5 ms·

> By contrast Apple today is locking down their platform and explicitly decreeing that nobody is permitted to compete with them. Microsoft got in trouble for a

by derefr 4y ago

> By contrast Apple today is locking down their platform and explicitly decreeing that nobody is permitted to compete with them. Microsoft got in trouble for anti-competitive practices with IE, because they were tightly integrating their OS with their browser in ways that meant that their browser was uniquely enabled by the OS to do things that third-party browsers couldn't do (not having access to the same APIs), thus using their position in the OS market to steal browser market-share away from third-party browser companies like Netscape, in ways those browser companies could do nothing to respond to. In contrast, on iOS, there's nothing Safari can do that third-party browsers can't. Third-party browsers do exactly the same things Safari does, rendering-engine-wise — no more, no less. And meanwhile, they all do more than Safari does UI-wise. There's nothing Apple is doing to bias users of iOS in favor of Mobile Safari, such that it steals market-share away from competing browsers. Instead, their OS is just ruining the browser experience for everybody, equally. That's not anti-competitive — it's just dumb. :)

scarface74 4y ago
Again absolutely nothing changed with respect to IE in the US as a result of the FTC case.
- derefr 4y ago
  Who said it did? The precedent people are always citing is that the FTC cared to sue Microsoft for doing it; not that anything came of it.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    And that’s about as useless as the EU caring to protect users privacy and writing a 99 section 11 chapter law and the only thing users got were cookie pop ups.
  - alwillis 4y ago
    not that anything came of it. You’re joking, right? The free and open web, to the extent we have it, only exists today because Microsoft wasn’t allowed to force IE, Active X, Silverlight and the rest of their technologies down everyone’s throat. Oh, and JScript [1], their proprietary version of JavaScript would have been the industry standard. We wouldn’t have the W3C or WHATWG creating open standards for the web had Microsoft been allowed to essentially turn the web into another Microsoft runtime environment. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript
    - scarface74 4y ago
      > The free and open web, to the extent we have it, only exists today because Microsoft wasn’t allowed to force IE, Active X, Silverlight and the rest of their technologies down everyone’s throat. Oh, and JScript [1], their proprietary version of JavaScript would have been the industry standard The justice department at no point stopped Microsoft from bundling IE with Windows. Besides that, up until 2008-2010, the “free and open web” was littered with proprietary Flash apps. It wasn’t until Apple refused to support Flash on iPhones that anyone started worrying about standards. > Microsoft been allowed to essentially turn the web into another Microsoft runtime environment. Nothing that the FTC did prevented that. No part of the consent decree caused MS to behave any differently with respect to IE. And if you don’t remember, the “modern web” as it exists today with Ajax was actually a Microsoft addition that everyone else added. JScript was no more or less proprietary than Netscape’s “LiveScript” before Netscape jumped on the Java bandwagon and called it Javascript. It’s not like JS came from a standards body.
      - alwillis 4y ago
        The justice department at no point stopped Microsoft from bundling IE with Windows. Nobody suggested otherwise; but that actually wasn’t the point. Microsoft made a deal with the government to stop most of its anticompetitive behavior. It was less about the bundling of IE with Windows than giving OEMs the choice to ship other browsers in addition to IE. Besides that, up until 2008-2010, the “free and open web” was littered with proprietary Flash apps. But that was a choice made by the market to adopt Flash instead of having of having all of the Microsoft stuff forced on them. Nobody forced developers to adopt Flash and there were other choices for audio/video, even if they weren’t as popular as Flash. And if you don’t remember, the “modern web” as it exists today with Ajax was actually a Microsoft addition that everyone else added. Well, to be accurate, Microsoft shipped XMLHttpRequest in IE 5.0 in 1999, as a proprietary Active X component for their products; it was never intended to be a web standard. But it was a cool idea so the other browser makers implemented it. The term AJAX was coined by a Google employee in 2005 and was standardized by the W3C in 2006 [1]. It’s no different than Apple developing the canvas [2] element, which became a web standard, except they were more intentional than Microsoft was about XMLHttpRequest which would be renamed as AJAX. Things would have been very different if the FTC and European regulators (who did make Microsoft ship a version of Windows without IE [3] hadn’t gotten involved. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element [3]: No IE onboard Windows 7 in Europe http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8096701.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8096701.stm
MobiusHorizons 4y ago
Apple blocks allocating executable memory which is necessary in order to create jit compilers, which are necessary for JavaScript engines to run at acceptable speeds. This restriction does not apply to safari’s js engine though.
- derefr 4y ago
  But nor does the restriction apply to WKWebViews. Which any browser that only cares about the UI part can just use and be done with it.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    I’ve implemented a WKWebView for a purely personal app with very specific but very minimal requirements and… “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. You can “just” use the API and you get a fully functional web browser without any UI, but you certainly aren’t going to attach any meaningful custom UI to it that way without digging deep not just into internals at the binding level but at the WebKit level. I’m not saying it’s a bad design either, but it’s definitely not a trivial investment.
    - derefr 4y ago
      Don't want to be snide, but you're talking about the high barrier-to-entry for implementing a nice, customized WKWebView in a project that isn't a web browser. In such a case, the WKWebView brings with it a bunch of complexity that wasn't already there otherwise. If your project is itself a web browser, then all that complexity is already inherent to the project, whatever you choose to build it with. It's just that the "digging deep" would be in the docs for how to glue Apple's low-level DOM/JS/etc library frameworks together in mostly-undocumented ways; rather than in the docs for how to feed WKWebView the right delegate logic in just the right place to get it to do something that'd be easy if you were directly doing it yourself.
      - eyelidlessness 4y ago
        Didn’t take it as snide but even just the delegated logic isn’t so simple. Most of my personal project was just a specialized browser, and really basic functionality was much more complex than I’d hoped. I got it good enough to use and haven’t maintained it since because it was just for my own use, so maybe the APIs have become less complex since.
tambourine_man 4y ago
Microsoft had 95% of the PC market share with Windows. Regulating a monopoly is the government's job. That is not the case at all for iOS. Android is a very healthy market and a viable alternative.
- isthatright4 4y ago
  Depends how you see the relevant market. You could define the market as browsers for iPhones, instead of browsers for all phones. After all, it’s not like users switch readily between different phones for different apps. There’s a whole body of case law on what the relevant market is. The gist is that it turns on substitutability, but it’s more complex and flexible. Easy knob to turn to account for tech platform dynamics.
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    Switching friction is not the same as a monopoly. The distinction is not that hard to draw and I think we should regulate the latter, not the former.
    - isthatright4 4y ago
      If the friction is high enough, antitrust law has always seen that as bearing on the definition of the relevant market. You can’t lock people in and then start charging monopoly prices with impunity. One issue is what happens when the stickiness is mostly psychological friction instead of something that an economist analyzing rational action would see as a barrier. These are laws for people, after all, not for hypothetical rational beings.
alwillis 4y ago
Microsoft got in trouble for anti-competitive practices with IE, because they were tightly integrating their OS with their browser in ways that meant that their browser was uniquely enabled by the OS to do things that third-party It was actually worse than this--when Microsoft was ordered to separate IE from Windows, they lied and said IE was integral to Windows and that it could not operate without it. Turned out Windows worked just fine without IE and Microsoft ended up settling with the government.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
comex 4y ago
But Safari is the default. And if all the options are equal, then there’s no reason to switch from the default. It’s hard enough to convince people to switch browsers in the best of cases, let alone when the list of potential advantages or differentiators you can offer is severely cut down.
- alwillis 4y ago
  But Safari is the default. iOS supports changing the default browser to something that’s not Safari. It’s not only about the rendering engines; Brave on iOS has other features and a UI/UX that I like that’s not present in Safari. 3rd party browsers on iOS have other ways of differentiating themselves, especially if you use those browsers on other platforms, like bookmark syncing, etc. 90% of end-users couldn’t care less what’s being used to render their websites on iOS.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Locking the rendering engine blocks a host of capabilities, both for the browser itself and its ability to support 3P extensions
    - alwillis 4y ago
      I doubt it. Safari has 3rd party extensions on iOS and WebKit has all of the important web platform features… in fact, it has pulled ahead of Chrome. What Apple is avoiding is all of the security issues attempting to support multiple web engines.
      - brokenmachine 4y ago
        Not an Apple guy, but I thought adblocking was not as good on Safari.
gernb 4y ago
it is anti-competative by denying 3rd parties from provinding more. Imagine a truck maker who could somehow prevent other truck makers from making a truck that caries more or runs faster or is more fuel efficient. Of course that would be anti-competative.
xorcist 4y ago
> on iOS, there's nothing Safari can do that third-party browsers can't Apart from, you know, run? (Strictly speaking not technically true of course, but enough to get the point across.)

by derefr 4y ago

scarface74 4y ago

Again absolutely nothing changed with respect to IE in the US as a result of the FTC case.

derefr 4y ago
Who said it did? The precedent people are always citing is that the FTC cared to sue Microsoft for doing it; not that anything came of it.
- scarface74 4y ago
  And that’s about as useless as the EU caring to protect users privacy and writing a 99 section 11 chapter law and the only thing users got were cookie pop ups.
- alwillis 4y ago
  not that anything came of it. You’re joking, right? The free and open web, to the extent we have it, only exists today because Microsoft wasn’t allowed to force IE, Active X, Silverlight and the rest of their technologies down everyone’s throat. Oh, and JScript [1], their proprietary version of JavaScript would have been the industry standard. We wouldn’t have the W3C or WHATWG creating open standards for the web had Microsoft been allowed to essentially turn the web into another Microsoft runtime environment. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript
  - scarface74 4y ago
    > The free and open web, to the extent we have it, only exists today because Microsoft wasn’t allowed to force IE, Active X, Silverlight and the rest of their technologies down everyone’s throat. Oh, and JScript [1], their proprietary version of JavaScript would have been the industry standard The justice department at no point stopped Microsoft from bundling IE with Windows. Besides that, up until 2008-2010, the “free and open web” was littered with proprietary Flash apps. It wasn’t until Apple refused to support Flash on iPhones that anyone started worrying about standards. > Microsoft been allowed to essentially turn the web into another Microsoft runtime environment. Nothing that the FTC did prevented that. No part of the consent decree caused MS to behave any differently with respect to IE. And if you don’t remember, the “modern web” as it exists today with Ajax was actually a Microsoft addition that everyone else added. JScript was no more or less proprietary than Netscape’s “LiveScript” before Netscape jumped on the Java bandwagon and called it Javascript. It’s not like JS came from a standards body.
    - alwillis 4y ago
      The justice department at no point stopped Microsoft from bundling IE with Windows. Nobody suggested otherwise; but that actually wasn’t the point. Microsoft made a deal with the government to stop most of its anticompetitive behavior. It was less about the bundling of IE with Windows than giving OEMs the choice to ship other browsers in addition to IE. Besides that, up until 2008-2010, the “free and open web” was littered with proprietary Flash apps. But that was a choice made by the market to adopt Flash instead of having of having all of the Microsoft stuff forced on them. Nobody forced developers to adopt Flash and there were other choices for audio/video, even if they weren’t as popular as Flash. And if you don’t remember, the “modern web” as it exists today with Ajax was actually a Microsoft addition that everyone else added. Well, to be accurate, Microsoft shipped XMLHttpRequest in IE 5.0 in 1999, as a proprietary Active X component for their products; it was never intended to be a web standard. But it was a cool idea so the other browser makers implemented it. The term AJAX was coined by a Google employee in 2005 and was standardized by the W3C in 2006 [1]. It’s no different than Apple developing the canvas [2] element, which became a web standard, except they were more intentional than Microsoft was about XMLHttpRequest which would be renamed as AJAX. Things would have been very different if the FTC and European regulators (who did make Microsoft ship a version of Windows without IE [3] hadn’t gotten involved. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element [3]: No IE onboard Windows 7 in Europe http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8096701.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8096701.stm

MobiusHorizons 4y ago

Apple blocks allocating executable memory which is necessary in order to create jit compilers, which are necessary for JavaScript engines to run at acceptable speeds. This restriction does not apply to safari’s js engine though.

derefr 4y ago
But nor does the restriction apply to WKWebViews. Which any browser that only cares about the UI part can just use and be done with it.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  I’ve implemented a WKWebView for a purely personal app with very specific but very minimal requirements and… “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. You can “just” use the API and you get a fully functional web browser without any UI, but you certainly aren’t going to attach any meaningful custom UI to it that way without digging deep not just into internals at the binding level but at the WebKit level. I’m not saying it’s a bad design either, but it’s definitely not a trivial investment.
  - derefr 4y ago
    Don't want to be snide, but you're talking about the high barrier-to-entry for implementing a nice, customized WKWebView in a project that isn't a web browser. In such a case, the WKWebView brings with it a bunch of complexity that wasn't already there otherwise. If your project is itself a web browser, then all that complexity is already inherent to the project, whatever you choose to build it with. It's just that the "digging deep" would be in the docs for how to glue Apple's low-level DOM/JS/etc library frameworks together in mostly-undocumented ways; rather than in the docs for how to feed WKWebView the right delegate logic in just the right place to get it to do something that'd be easy if you were directly doing it yourself.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      Didn’t take it as snide but even just the delegated logic isn’t so simple. Most of my personal project was just a specialized browser, and really basic functionality was much more complex than I’d hoped. I got it good enough to use and haven’t maintained it since because it was just for my own use, so maybe the APIs have become less complex since.

tambourine_man 4y ago

Microsoft had 95% of the PC market share with Windows. Regulating a monopoly is the government's job. That is not the case at all for iOS. Android is a very healthy market and a viable alternative.

isthatright4 4y ago
Depends how you see the relevant market. You could define the market as browsers for iPhones, instead of browsers for all phones. After all, it’s not like users switch readily between different phones for different apps. There’s a whole body of case law on what the relevant market is. The gist is that it turns on substitutability, but it’s more complex and flexible. Easy knob to turn to account for tech platform dynamics.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  Switching friction is not the same as a monopoly. The distinction is not that hard to draw and I think we should regulate the latter, not the former.
  - isthatright4 4y ago
    If the friction is high enough, antitrust law has always seen that as bearing on the definition of the relevant market. You can’t lock people in and then start charging monopoly prices with impunity. One issue is what happens when the stickiness is mostly psychological friction instead of something that an economist analyzing rational action would see as a barrier. These are laws for people, after all, not for hypothetical rational beings.

alwillis 4y ago

Microsoft got in trouble for anti-competitive practices with IE, because they were tightly integrating their OS with their browser in ways that meant that their browser was uniquely enabled by the OS to do things that third-party It was actually worse than this--when Microsoft was ordered to separate IE from Windows, they lied and said IE was integral to Windows and that it could not operate without it. Turned out Windows worked just fine without IE and Microsoft ended up settling with the government.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

comex 4y ago

But Safari is the default. And if all the options are equal, then there’s no reason to switch from the default. It’s hard enough to convince people to switch browsers in the best of cases, let alone when the list of potential advantages or differentiators you can offer is severely cut down.

alwillis 4y ago
But Safari is the default. iOS supports changing the default browser to something that’s not Safari. It’s not only about the rendering engines; Brave on iOS has other features and a UI/UX that I like that’s not present in Safari. 3rd party browsers on iOS have other ways of differentiating themselves, especially if you use those browsers on other platforms, like bookmark syncing, etc. 90% of end-users couldn’t care less what’s being used to render their websites on iOS.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Locking the rendering engine blocks a host of capabilities, both for the browser itself and its ability to support 3P extensions
  - alwillis 4y ago
    I doubt it. Safari has 3rd party extensions on iOS and WebKit has all of the important web platform features… in fact, it has pulled ahead of Chrome. What Apple is avoiding is all of the security issues attempting to support multiple web engines.
    - brokenmachine 4y ago
      Not an Apple guy, but I thought adblocking was not as good on Safari.

gernb 4y ago

it is anti-competative by denying 3rd parties from provinding more. Imagine a truck maker who could somehow prevent other truck makers from making a truck that caries more or runs faster or is more fuel efficient. Of course that would be anti-competative.

xorcist 4y ago

> on iOS, there's nothing Safari can do that third-party browsers can't Apart from, you know, run? (Strictly speaking not technically true of course, but enough to get the point across.)