16 ms·

You do see the implication of what you say: Apple produces a vastly inferior browser and only gets to maintain market share via absolute, monopolistic control o

by kjksf 4y ago

You do see the implication of what you say: Apple produces a vastly inferior browser and only gets to maintain market share via absolute, monopolistic control over their OS. You clearly believe that if they were forced to compete on equal terms with Chrome, they would loose. Do explain how forcing inferior browser on iOS users is better than Chrome winning on merits? The road to better products has always been competition. Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla can, and do, compete with Chrome. Apple not allowing competition is the root of all evil. Neither Apple nor Google spends money on developing browser out of the goodness of their heart. In a battle of two evil corporations I'll side with the one that's making a better product. And in web browsers, it's Google.

nwienert 4y ago
Switched to Safari a couple years ago and haven’t looked back. Chrome feels like a dinosaur and I miss it only for the dev tools. Sorry to break it to you, but Safari is the better browser. I’m glad they limit the engine choice. At least apples authoritarian policies are limited to their own platforms, meanwhile Google is quickly fencing off the web for itself in pure EEE style, with new “standards” flying out as fast as they can tweet them.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Sorry to break it to you, but Safari is the better browser. unless you are in the 92% of the World that does not use Apple HW for computing and/or the 87% of the World that does not use an iPhone.
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  > Sorry to break it to you, but Safari is the better browser. > I’m glad they limit the engine choice. Why is that necessary if Safari is the better browser anyway?
  - jalfresi 4y ago
    Because the browser market is not a free market; both Apple and Google leverage their existing positions in other markets to promote their browsers.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    If only Apple would prevent grandparent commenter from installing browsers with other rendering engines on MacOS too. Why isn't Apple, in its benevolence, restricting browser choice on MacOS?
- janesconference 4y ago
  If Safari is the better browser, they should allow competition. Users will choose the better browser anyway.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    Not when Google properties show their “some features wont work on your browser” lies, err, alerts. ~65% of users are not savvy enough to see this as the marketing statement it is, and will treat it as a real reason to get chrome. I’ve watched it happen in front of my eyes.
- agust 4y ago
  Safari is in no way a better browser than any competitor. It is widely known in the web developer community that it is rigged with bugs and lagging behind in terms of features.
  - MrScruff 4y ago
    Perhaps the statement should be, Safari is in no way a better browser than any competitor for developers.
    - chanc3e 4y ago
      I think this is the correct take. Most comments have been developers complaining that Safari doesn't do esoteric task _x_ rather than their clients can't achieve _y_ Apple make products for the top end of customers and they don't want to be dealing with complaints from Grandma about battery life because they hit a series of dark patterns and accidentally installed Chrome and made it default. They've made it quite clear IMO that pwa style products would be better served by a native app.
      - MCArth 4y ago
        That's like saying we should be writing all our applications in assembly. No. Developer productivity is important, and it does impact the end user in quality and amount of features.
        stjohnswarts 4y ago
        It's not important to me that your job is easier. I'm a dev and I deal with hard shit 5 days out of the week. My users don't give fk about that, they only care that my product works on their phone.
2fast4you 4y ago
> …Apple produces a vastly inferior browser… People say this all the time, have you ever actually used Safari? I use it daily and it’s rock solid, I have zero complaints.
- nailer 4y ago
  Spent years maintaining a completely different flow for my customers because Safari webcrypto was broken.
- iasay 4y ago
  This. Also it doesn’t absolutely shag your battery on any device.
  - Grazester 4y ago
    Battery thing aside, it's inferior. As a developer that sometimes have to dabble on the front end, I have come across areas where Firefox and Chrome supported features for years and I just assumed Safari did also...nope it didn't dues to what I could only assume is some nonsense Apple dogma
    - birdyrooster 4y ago
      Chrome has a bunch of Google spyware bundled in it. No thanks.
    - criddell 4y ago
      > Battery thing aside, it's inferior. On mobile platforms that's a pretty major feature to brush aside.
  - Cipater 4y ago
    I would 100% use Safari on Android/Windows but, alas.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    I’ve long found it shocking the extent to which Google and Mozilla shrug this aspect off. Between laptops, phones, and tablets, computing is dominated by battery powered devices… power efficiency should be a headlining goal, not a trailing afterthought. As a user I don’t care nearly as much if my browser supports WebOnions v2 or whatever feature-du-jour as I do that it’s not wantonly burning through my battery just doing basic browsing.
minimaul 4y ago
I don't see it as that. I see it as Google will use the same techniques they used for desktop to aggressively push Chrome regardless of technical merit - aggressive banners & popups on their own web properties, user-agent based blocking of functionality, etc. edit: I suppose due to the nature of the app store (at present), they can't do the bundling stuff - like they used to do with Chrome-by-default when you downloaded Adobe Reader, for instance.
pjmlp 4y ago
Microsoft re-packages Chrome with some extras, they don't compete with it, they lost. Mozilla is at the edge of extinction, they lost.
- SubjectToChange 4y ago
  > Apple gave up trying to compete with Chrome/Firefox, they lost.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Apple has trucidated Firefox, and are the last army standing preventing the Web turning into ChromeOS, they are still winning.
    - SubjectToChange 4y ago
      > and are the last army standing preventing the Web turning into ChromeOS Except safari doesn't exist outside of Apple's luxury walled garden. > they are still winning. The strategic purpose of Safari is to extract dollars from Google and push users to the app store. Indeed a second rate, mediocre Safari is in Apple's best interest. On the other hand Google has every reason to develop the best browser possible and the incredible scale of chromium development demonstrates that.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        Exactly the reason Safari matters to keep Chrome to take over the Web. That luxury walled garden owns 23% of the world. Funny how the same anti-M$ crowd pushes for Google no matter what.
thecassandrist 4y ago
Funny, I prefer Safari. Then Firefox. Your opinion doesn’t align with my experience…
Retric 4y ago
The argument wasn’t chrome winning on it’s merits. The argument is Google has such a stranglehold on the web that they can extend their monopoly to the browser engine.
mebassett 4y ago
I think the point the other author is trying to make isn't that apple's anti-competitive practices are good. it's that google's anti-competitive practices with their browser are more powerful than apple's anti-competitive practices. In particular the close integration with search, youtube, and add delivery. I don't think the other author was making a point about one product being inferior to the other, more that both products rely on anti-competitive practices and google's anti-competitive practices are more powerful. safari could be an excellent product, but google will just stick a big modal dialogue on every search page and youtube video "For the best results download chrome.." no browser product these days compete in a completely free market.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Exactly. If Apple is required to open up iOS to other engines, Google should be barred from aggressively promoting Chrome with their own services as well as ensure that their sites perform well on competing engines (currently, they don’t) with the same stroke.
  - jeswin 4y ago
    Aggressively promoting !== barring completely. Both Firefox and Chrome would have appreciated a way to install their browsers on iOS, even if it was harder. Google making their sites function inadequately in other browsers should be illegal too. Many features don't work in Firefox.
isodev 4y ago
> Apple not allowing competition is the root of all evil. There are plenty of browsers available for iOS. In all the ways that matter to consumers, they can choose a browser and the services associated with it. All the WebKit haters are so loud and driven in their quest to "liberate" others, while the alternative is just looking for the most optimal ways to monetize their browsing habits. Google is the company US legislators need to beg not to collect personal information so citizens can be safe... which makes them much closer to the "root of all evil".
- pndy 4y ago
  You are of course aware that all these iOS browsers run on WebKit from Apple? Linked post is about that.
  - isodev 4y ago
    From a consumer point of view, the engine in use is of no consequence. The engine doesn't make the browser. Otherwise, it would be called "WebKit" and not Safari. Users perceive the browser as a collection of UI, look and feel, integration with services, and other ecosystems - all built on top of the engine. All unrestricted on iOS. What consumers also expect is for things to work. Reliably. I can't wait for pages to start asking people to download browser X because "opinionated" devs decided they only want to support their favorite brand.
- pier25 4y ago
  All third-party browsers on iOS use WkWebView
nemothekid 4y ago
>Apple produces a vastly inferior browser and only gets to maintain market share via absolute, monopolistic control over their OS. Yes. If you think Safari is terrible and you want to use Chrome on your iPhone then argue that. This incredible reach around that Apple not letting you install Chrome harms browser diversity is ridiculous.
pier25 4y ago
And it's not only about the product itself. WebKit bug reports are ignored, for years.
- lapcat 4y ago
  So are Chromium bug reports. Here's my personal pet peeve. 4 years ago, Chrome broke the ability to open pages in the background on Mac. People complained, and so Google locked the bug report for comments. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=854609 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=854609
  - pier25 4y ago
    I agree that's bad but at least something happened. I've reported bugs to WebKit and got absolutely nothing. Here's one from 2020 which is still open: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207049 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207049
v0idzer0 4y ago
What’s stopping you from downloading Chrome on your iPhone and making it the default browser? They are allowing competition in every sense. They have just managed to keep Safari good enough for typical users not to feel any desire to add another browser to their phone. From a non-developer standpoint, safari is great. From a developer standpoint, I have just as many issues with Firefox having strange quirks.
- traverseda 4y ago
  ...Apple's app store policies that forbid other browser runtimes? Chrome on iphone is just a wrapper for webkit.
- jonp888 4y ago
  Chrome on iPhone is just Safari with a different menu bar. The web page rendering and interaction is entirely controlled by Apple's webkit.
HWR_14 4y ago
> You clearly believe that if they were forced to compete on equal terms with Chrome, they would loose. Woah there. Will they actually compete on equal terms, or will YouTube/Google/Gmail (the most popular sites on the internet) tell people that not using Chrome is causing a variety of issues. I don't think Chrome ever really won "on merits", it won on "Google keeps telling me I'm interneting wrong". Besides that, "better" isn't really a recognizable concept. What you want and what I want are different. And if what I want is a way to prevent ad-tracking, and what Google wants is better ad-tracking, I don't think I win that war of words. That is, I don't really care what features a browser has if I cannot block ads, and not blocking ads is high on Google's list.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cptskippy 4y ago
> You clearly believe that if they were forced to compete on equal terms with Chrome, they would loose. Actually what he said was that they can't compete on equal terms. If Apple were forced to open it's platform, they wouldn't be competing on equal terms, Google would have a clear advantage. Google can put up Ads for Chrome on all of it's properties for free. Apple cannot put up Ads for Safari on all of Google's properties for free. What if part of the agreement to open the iOS platform to competing browsers was that all competing browser makers must agree to provide equal advertising time to all other competing browsers across their platforms?
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I use it every day and it's fine. It may suck for developers, but I don't care if makes your job making webpages harder or not, just do your job. I like the competition from it whether artificial or not.

by kjksf 4y ago

nwienert 4y ago

Switched to Safari a couple years ago and haven’t looked back. Chrome feels like a dinosaur and I miss it only for the dev tools. Sorry to break it to you, but Safari is the better browser. I’m glad they limit the engine choice. At least apples authoritarian policies are limited to their own platforms, meanwhile Google is quickly fencing off the web for itself in pure EEE style, with new “standards” flying out as fast as they can tweet them.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> Sorry to break it to you, but Safari is the better browser. unless you are in the 92% of the World that does not use Apple HW for computing and/or the 87% of the World that does not use an iPhone.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
> Sorry to break it to you, but Safari is the better browser. > I’m glad they limit the engine choice. Why is that necessary if Safari is the better browser anyway?
- jalfresi 4y ago
  Because the browser market is not a free market; both Apple and Google leverage their existing positions in other markets to promote their browsers.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  If only Apple would prevent grandparent commenter from installing browsers with other rendering engines on MacOS too. Why isn't Apple, in its benevolence, restricting browser choice on MacOS?
janesconference 4y ago
If Safari is the better browser, they should allow competition. Users will choose the better browser anyway.
- falcolas 4y ago
  Not when Google properties show their “some features wont work on your browser” lies, err, alerts. ~65% of users are not savvy enough to see this as the marketing statement it is, and will treat it as a real reason to get chrome. I’ve watched it happen in front of my eyes.
agust 4y ago
Safari is in no way a better browser than any competitor. It is widely known in the web developer community that it is rigged with bugs and lagging behind in terms of features.
- MrScruff 4y ago
  Perhaps the statement should be, Safari is in no way a better browser than any competitor for developers.
  - chanc3e 4y ago
    I think this is the correct take. Most comments have been developers complaining that Safari doesn't do esoteric task _x_ rather than their clients can't achieve _y_ Apple make products for the top end of customers and they don't want to be dealing with complaints from Grandma about battery life because they hit a series of dark patterns and accidentally installed Chrome and made it default. They've made it quite clear IMO that pwa style products would be better served by a native app.
    - MCArth 4y ago
      That's like saying we should be writing all our applications in assembly. No. Developer productivity is important, and it does impact the end user in quality and amount of features.
      - stjohnswarts 4y ago
        It's not important to me that your job is easier. I'm a dev and I deal with hard shit 5 days out of the week. My users don't give fk about that, they only care that my product works on their phone.

2fast4you 4y ago

> …Apple produces a vastly inferior browser… People say this all the time, have you ever actually used Safari? I use it daily and it’s rock solid, I have zero complaints.

nailer 4y ago
Spent years maintaining a completely different flow for my customers because Safari webcrypto was broken.
iasay 4y ago
This. Also it doesn’t absolutely shag your battery on any device.
- Grazester 4y ago
  Battery thing aside, it's inferior. As a developer that sometimes have to dabble on the front end, I have come across areas where Firefox and Chrome supported features for years and I just assumed Safari did also...nope it didn't dues to what I could only assume is some nonsense Apple dogma
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    Chrome has a bunch of Google spyware bundled in it. No thanks.
  - criddell 4y ago
    > Battery thing aside, it's inferior. On mobile platforms that's a pretty major feature to brush aside.
- Cipater 4y ago
  I would 100% use Safari on Android/Windows but, alas.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I’ve long found it shocking the extent to which Google and Mozilla shrug this aspect off. Between laptops, phones, and tablets, computing is dominated by battery powered devices… power efficiency should be a headlining goal, not a trailing afterthought. As a user I don’t care nearly as much if my browser supports WebOnions v2 or whatever feature-du-jour as I do that it’s not wantonly burning through my battery just doing basic browsing.

minimaul 4y ago

I don't see it as that. I see it as Google will use the same techniques they used for desktop to aggressively push Chrome regardless of technical merit - aggressive banners & popups on their own web properties, user-agent based blocking of functionality, etc. edit: I suppose due to the nature of the app store (at present), they can't do the bundling stuff - like they used to do with Chrome-by-default when you downloaded Adobe Reader, for instance.

pjmlp 4y ago

Microsoft re-packages Chrome with some extras, they don't compete with it, they lost. Mozilla is at the edge of extinction, they lost.

SubjectToChange 4y ago
> Apple gave up trying to compete with Chrome/Firefox, they lost.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Apple has trucidated Firefox, and are the last army standing preventing the Web turning into ChromeOS, they are still winning.
  - SubjectToChange 4y ago
    > and are the last army standing preventing the Web turning into ChromeOS Except safari doesn't exist outside of Apple's luxury walled garden. > they are still winning. The strategic purpose of Safari is to extract dollars from Google and push users to the app store. Indeed a second rate, mediocre Safari is in Apple's best interest. On the other hand Google has every reason to develop the best browser possible and the incredible scale of chromium development demonstrates that.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Exactly the reason Safari matters to keep Chrome to take over the Web. That luxury walled garden owns 23% of the world. Funny how the same anti-M$ crowd pushes for Google no matter what.

thecassandrist 4y ago

Funny, I prefer Safari. Then Firefox. Your opinion doesn’t align with my experience…

Retric 4y ago

The argument wasn’t chrome winning on it’s merits. The argument is Google has such a stranglehold on the web that they can extend their monopoly to the browser engine.

mebassett 4y ago

I think the point the other author is trying to make isn't that apple's anti-competitive practices are good. it's that google's anti-competitive practices with their browser are more powerful than apple's anti-competitive practices. In particular the close integration with search, youtube, and add delivery. I don't think the other author was making a point about one product being inferior to the other, more that both products rely on anti-competitive practices and google's anti-competitive practices are more powerful. safari could be an excellent product, but google will just stick a big modal dialogue on every search page and youtube video "For the best results download chrome.." no browser product these days compete in a completely free market.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
Exactly. If Apple is required to open up iOS to other engines, Google should be barred from aggressively promoting Chrome with their own services as well as ensure that their sites perform well on competing engines (currently, they don’t) with the same stroke.
- jeswin 4y ago
  Aggressively promoting !== barring completely. Both Firefox and Chrome would have appreciated a way to install their browsers on iOS, even if it was harder. Google making their sites function inadequately in other browsers should be illegal too. Many features don't work in Firefox.

isodev 4y ago

> Apple not allowing competition is the root of all evil. There are plenty of browsers available for iOS. In all the ways that matter to consumers, they can choose a browser and the services associated with it. All the WebKit haters are so loud and driven in their quest to "liberate" others, while the alternative is just looking for the most optimal ways to monetize their browsing habits. Google is the company US legislators need to beg not to collect personal information so citizens can be safe... which makes them much closer to the "root of all evil".

pndy 4y ago
You are of course aware that all these iOS browsers run on WebKit from Apple? Linked post is about that.
- isodev 4y ago
  From a consumer point of view, the engine in use is of no consequence. The engine doesn't make the browser. Otherwise, it would be called "WebKit" and not Safari. Users perceive the browser as a collection of UI, look and feel, integration with services, and other ecosystems - all built on top of the engine. All unrestricted on iOS. What consumers also expect is for things to work. Reliably. I can't wait for pages to start asking people to download browser X because "opinionated" devs decided they only want to support their favorite brand.
pier25 4y ago
All third-party browsers on iOS use WkWebView

nemothekid 4y ago

>Apple produces a vastly inferior browser and only gets to maintain market share via absolute, monopolistic control over their OS. Yes. If you think Safari is terrible and you want to use Chrome on your iPhone then argue that. This incredible reach around that Apple not letting you install Chrome harms browser diversity is ridiculous.

pier25 4y ago

And it's not only about the product itself. WebKit bug reports are ignored, for years.

lapcat 4y ago
So are Chromium bug reports. Here's my personal pet peeve. 4 years ago, Chrome broke the ability to open pages in the background on Mac. People complained, and so Google locked the bug report for comments. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=854609 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=854609
- pier25 4y ago
  I agree that's bad but at least something happened. I've reported bugs to WebKit and got absolutely nothing. Here's one from 2020 which is still open: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207049 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207049

v0idzer0 4y ago

What’s stopping you from downloading Chrome on your iPhone and making it the default browser? They are allowing competition in every sense. They have just managed to keep Safari good enough for typical users not to feel any desire to add another browser to their phone. From a non-developer standpoint, safari is great. From a developer standpoint, I have just as many issues with Firefox having strange quirks.

traverseda 4y ago
...Apple's app store policies that forbid other browser runtimes? Chrome on iphone is just a wrapper for webkit.
jonp888 4y ago
Chrome on iPhone is just Safari with a different menu bar. The web page rendering and interaction is entirely controlled by Apple's webkit.

HWR_14 4y ago

> You clearly believe that if they were forced to compete on equal terms with Chrome, they would loose. Woah there. Will they actually compete on equal terms, or will YouTube/Google/Gmail (the most popular sites on the internet) tell people that not using Chrome is causing a variety of issues. I don't think Chrome ever really won "on merits", it won on "Google keeps telling me I'm interneting wrong". Besides that, "better" isn't really a recognizable concept. What you want and what I want are different. And if what I want is a way to prevent ad-tracking, and what Google wants is better ad-tracking, I don't think I win that war of words. That is, I don't really care what features a browser has if I cannot block ads, and not blocking ads is high on Google's list.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cptskippy 4y ago

> You clearly believe that if they were forced to compete on equal terms with Chrome, they would loose. Actually what he said was that they can't compete on equal terms. If Apple were forced to open it's platform, they wouldn't be competing on equal terms, Google would have a clear advantage. Google can put up Ads for Chrome on all of it's properties for free. Apple cannot put up Ads for Safari on all of Google's properties for free. What if part of the agreement to open the iOS platform to competing browsers was that all competing browser makers must agree to provide equal advertising time to all other competing browsers across their platforms?

stjohnswarts 4y ago

I use it every day and it's fine. It may suck for developers, but I don't care if makes your job making webpages harder or not, just do your job. I like the competition from it whether artificial or not.