9 ms·

So, you are happy to have Apple provide no user choice, because you fear a future where there is no user choice?

nemothekid 4y ago
No; my problem is when people are using the "open web" as a bludgeon to get Apple to allow Chrome on iOS. If you want Chrome on iOS, just say that. To pretend that there is open future of browser diversity once Chrome is allowed on iOS is underhanded.
- idle_zealot 4y ago
  I want Firefox on iOS.
- cowtools 4y ago
  I want Firefox on iOS, and I want Tor Browser on iOS, and I want Lynx on iOS, and I want wget on iOS, and I want youtube-dl on iOS, and I want to run whatever the hell I damn well please on iOS. Underhanded? It's pretty clear that your stated goals don't align with your real goals here. Edit: I have a hard time putting into words why your arguments seem so deceptive to me. It is like whataboutism: the arguments you are making are technically functional but they just completely fall apart with any reasonable weighing of the pros/cons because it betrays the "intrinsic" goals (choice, browser competition, functionality, security) for "extrinsic" goals (browser diversity, but mostly the success of safari). This makes me think that you're secretly misaligned and that you actually hold those "extrinsic" goals as your intrinsic goals.
  - cptskippy 4y ago
    - nailer 4y ago
    - m-p-3 4y ago
      I hate to break it to you, but Safari isn't going to stop that from happening.
      - cptskippy 4y ago
        Thank you for proving my point. Safari only has ~20% market share because it's has ~25% of mobile and nearly 50% of tablet and only because Apple restricts those platforms. If Apple opened up their platform that would vanish and Chrome would take over. The platform being relevant and closed is the only thing stopping Chrome from becoming the next Internet Explorer 6.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    Get FF or some other browser a healthy market share first and then talk about cracking open iOS. Instead what happens is this internecine warfare where everyone shits all over FF for political reasons (most of which have no relevance to their day to day use of a web browser) and uptake of Tor/Brave is miniscule and most everyone sticks with Chrome.
    - lenkite 4y ago
      "Get FF or some other browser a healthy market share first" Why ? Open up the platform first.
      - Jcowell 4y ago
        One would say it would be disastrous to open a platform first and then take on Chrome because 1) Firefox cannot compete against Google endless resources m. Google will win, not a matter of it but will. 2) The time it takes to decouple chrome from google will be too long. It may just kill Firefox before any action can really be done.
        lamontcg 4y ago
        Yeah I don't see why this math is so hard. If you force Apple to open up iOS then Chrome just takes it over and Safari will take such a hit that Apple will probably have to kill it. Then Google will own 99% of the portal to the web. I think I'm arguing with a bunch of Libertarians though who think that an unregulated market is some kind of magic sauce that will conjure up a Chrome competitor out of thin air, and not a recipe for monopolization.
        depressedpanda 4y ago
        Why are you so certain that Apple will have to kill Safari if Chrome and other browsers are allowed on iOS?
        lamontcg 4y ago
  - nneonneo 4y ago
    As far as youtube-dl goes, you can run that on iOS via a Python interpreter such as Pythonista: https://gist.github.com/nneonneo/f6b2d659ba76542e7d27e13598a6859c https://gist.github.com/nneonneo/f6b2d659ba76542e7d27e13598a...
  - nemothekid 4y ago
    I can be clear and transparent here. My position is that if you actually care about browser choice the biggest elephant in the room is Chromium. The reality is Google has shown that it will leverage it's properties like Gmail and YouTube to get users to install Chrome; from nagware to just outright breaking sites on other browsers. If you want to force Apple to allow different browsers without addressing this problem, then you are trading one company's monopoly on a single platform for another company's monopoly globally. And there is no reason to believe that Google will behave any better than Apple has. It's not like Google hasn't tried to skip the standards process before. So when people argue that "it's for browser diversity" I have to consider them as 1.) naive, 2.) actually working for Google. 3.) just developers who are tired of being forced to target multiple platforms. Do I think it's ethical that this is how this stalemate is handled? No; taking away user choice is limiting the freedoms of users. Do I think Safari is amazing? No; I think Chrome on Android, today, is better than Safari on iOS. I may be harming users today by forcing them on Safari. Would I fold if Apple only allowed Firefox/Lynx/Netscape? Yes; My problem is with Chrome, not with other browsers. But I think the number of people who genuinely want to Firefox is tiny in comparison to the number of people who would just install Chrome. My worst fear is that once Chrome is allowed on iOS, then there is no reason for Google, or anyone else, to target anything other than Chrome; and that would ultimately be harder to fix. A year of Chrome dominance, where developers only target Chrome would fully entrench Chrome and make it difficult for anyone to build a browser that wasn't just a Chrome fork that emulated all of Chrome's bugs and unspecified behaviors. The alternate solution, where the Chrome problem is addressed first, then the fix is "just" passing legislation that opens up iOS. One fix involves just changing the behavior of one company. The other fix involves changing the behavior of thousands of companies.
  - popcube 4y ago
    he just pragmatic, if the results are worse than now, someone will not do the "right thing" on moral
- mtomweb 4y ago
  OP here. That's actually incorrect. We started OWA with a group of primarily Safari first developers, in that iOS Safari is our primary target platform. We've had over a decade of major issues from rendering bugs, to lack of functionality to our apps breaking for months at a time waiting for a patch. The severe underfunding of Safari/webkit coupled with a ban on competition meant that it was never going to be viable to ship Web Apps to iOS. So the question is, how do you convince the worlds richest company to invest a extra few hundred million/year into their own browser? The answer is competition. Competition provides Apple a deep incentive to produce a capable, feature risk browser at risk of losing users to the other vendors. Each 1% of Safari users is worth 150m/year in google search revenue, a number so large it would make even Apple take notice. As web developers we see the value in having browser engine competition, many of us lived through the IE6 era and know the risks of the monopolistic competitive behavior like we're seeing from Apple (Side-point: At no point did Microsoft ever ban the competition). The status-quo where Safari/Webkit was both stifling the Web and Web Apps and providing no competitive pressure on Chrome/Edge/Firefox + the severe underinvestment from Apple meant that a regulatory solution was needed.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    > The answer is competition There is no competition. There is only Chrome. This is what I was talking about. There will only be one result to opening iOS and it scares me. FF/Opera are too small. Edge is small and really just Chrome anyway. If we had a healthy browser market I’d be fine. But we don’t. Apple is, for the wrong reason, the only thing keeping us from total Chrome dominance. I want one of these “just open iOS” calls to include the consequences of what they’re calling for and how they plan to deal with it.
    - agust 4y ago
      Chrome is competition, and no, it's not alone: on the desktop market, where competition is not rigged as much as on mobile, Edge has 10% market share, and Firefox 7.5%. It's not insignificant. > I want one of these “just open iOS” calls to include the consequences of what they’re calling for and how they plan to deal with it. OWA has taken into account anti-competitive practices used by Google to gain browser market share, and made recommendation to mitigate or prevent them. In there submission to the japanese regulator [1], they include: - 3.1.7: No Chrome Preferencing: > Google should not use their control over the operating system to provide unfair preference to their own browser, Chrome, either through the operating system or agreements with partners. - 3.1.8: Website Transparency Obligations: > OWA suggests that where a Gatekeeper’s website does not support a browser which has above a 2% market share, they be compelled to publish a document containing detailed reasoning that prevents support of certain engines. [1]: https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20HDMC%20(Japan)%20-%20Competition%20in%20the%20Mobile%20App%20Ecosystem%20-%20v1.1.pdf https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20HDMC%20(Japan)...
- agust 4y ago
  Open Web Advocacy has been very clear that they want competition on iOS, not Chrome specifically. The reason being that the absence of competition is currently allowing Apple to deteriorate the web experience on iOS, preventing the web and web apps from competing with native apps. Their objective is to lift these artificial limitations imposed by Apple and free the web. OWA members have actually been actively reporting WebKit bugs and interacting with the Safari team to help prioritise features and bug fixes on Twitter and elsewhere, showing the goal is to improve the overall web experience on iOS, not allow Chrome to become dominant. Here is one of their detailed bug report: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84 https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    Competition on iOS without real competition on the desktop already existing could quickly mean unbreakable Chrome hegemony. That’s why I originally commented. If you focus on just one of those I believe there will be terrible unintentional consequences.
    - dcow 4y ago
      This whole chrome fetish thing you've got is actually the issue. Everyone thinks "there is only Chrome" so in a sense we all deceive ourselves. I don't know a single person anymore who uses Chrome. Maybe you do but that's not really the point. If you don't want a Chrome hegemony then don't fool yourself into thinking there is one and don't proliferate that ideology. Tell your product people that NO, you're not going to just ship the Chrome version and support Safari and Firefox later. Put in the work to make software work on other browsers. That's how you break the status quo. The amount of times I've seen some software company tell users "our product only works on Chrome" is disgusting. No wonder it's popular... people don't have a choice because of shitty software.
      - nemothekid 4y ago
        >I don't know a single person anymore who uses Chrome. I find this very hard to believe. Everyone you know uses Firefox?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pier25 4y ago
  If Safari hadn't been lagging so far behind for years, I'm sure the sentiment to allow Chrome on iOS would be very different.
- m-p-3 4y ago
  On the other end, the competition (namely Firefox) can't flourish either if all it can do is to be a skin with some sync features on top of Safari. All Apple achieve with this is to slow down the inevitable, especially if the smaller players can't catch up because of it.
criddell 4y ago
Actually, yes. With Apple not having user choice, those of use who want a choice can choose Android. Lack of diversity in one ecosystem supports diversity in a broader context. It's like prohibitions against importing some aggressive plant or animal species. It's a way of protecting local diversity.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  This leaves the user who want actual choice crying in the corner. Android is only the bare OS, and actual devices come either with Google bindings everywhere (mostly from direct contract with each phone maker in exchange to let them have the Play Store), or no Play Store at all (which usually means no commercial license for stuff like Felica as well, same situation as when wiping clean a phone basically). To me it feels a lot like in the 90s when 'viable' alternatives to Windows were either overpriced and obsoleting Macs, or "every year is year of linux on the desktop" linux boxes. And getting shouted from every camp when complaining the situation really sucks.
veilrap 4y ago
Yes, I am happy with the Apple ecosystem in this regard. If I wanted to run a different browser engine, I could do so by buying an Android phone. I purchased an iOS phone specifically because I think the overall phone experience is better when certain aspects do not have a choice. If android did not exist and Apple controlled the market it would be a different story, but that is far from the case.

No; my problem is when people are using the "open web" as a bludgeon to get Apple to allow Chrome on iOS. If you want Chrome on iOS, just say that. To pretend that there is open future of browser diversity once Chrome is allowed on iOS is underhanded.

idle_zealot 4y ago
I want Firefox on iOS.
cowtools 4y ago
I want Firefox on iOS, and I want Tor Browser on iOS, and I want Lynx on iOS, and I want wget on iOS, and I want youtube-dl on iOS, and I want to run whatever the hell I damn well please on iOS. Underhanded? It's pretty clear that your stated goals don't align with your real goals here. Edit: I have a hard time putting into words why your arguments seem so deceptive to me. It is like whataboutism: the arguments you are making are technically functional but they just completely fall apart with any reasonable weighing of the pros/cons because it betrays the "intrinsic" goals (choice, browser competition, functionality, security) for "extrinsic" goals (browser diversity, but mostly the success of safari). This makes me think that you're secretly misaligned and that you actually hold those "extrinsic" goals as your intrinsic goals.
- cptskippy 4y ago
  - nailer 4y ago
  - m-p-3 4y ago
    I hate to break it to you, but Safari isn't going to stop that from happening.
    - cptskippy 4y ago
      Thank you for proving my point. Safari only has ~20% market share because it's has ~25% of mobile and nearly 50% of tablet and only because Apple restricts those platforms. If Apple opened up their platform that would vanish and Chrome would take over. The platform being relevant and closed is the only thing stopping Chrome from becoming the next Internet Explorer 6.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  Get FF or some other browser a healthy market share first and then talk about cracking open iOS. Instead what happens is this internecine warfare where everyone shits all over FF for political reasons (most of which have no relevance to their day to day use of a web browser) and uptake of Tor/Brave is miniscule and most everyone sticks with Chrome.
  - lenkite 4y ago
    "Get FF or some other browser a healthy market share first" Why ? Open up the platform first.
    - Jcowell 4y ago
      One would say it would be disastrous to open a platform first and then take on Chrome because 1) Firefox cannot compete against Google endless resources m. Google will win, not a matter of it but will. 2) The time it takes to decouple chrome from google will be too long. It may just kill Firefox before any action can really be done.
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        Yeah I don't see why this math is so hard. If you force Apple to open up iOS then Chrome just takes it over and Safari will take such a hit that Apple will probably have to kill it. Then Google will own 99% of the portal to the web. I think I'm arguing with a bunch of Libertarians though who think that an unregulated market is some kind of magic sauce that will conjure up a Chrome competitor out of thin air, and not a recipe for monopolization.
        depressedpanda 4y ago
        Why are you so certain that Apple will have to kill Safari if Chrome and other browsers are allowed on iOS?
        lamontcg 4y ago
- nneonneo 4y ago
  As far as youtube-dl goes, you can run that on iOS via a Python interpreter such as Pythonista: https://gist.github.com/nneonneo/f6b2d659ba76542e7d27e13598a6859c https://gist.github.com/nneonneo/f6b2d659ba76542e7d27e13598a...
- nemothekid 4y ago
  I can be clear and transparent here. My position is that if you actually care about browser choice the biggest elephant in the room is Chromium. The reality is Google has shown that it will leverage it's properties like Gmail and YouTube to get users to install Chrome; from nagware to just outright breaking sites on other browsers. If you want to force Apple to allow different browsers without addressing this problem, then you are trading one company's monopoly on a single platform for another company's monopoly globally. And there is no reason to believe that Google will behave any better than Apple has. It's not like Google hasn't tried to skip the standards process before. So when people argue that "it's for browser diversity" I have to consider them as 1.) naive, 2.) actually working for Google. 3.) just developers who are tired of being forced to target multiple platforms. Do I think it's ethical that this is how this stalemate is handled? No; taking away user choice is limiting the freedoms of users. Do I think Safari is amazing? No; I think Chrome on Android, today, is better than Safari on iOS. I may be harming users today by forcing them on Safari. Would I fold if Apple only allowed Firefox/Lynx/Netscape? Yes; My problem is with Chrome, not with other browsers. But I think the number of people who genuinely want to Firefox is tiny in comparison to the number of people who would just install Chrome. My worst fear is that once Chrome is allowed on iOS, then there is no reason for Google, or anyone else, to target anything other than Chrome; and that would ultimately be harder to fix. A year of Chrome dominance, where developers only target Chrome would fully entrench Chrome and make it difficult for anyone to build a browser that wasn't just a Chrome fork that emulated all of Chrome's bugs and unspecified behaviors. The alternate solution, where the Chrome problem is addressed first, then the fix is "just" passing legislation that opens up iOS. One fix involves just changing the behavior of one company. The other fix involves changing the behavior of thousands of companies.
- popcube 4y ago
  he just pragmatic, if the results are worse than now, someone will not do the "right thing" on moral
mtomweb 4y ago
OP here. That's actually incorrect. We started OWA with a group of primarily Safari first developers, in that iOS Safari is our primary target platform. We've had over a decade of major issues from rendering bugs, to lack of functionality to our apps breaking for months at a time waiting for a patch. The severe underfunding of Safari/webkit coupled with a ban on competition meant that it was never going to be viable to ship Web Apps to iOS. So the question is, how do you convince the worlds richest company to invest a extra few hundred million/year into their own browser? The answer is competition. Competition provides Apple a deep incentive to produce a capable, feature risk browser at risk of losing users to the other vendors. Each 1% of Safari users is worth 150m/year in google search revenue, a number so large it would make even Apple take notice. As web developers we see the value in having browser engine competition, many of us lived through the IE6 era and know the risks of the monopolistic competitive behavior like we're seeing from Apple (Side-point: At no point did Microsoft ever ban the competition). The status-quo where Safari/Webkit was both stifling the Web and Web Apps and providing no competitive pressure on Chrome/Edge/Firefox + the severe underinvestment from Apple meant that a regulatory solution was needed.
- MBCook 4y ago
  > The answer is competition There is no competition. There is only Chrome. This is what I was talking about. There will only be one result to opening iOS and it scares me. FF/Opera are too small. Edge is small and really just Chrome anyway. If we had a healthy browser market I’d be fine. But we don’t. Apple is, for the wrong reason, the only thing keeping us from total Chrome dominance. I want one of these “just open iOS” calls to include the consequences of what they’re calling for and how they plan to deal with it.
  - agust 4y ago
    Chrome is competition, and no, it's not alone: on the desktop market, where competition is not rigged as much as on mobile, Edge has 10% market share, and Firefox 7.5%. It's not insignificant. > I want one of these “just open iOS” calls to include the consequences of what they’re calling for and how they plan to deal with it. OWA has taken into account anti-competitive practices used by Google to gain browser market share, and made recommendation to mitigate or prevent them. In there submission to the japanese regulator [1], they include: - 3.1.7: No Chrome Preferencing: > Google should not use their control over the operating system to provide unfair preference to their own browser, Chrome, either through the operating system or agreements with partners. - 3.1.8: Website Transparency Obligations: > OWA suggests that where a Gatekeeper’s website does not support a browser which has above a 2% market share, they be compelled to publish a document containing detailed reasoning that prevents support of certain engines. [1]: https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20HDMC%20(Japan)%20-%20Competition%20in%20the%20Mobile%20App%20Ecosystem%20-%20v1.1.pdf https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20HDMC%20(Japan)...
agust 4y ago
Open Web Advocacy has been very clear that they want competition on iOS, not Chrome specifically. The reason being that the absence of competition is currently allowing Apple to deteriorate the web experience on iOS, preventing the web and web apps from competing with native apps. Their objective is to lift these artificial limitations imposed by Apple and free the web. OWA members have actually been actively reporting WebKit bugs and interacting with the Safari team to help prioritise features and bug fixes on Twitter and elsewhere, showing the goal is to improve the overall web experience on iOS, not allow Chrome to become dominant. Here is one of their detailed bug report: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84 https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84.
- MBCook 4y ago
  Competition on iOS without real competition on the desktop already existing could quickly mean unbreakable Chrome hegemony. That’s why I originally commented. If you focus on just one of those I believe there will be terrible unintentional consequences.
  - dcow 4y ago
    This whole chrome fetish thing you've got is actually the issue. Everyone thinks "there is only Chrome" so in a sense we all deceive ourselves. I don't know a single person anymore who uses Chrome. Maybe you do but that's not really the point. If you don't want a Chrome hegemony then don't fool yourself into thinking there is one and don't proliferate that ideology. Tell your product people that NO, you're not going to just ship the Chrome version and support Safari and Firefox later. Put in the work to make software work on other browsers. That's how you break the status quo. The amount of times I've seen some software company tell users "our product only works on Chrome" is disgusting. No wonder it's popular... people don't have a choice because of shitty software.
    - nemothekid 4y ago
      >I don't know a single person anymore who uses Chrome. I find this very hard to believe. Everyone you know uses Firefox?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pier25 4y ago
If Safari hadn't been lagging so far behind for years, I'm sure the sentiment to allow Chrome on iOS would be very different.
m-p-3 4y ago
On the other end, the competition (namely Firefox) can't flourish either if all it can do is to be a skin with some sync features on top of Safari. All Apple achieve with this is to slow down the inevitable, especially if the smaller players can't catch up because of it.

criddell 4y ago

Actually, yes. With Apple not having user choice, those of use who want a choice can choose Android. Lack of diversity in one ecosystem supports diversity in a broader context. It's like prohibitions against importing some aggressive plant or animal species. It's a way of protecting local diversity.

makeitdouble 4y ago
This leaves the user who want actual choice crying in the corner. Android is only the bare OS, and actual devices come either with Google bindings everywhere (mostly from direct contract with each phone maker in exchange to let them have the Play Store), or no Play Store at all (which usually means no commercial license for stuff like Felica as well, same situation as when wiping clean a phone basically). To me it feels a lot like in the 90s when 'viable' alternatives to Windows were either overpriced and obsoleting Macs, or "every year is year of linux on the desktop" linux boxes. And getting shouted from every camp when complaining the situation really sucks.

veilrap 4y ago

Yes, I am happy with the Apple ecosystem in this regard. If I wanted to run a different browser engine, I could do so by buying an Android phone. I purchased an iOS phone specifically because I think the overall phone experience is better when certain aspects do not have a choice. If android did not exist and Apple controlled the market it would be a different story, but that is far from the case.