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The fact that Safari is required to support iOS is the only reason site owners can't switch entirely to Google-proprietary standards. As soon as alternative eng

The fact that Safari is required to support iOS is the only reason site owners can't switch entirely to Google-proprietary standards. As soon as alternative engines in iOS is allowed, web standards are over, and your Firefox will stop being adequate.

heavyset_go 5y ago
Doubt it, considering that Firefox single-handedly defeated the IE monopoly and no one was forced to use it like they're forced to use Safari.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  This is an entirely fictional history of the world. IE was never defeated on the scale we are currently forced to suffer Chrome. Firefox took some consumer market share (until Chrome took it), but most businesses stayed on IE for an extremely long time, until enterprise apps left Java/ActiveX only a few years ago for more HTML5-based design. Then Chrome took a large chunk of enterprise, and finally Microsoft killed their own child by forcing everyone over to the new Chrome forked Edge. Comparatively, Chrome controls the majority of consumer, business, and mobile, and the sole defense against a completely proprietary web platform is Safari being required on iOS.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > IE was never defeated on the scale we are currently forced to suffer Chrome IE actually had a much larger scale the Chrome does, as IE had 95% of the browser marketshare in 2004. Just because IE existed for years afterwards, despite only having a minuscule amount of marketshare, doesn't mean it wasn't defeated, either.
    - olliej 5y ago
      You're literally saying Firefox defeated the IE monopoly, and then turning around and saying IE had 95% market share. "Just because IE existed for years afterwards, despite only having a minuscule amount of marketshare, doesn't mean it wasn't defeated, either." Lets go look at what actual numbers were: 2008: IE: 69% Firefox: 26% Chrome: 0% Safari: 2-3%? 2009/2010 (Peak Firefox): IE: 55% Firefox: 32% Chrome: >4% Safari: <4% I'm going off graphs rather than tables so the numbers are a bit off. 2012 (Peak safari): Firefox: 24% IE: 34% Chrome: 32%: Safari: 8% 2018 (Edge Becomes a chromium wrapper): Firefox: 12% IE: 6% Edge: 4% Chrome: 69% (Hey that's where IE was!) Safari: 3% October 2021 (From chart on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers) Firefox: 6-8% IE: / Edge: 12% Chrome: 73% Safari: 3% Actually just chrome: 85% Opening up iOS is not going to magically make Firefox popularity boom, any more than android, if people install a different browser it will be chrome. And once that is possible, Google will push Chrome on all of their properties. Just like they do on desktop. To reinforce the amount of power google has. No other browser managed to kill IE6, not even IE>6. Then one day Google literally just decided that they would stop support IE6 on YouTube. Every person who came to YouTube with IE6 was greeted with “your browser is not supported. Update to a newer one. Chrome is a browser by Google that is designed from the ground up for security and performance. You can get it here”. They rapidly rolled that change to their other properties, and by the power of controlling all the largest and most popular sites on the web they killed IE6 in like 6 months. The entire existence of other browsers is dependent on what Google does with their dominance in web content. I don’t know about Firefox, but in Safari when I go to pretty much any google property it’s aggressively marketing Chrome, and reasonably high % of the time. Google.com itself, possibly 100% of the time? At the same time google has actively pushed back against most privacy efforts on the web, regularly nominates new standards that have the sole purpose of supporting their advertising business, etc
      - hedora 5y ago
        You start in 2008, so you skip the time period where IE had 95% share, and netscape communicator seemed as good as dead. Chrome isn't there yet. I remember how bad the web was with netscape / early firefox.
- hollerith 5y ago
  The IE team was being hobbled by MS management out of a desire to prevent as much as possible the movement of apps from Windows to the web.
ComradePhil 5y ago
Meh! Chromium is the standard, not what Google builds on top of it. There's Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi etc. which will continue to exist even if Google suddenly disappears. Besides, Apple maintains Safari the way it does for no other reason than for disallowing people from building more functional open web apps so that to reach iOS users, one has to build native iOS apps.

heavyset_go 5y ago

Doubt it, considering that Firefox single-handedly defeated the IE monopoly and no one was forced to use it like they're forced to use Safari.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
This is an entirely fictional history of the world. IE was never defeated on the scale we are currently forced to suffer Chrome. Firefox took some consumer market share (until Chrome took it), but most businesses stayed on IE for an extremely long time, until enterprise apps left Java/ActiveX only a few years ago for more HTML5-based design. Then Chrome took a large chunk of enterprise, and finally Microsoft killed their own child by forcing everyone over to the new Chrome forked Edge. Comparatively, Chrome controls the majority of consumer, business, and mobile, and the sole defense against a completely proprietary web platform is Safari being required on iOS.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > IE was never defeated on the scale we are currently forced to suffer Chrome IE actually had a much larger scale the Chrome does, as IE had 95% of the browser marketshare in 2004. Just because IE existed for years afterwards, despite only having a minuscule amount of marketshare, doesn't mean it wasn't defeated, either.
  - olliej 5y ago
    You're literally saying Firefox defeated the IE monopoly, and then turning around and saying IE had 95% market share. "Just because IE existed for years afterwards, despite only having a minuscule amount of marketshare, doesn't mean it wasn't defeated, either." Lets go look at what actual numbers were: 2008: IE: 69% Firefox: 26% Chrome: 0% Safari: 2-3%? 2009/2010 (Peak Firefox): IE: 55% Firefox: 32% Chrome: >4% Safari: <4% I'm going off graphs rather than tables so the numbers are a bit off. 2012 (Peak safari): Firefox: 24% IE: 34% Chrome: 32%: Safari: 8% 2018 (Edge Becomes a chromium wrapper): Firefox: 12% IE: 6% Edge: 4% Chrome: 69% (Hey that's where IE was!) Safari: 3% October 2021 (From chart on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers) Firefox: 6-8% IE: / Edge: 12% Chrome: 73% Safari: 3% Actually just chrome: 85% Opening up iOS is not going to magically make Firefox popularity boom, any more than android, if people install a different browser it will be chrome. And once that is possible, Google will push Chrome on all of their properties. Just like they do on desktop. To reinforce the amount of power google has. No other browser managed to kill IE6, not even IE>6. Then one day Google literally just decided that they would stop support IE6 on YouTube. Every person who came to YouTube with IE6 was greeted with “your browser is not supported. Update to a newer one. Chrome is a browser by Google that is designed from the ground up for security and performance. You can get it here”. They rapidly rolled that change to their other properties, and by the power of controlling all the largest and most popular sites on the web they killed IE6 in like 6 months. The entire existence of other browsers is dependent on what Google does with their dominance in web content. I don’t know about Firefox, but in Safari when I go to pretty much any google property it’s aggressively marketing Chrome, and reasonably high % of the time. Google.com itself, possibly 100% of the time? At the same time google has actively pushed back against most privacy efforts on the web, regularly nominates new standards that have the sole purpose of supporting their advertising business, etc
    - hedora 5y ago
      You start in 2008, so you skip the time period where IE had 95% share, and netscape communicator seemed as good as dead. Chrome isn't there yet. I remember how bad the web was with netscape / early firefox.
hollerith 5y ago
The IE team was being hobbled by MS management out of a desire to prevent as much as possible the movement of apps from Windows to the web.

ComradePhil 5y ago

Meh! Chromium is the standard, not what Google builds on top of it. There's Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi etc. which will continue to exist even if Google suddenly disappears. Besides, Apple maintains Safari the way it does for no other reason than for disallowing people from building more functional open web apps so that to reach iOS users, one has to build native iOS apps.