced into using Chrome on my iPad and iPhone and taking a hit to battery life because front end web devs couldn’t be bothered to support Safari properly, which will most assuredly happen shortly after thirty party engine support had been added.
- arvinsim 8y ago
  How does allowing Chrome on iPad/iPhone equate to being forced to use them?
  - kitsunesoba 8y ago
    Because if they’re available, it’s then possible for web developers to use the old “go download Chrome to use this site” cop out and then stop supporting mobile Safari. After a while, so many sites will fail to work properly in Safari that the only choice I’ll have if I want a smooth browsing experience is to give in and use Chrome. It’ll be like the 90’s with IE except this time the monopoly browser is “good” so the monopoly is somehow OK. You see this happening with sites and web apps not intended for mobile use already. Once WebKit is no longer the only option on iOS, Chrome will take over entirely.

Jtsummers 8y ago

Apple doesn’t have the same market share Microsoft had at the time of the 1990s anti-trust case. They haven’t exercised the same level of anticompetitive and monopolistic practices. Get them to 90% of the market share. Get them to cripple other companies by withholding (or threatening to withhold) OEM-priced licenses if they work with a competitor. Get them to drop billions on a broken web browser to undercut their competitors (they lost money on IE in order to cut into Netscape). Then we can go after Apple for their browser (and other) policies.

stcredzero 8y ago
Get them to 90% of the market share. This is where Microsoft blew it. Instead of taking over all the business desktops in the world, they should've left it just at a huge fraction, but got their customers into their own tightly controlled walled garden. Get them to cripple other companies by withholding (or threatening to withhold) OEM-priced licenses if they work with a competitor. I'm reminded of how they'll not let you publish your app if it uses a different browser engine.
- Jtsummers 8y ago
  Apple does not have such a sufficient hold on the market that anyone has to target their users for customers. Android has the majority of the market share for mobile devices by a pretty decent margin. Apple has not gone out of its way like MS did to block people from entering the general market (like MS did with BeOS and Netscape), let alone the market on their system. BeOS was going to be sold by Compaq. MS told Compaq that they'd have to pay the higher, direct-to-customer, cost for Windows licenses if they also sold BeOS, as opposed to the OEM license cost. Compaq nixed the deal with Be, because they couldn't afford the hit to their profit margin (PC margins were slim then, though they got tighter in the future). MS spent the money to develop IE, and then a billion dollars marketing it. And they gave it away for free. Why? Because Netscape offered the potential (though still in its infancy) for web apps that would reduce/eliminate the market for native applications, which MS relied on. Not because MS sold applications (they did, and do, of course), but because they sold the OS that most native apps ran on. Apple may eat up a lot of profits (30% cut) and restrict a lot of options (can't use third party browser engines, limits on use of embedded languages and side loading applications). But they aren't pulling off half the shit MS did, and have nowhere the influence to do it if they wanted to (w.r.t. market share).

blakesterz 8y ago

How to request the desktop version of a website in mobile Safari... Visit the affected site in Safari. Tap and hold the Refresh button in the URL bar. Tap Request Desktop Site. The website will then reload as its desktop version.

stcredzero 8y ago
The most amazing thing about your comment, is that it appears that you think it's a reply to my comment.
- sctb 8y ago
  You're doing the uninformative rudeness thing again. Please don't.
Bluecobra 8y ago
In many cases I found that this doesn’t seem to work. For example, reddit.com will only load the mobile version.
_asummers 8y ago
That’s not what they referred to. That’s still loading the built in version of WebKit. On Android for example I can download Firefox and Chrome and they run on their own rendering engines.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  They said both: "no view as desktop, and no alternatives to Webkit" It has view as desktop, it doesn't have alternatives to webkit.
  - nsxwolf 8y ago
    It doesn't work for many responsive websites since you can't spoof your screen metrics.

irrational 8y ago

I imagine it is because the percentage of people using iOS is so small that it can't be considered a monopoly or worthy of anti-trust by any stretch of the imagination.

geofft 8y ago

Side note, several of these restrictions are App Store restrictions and not OS restrictions - i.e., with Xcode but without a jailbroken device you can run custom browsers just fine. But there's no market / user base because Apple limits how many devices a developer can install test versions of apps on, so nobody has bothered to build such a browser, as far as I know. I'd love to see an open-source project that helped you get set up with Xcode on your own device (or your favorite cloud Mac host... I wonder if you can make Travis work for this, honestly) with your own developer key, so you can build non-App-Store permitted apps for your own small number of iOS devices and not run into the private distribution limit.

Nullabillity 8y ago
That's a distinction without a difference, since (as you mentioned) iOS is set up to discourage third-party distribution at every turn.

spdustin 8y ago

Because iOS only runs on Apple devices, that’s my interpretation.

coldtea 8y ago

>How is it that Apple can keep browsers on iOS this locked down, while there was some sort of anti-trust ruling against Microsoft favoring their own browser on Windows? Windows was a monopoly. Back then Windows was 96%, Mac 4% and the rest OSes negligible. OS X is hardly 40% of the market (and no, you can't have a "monopoly" on your own platform, as in "but Apple sells 100% of iOS devices"). But even the near 100% of Windows wasn't the actual problem, even with MS bundling the browser. What got MS in trouble with antitrust laws was both having the monopoly AND abusing it by forcing vendors (Dell and co) into special deals.

kitsunesoba 8y ago

I’ll start supporting support for third party web engines on iOS when Google and Mozilla start putting efficiency first and whizz-bang features second. I have zero desire to be forced into using Chrome on my iPad and iPhone and taking a hit to battery life because front end web devs couldn’t be bothered to support Safari properly, which will most assuredly happen shortly after thirty party engine support had been added.

arvinsim 8y ago
How does allowing Chrome on iPad/iPhone equate to being forced to use them?
- kitsunesoba 8y ago
  Because if they’re available, it’s then possible for web developers to use the old “go download Chrome to use this site” cop out and then stop supporting mobile Safari. After a while, so many sites will fail to work properly in Safari that the only choice I’ll have if I want a smooth browsing experience is to give in and use Chrome. It’ll be like the 90’s with IE except this time the monopoly browser is “good” so the monopoly is somehow OK. You see this happening with sites and web apps not intended for mobile use already. Once WebKit is no longer the only option on iOS, Chrome will take over entirely.