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> None of the arguments about battery life, security, or privacy were contradicted in this article. Regarding battery life, and to quote your own remark, one l

> None of the arguments about battery life, security, or privacy were contradicted in this article. Regarding battery life, and to quote your own remark, one line below this: "There's no evidence that that is true, nor has there ever been." - because no other browser was ever benchmarked / tested because there is no other browser. Regarding security: Having one single attack surface for every single iOS user is not "good security". If Safari/WebKit has a problem, every iOS user has a problem and they can't (temp) switch to an alternative. To fix it, Apple needs to roll out an entire OS update, 15 minutes downtime, reboots and all. And users tend to postpone OS updates because of it. Regarding privacy: You're saying Safari is better at privacy than Firefox, Brave, etc? We don't really know, do we? Actually, Safari on iOS has privacy / security features that Chrome, Firefox and others on iOS do not because they can't access the necessary APIs. Apple is actually undermining user privacy and security here.

otterley 5y ago
Because it is an Apple-written browser, Safari is able to use privileged libraries and JIT functionality that it denies to third-party applications. (It is very difficult to verify the security and compliance of third-party applications that are allowed to perform runtime compilation of code.) This improves performance and battery life. Other browsers would not be able to have the same ability, and so it follows they would sacrifice performance and battery life. As for the security argument, if Safari/WebKit has a problem, it is crucial for all users to apply the security fix anyway, even if a third party browser were installed - using the third-party browser might not be sufficient to avoid exploitation. The last two paragraphs seem to contradict themselves. On the one hand, you are questioning privacy; on the other, you admit that Safari on iOS has exclusive privacy and security features. Nevertheless, forbidding third-party browsers guards against the possibility that such vendors who initially have strong privacy policies might change their minds later.

otterley 5y ago

Because it is an Apple-written browser, Safari is able to use privileged libraries and JIT functionality that it denies to third-party applications. (It is very difficult to verify the security and compliance of third-party applications that are allowed to perform runtime compilation of code.) This improves performance and battery life. Other browsers would not be able to have the same ability, and so it follows they would sacrifice performance and battery life. As for the security argument, if Safari/WebKit has a problem, it is crucial for all users to apply the security fix anyway, even if a third party browser were installed - using the third-party browser might not be sufficient to avoid exploitation. The last two paragraphs seem to contradict themselves. On the one hand, you are questioning privacy; on the other, you admit that Safari on iOS has exclusive privacy and security features. Nevertheless, forbidding third-party browsers guards against the possibility that such vendors who initially have strong privacy policies might change their minds later.