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> If only so that there is another alternative if a page renders poorly in webkit I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only thing standing between

> If only so that there is another alternative if a page renders poorly in webkit I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari. Nobody in a suit can make a business case for not supporting iOS Safari, given its market share, and also given the fact that the entire C-Suite and senior management team at any given company are using Safari on their iPhone and iPad. A page not working on iOS Safari is a serious business problem that people will take seriously, today. If it gets displaced by Chrome on iOS, with a tiny sliver of us using Firefox, I worry "works on Chrome" will be the only thing that gets solved for.

h0l0cube 4y ago
> I worry "works on Chrome" will be the only thing that gets solved for Firefox is my daily driver, and I use their WebKit wrapper on iOS, and I have to agree. I'm not looking forward to a Blink monopoly in the browser space. The upshot is that we might have closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS.
- judge2020 4y ago
  > closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS. What is native? If a website is explicitly testing for Firefox compatibility, they're probably also testing for Safari compatibility due to its increased market share.
  - JohnTHaller 4y ago
    I know a fair few solo developers that don't test Safari compatibility because they don't own Apple hardware. And Safari only runs on Apple hardware (with the exception of Hackintosh).
  - h0l0cube 4y ago
    It's not so much Safari compatibility, but WebKit compatibility. Anyone who wants their website to work on iOS has to test against mobile WebKit, regardless if their target users are on Chrome or Firefox. If these legislative changes go into effect, Webkit market penetration will plummet quickly to only those using Safari, and Apple will have less leverage to hold back on features that don't suit their App Store profits.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > The upshot is that we might have closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS Strange. Android is 70% market share. Chrome is something like 80% market share (all playforms). Where are these glorious "closer to native web apps" we keep hearing about?
  - h0l0cube 4y ago
    I specified on iOS. It would at least be possible on iOS if other renderers could be used, and both Firefox and Google would certainly have their own incentive to make this happen. Google don't want to undermine the Play Store, but they might want to undermine the App Store. Firefox have existential reasons for product differentiation, though web apps won't get traction without broader support by all players.
    - iainmerrick 4y ago
      The parent was clearly alluding to “closer-to-native experiences” on Android. If Chrome will bring that to iOS, there should already be examples on Android. Google don't want to undermine the Play Store, but they might want to undermine the App Store. I’ll buy that, but it doesn’t seem like a reason to be optimistic about the way things might go.
      - h0l0cube 4y ago
        > If Chrome will bring that to iOS, there should already be examples on Android. I think I illustrated that the incentives are different > doesn’t seem like a reason to be optimistic I did say "we might have closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS" (emphasis added) in my OP. Only because it would become possible, not because it would be likely
        dmitriid 4y ago
        They are already supposedly possible on Android. So?
afavour 4y ago
I’m less sure about that for a few reasons. Biggest among them is that (presumably?) in app webviews will still be WKWebView, powered by WebKit. So if you want your page to load inside Facebook’s browser (and you do) you’re still going to have to care about Safari.
- j16sdiz 4y ago
  There is nothing stopping facebook shipping a copy of chromium. It’s around 400MB already, and they don’t seems to care
  - afavour 4y ago
    Fair point. They already do this on Android. For compatibility reasons you understand, not so that they can track absolutely everything you do, no sir.
dcow 4y ago
[flagged]
- nerdponx 4y ago
  It's not a tired argument, it's a concern. I think they're right to be concerned. Good things can have bad side effects.
  - dcow 4y ago
    Its… not an argument? Have you lost your mind? It was presented as an argument for why it would be bad to let users have freedom to choose their mobile browser. Of course an argument can be born out of a concern, that’s obvious. But you can’t just dismiss a rebuttal by saying an argument is not real it’s just a concern.
    - nerdponx 4y ago
      Are we reading the same post? > I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari. Nobody in a suit can make a business case for not supporting iOS Safari, given its market share, and also given the fact that the entire C-Suite and senior management team at any given company are using Safari on their iPhone and iPad. A page not working on iOS Safari is a serious business problem that people will take seriously, today. This doesn't sound like an argument against the change, only a pessimistic outlook for its effects.
      - dcow 4y ago
        The argument is that the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome monoculture is iOS Safari.
        nerdponx 4y ago
        Right, both things can be true. Apple has a closed web browser ecosystem, and that's bad for users. Opening up that ecosystem could possibly lead to even greater market dominance by Chrome, which would also be bad for users.
jchw 4y ago
Well, Firefox users may never make up quite as much marketshare as it used to, but it does have one advantage: we're a lot louder and more annoying than Chrome users when stuff is broken. It's a feature! (Okay, I try not to be annoying. But I'm pretty sure absolutely nobody is thrilled when I report bugs about Librewolf not working. Shoutouts to SoundCloud for eventually fixing one of said issues.) I doubt Safari will actually die on iOS. The truth is, Safari on iOS is kinda good. That said, honestly this whole line of thinking has gotten pretty tiring. I'm not really sure that an Apple/Google duopoly on browsers is really that much better than the seemingly inevitable Google monopoly. It's not like either of them are particularly good citizens, but Apple's relatively small influence has been very negative in a lot of ways. I'm not even a huge fan of using regulations to solve every problem, but even I must admit that EU regulations have done far more to start to reel in Google than Apple ever could, anyways. As for poor WebM support and pushing wgsl into the WebGPU spec, good riddance. It's really sad that Google can't be trusted more. There's a lot of people there who are doing good work on Chromium and other web-related projects, and it's besmirched by greedy decisions at worst and optically blind decisions at best. When I was at Google, I did spend a bit of my time trying to make some intranet stuff work better in Firefox... It's probably a token gesture at best, but oh well. You know we're at a weird point when the underdog competition in browsers is Apple, one of the richest and most resourceful companies of all time.
- happymellon 4y ago
  > Well, Firefox users may never make up quite as much marketshare as it used to, but it does have one advantage: we're a lot louder and more annoying than Chrome users when stuff is broken. Slack refuses to work properly on Firefox. I don't think they care that we are being loud about it.
  - jchw 4y ago
    To be fair, I'm not even sure if Slack cares about web users at all. It just doesn't work that well, at least for me. (Though I obviously haven't tried it in a bit, so maybe it's good in Chrome now.)
can16358p 4y ago
Agreed. While being forced into a walled garden isn't a good thing, it has the current side effect giving iOS Safari a significant market share to keep Chrome from dominating to become the new IE and have all those "works in Internet Explorer 6 with 1024x768 screen" websites again but this time for Chrome.
- amelius 4y ago
  What if Safari is the new IE?
  - KyeRussell 4y ago
    That simplistic a comparison is simply not worth responding to in any direct way. Safari is Safari and IE is IE. there are some clear differences between the two, in both mobile market share and total market share. That’s just the beginning.
  - dijit 4y ago
    > What if Safari is the new IE? Let me know when safari has 80% of the browser market share. Even across mobile devices. EDIT: Guess Chrome has the same marketshare as IE had in 2009 (if not a little more), iOS has 18%, everything else is a footnote. https://i.imgur.com/WnAsXId.png https://i.imgur.com/WnAsXId.png
  - forgetfulness 4y ago
    Maybe from the perspective of webdevs, from what it represents for users, that's Chrome. A Chrome monopoly may seem desirable, because they're catering to webdevs, but there's nothing they'd like more than having webdevs help them lasso all the users they can surveil and expose to ads as possible.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    I get your point. However, unless mobile usage (vs desktop) gets to something like 90% and unless another 90% of that mobile is iPhone/iPad (vs anything non-Apple), Safari dominating like IE did is impossible. However, for Chrome, it is possible without the walled garden (not to defend it or anything, but it is what it is).
BarryMilo 4y ago
Internet Explorer used to dominate the market, now it doesn't. As it was, so it will be.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  Right, but the years when it did sucked
- viraptor 4y ago
  IE dominated because it was the default / only known choice for a while. Then Mozilla/FF was huge because of features (tabs). Then Chrome was huge because Google had bazillion $$$ to burn on advertising it everywhere. I'm not sure how we can move away from that local maximum this time. On the iOS side, Apple had the default + locked browser choice. Now they can try to outspend each other with Google there.
  - matwood 4y ago
    When IE 6 came out, it was also one of the best/fastest browsers at the time. Heck, it even came with the first implementation of what we all call AJAX today. The problem was that MS declared victory and stop developing IE, expecting to use their OS leverage to keep others out.
    - forgetfulness 4y ago
      They lost the favor of web developers, because they thought that by pushing a crappy browser they could stall the advancement of web applications. They wanted to stifle the web and have people use IE the least as possible and have developers keep making native applications. Google doesn't have that incentive, it has the incentive to make the browser as shiny as possible to keep the loyalty of web developers, so that they won't campaign in a way that will make fewer people download their ads delivery platform. They want people to use Chrome
- Devasta 4y ago
  MS sat on their laurels and allowed everyone else catch up though. Through the living standard all google needs to do is keep Chrome updating at a frantic pace and no one will be able to come close. If MS doesn't have the capability of maintaining their own browser, the chances of someone else entering the market is basically nil.
tluyben2 4y ago
It might make Apple work harder maybe? For instance on my m1 MacBook Air, safari is vastly better for my battery life than chrome or ff for my workload. It makes a huge difference. That would make me use it over the others if that’s the same on the iPhone or iPad where battery life is even more important.
- matwood 4y ago
  To be fair, Chrome has gotten much better, but Safari is definitely the best.
andirk 4y ago
Tell the devs (any here on this thread? Please speak!) of _iPhone_ iOS Safari (which is somehow different than iPad) to support `MediaSource` and I'll sympathize. They are often behind the curve, and with the size of market share they have, I'd at least like a timeline of when very popular features will be exposed. Until then, they're the new IE to me. It's popular because it's the default and that's it.
chii 4y ago
Presumably, the people who care about web would only install firefox on their iOS devices, while the people who don't care would just keep safari. in other words, the chrome share of the iOS market would remain small. So a product manager cannot just say that it works on chrome and forget about safari. Unless, somehow, google manages to boost chrome's iOS marketshare up and above safaris'!
- dtech 4y ago
  I don't know the current iOS Chrome install base, but having everything synced is a powerful incentive I'd guess.
- maxnoe 4y ago
  > Presumably, the people who care about web would only install firefox on their iOS devices, while the people who don't care would just keep safari. Until they get large banners of "Please install the Chrome App to visit this web page"
  - chii 4y ago
    i hope that doesn't happen. And i hope that users would rather just not visit those sites. A lot of sites already try to push you to use their app by using the same banner, unfortunately. Time will tell if this tactic will be successful.
    - the_other 4y ago
      Every time I log into a Google web app it tells me to use Chrome for a better experience. It’s happened in two, maybe three browsers in the last month. I have no hope for your hope. Google will pummel users into using Chrome, relentlessly.
- rahoulb 4y ago
  I know a lot of non-technical people who use Webkit-Chrome on their iPhones because they (have to?) use Blink-Chrome on their computers. Currently they just accept that "iPhone" browsers don't behave exactly like computer browsers, but if Google started a campaign saying "now you can get exactly the same behaviour on your phone" I'm sure it would influence them.
int_19h 4y ago
Why would Safari get displaced on iOS, though? Apple users tend to stick to first-party software even when options are available, unless third-party stuff has a significant feature gap (and keep in mind that we're talking about UX here, not how many APIs the browser supports etc). Did Chrome overtake Safari on macOS?
- Devasta 4y ago
  Consider, for example, MBNA in Canada no longer supporting Firefox. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32350109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32350109 Is the user, just some ordinary joe who isnt especially technical, going to switch banks to continue using FF or is he going to switch to Chrome and carry on his day? When google search, youtube, maps, and a bunch of third party sites all start recommending Chrome as well, what happens then? Most websites have financial incentives to only support one browser, if they can get rid of WebKit they will, standards be damned.
  - KyeRussell 4y ago
    Firefox is off the beaten path. iOS Safari isn’t. Someone has to be ballsy enough to do make that first call. These kids calling it “the new IE” are being dramatic. iOS Safari as it is right now is nowhere near what IE was. Any meaningful organisation that makes the first call on not supporting iOS Safari is…to put it one way…not somewhere that I want to work. Because it sounds like the prioritises are being set by a nerd with a chip on his (yes, his) shoulder instead of what’s best for the user or for the business.
    - forgetfulness 4y ago
      Google will pay handsomely to a good bunch of "nerds" to gain dominance on iOS with Chrome as it did in other platforms, and then it will make business sense for independent vendors to drop support for anything but Chrome.
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  Google can prompt you to download Chrome in every service and every app of theirs you use, and every so often "innocently" break some aspect of their services if it's being touched by another browser. I remember back when their enthusiasts here, on HN, urged Firefox users to keep an open mind that Google products breaking on Gecko regularly was just because they were so busy making the web awesome! It was strange back then, but also the product of another era of the Orange Site, you saw more of that tendency to identify with businesses such as Google than with other individual people.
amelius 4y ago
> I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari. Unless web admins take action and e.g. show an annoying popup about web freedom on iOS and Chrome.
nvarsj 4y ago
> the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari It's not really a good argument. It should be about user choice. If Chrome is better than Safari, and I prefer it, I should be able to install it. OS locked down browsers is 1990s era MS anti-trust behaviour that significantly reduces overall competition. Mobile is king - if Safari/webkit wasn't so locked down on iOS, we may have gotten even a completely different player who made a really good mobile browser. Apple's behaviour is nothing short of monopolistic and there is no good defence of it imo.
- danuker 4y ago
  Anti-trust or not, the authorities are sleeping (perhaps paid well to do so). What are you going to do in response? I would restrict my site to work with even simple browsers like Links.
  - piva00 4y ago
    I don't know, individual action has very rarely worked to meaningfully enact system change.
    - wizzwizz4 4y ago
      But at least you won't be part of the problem, forcing people to use Chromium.
- michaelt 4y ago
  > Apple's behaviour is nothing short of monopolistic and there is no good defence of it imo. What if we have a straightforward choice between an Apple monopoly and a Chrome monopoly? I've seen major online shopping websites deploy code that meant firefox users couldn't add items to their shopping baskets, and then classify it as a low priority bug because there was a workaround - using chrome.
- yywwbbn 4y ago
  Well IE was just better than the competition. IIRC Nobody prevented you from installing alternative browser back in the 90s or 2000s Whether Chrome is better or not is moot if developers design to only support it or offer a subpar experience when using other browsers
markandrewj 4y ago
If your website only works on one of the browsers, you are probably doing something wrong. It is not like it was in the 90s, it can pretty much be expected your website will work on all browsers, if you are following the current HTML/CSS specs and best practices.

h0l0cube 4y ago

> I worry "works on Chrome" will be the only thing that gets solved for Firefox is my daily driver, and I use their WebKit wrapper on iOS, and I have to agree. I'm not looking forward to a Blink monopoly in the browser space. The upshot is that we might have closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS.

judge2020 4y ago
> closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS. What is native? If a website is explicitly testing for Firefox compatibility, they're probably also testing for Safari compatibility due to its increased market share.
- JohnTHaller 4y ago
  I know a fair few solo developers that don't test Safari compatibility because they don't own Apple hardware. And Safari only runs on Apple hardware (with the exception of Hackintosh).
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  It's not so much Safari compatibility, but WebKit compatibility. Anyone who wants their website to work on iOS has to test against mobile WebKit, regardless if their target users are on Chrome or Firefox. If these legislative changes go into effect, Webkit market penetration will plummet quickly to only those using Safari, and Apple will have less leverage to hold back on features that don't suit their App Store profits.
dmitriid 4y ago
> The upshot is that we might have closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS Strange. Android is 70% market share. Chrome is something like 80% market share (all playforms). Where are these glorious "closer to native web apps" we keep hearing about?
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  I specified on iOS. It would at least be possible on iOS if other renderers could be used, and both Firefox and Google would certainly have their own incentive to make this happen. Google don't want to undermine the Play Store, but they might want to undermine the App Store. Firefox have existential reasons for product differentiation, though web apps won't get traction without broader support by all players.
  - iainmerrick 4y ago
    The parent was clearly alluding to “closer-to-native experiences” on Android. If Chrome will bring that to iOS, there should already be examples on Android. Google don't want to undermine the Play Store, but they might want to undermine the App Store. I’ll buy that, but it doesn’t seem like a reason to be optimistic about the way things might go.
    - h0l0cube 4y ago
      > If Chrome will bring that to iOS, there should already be examples on Android. I think I illustrated that the incentives are different > doesn’t seem like a reason to be optimistic I did say "we might have closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS" (emphasis added) in my OP. Only because it would become possible, not because it would be likely
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        They are already supposedly possible on Android. So?

afavour 4y ago

I’m less sure about that for a few reasons. Biggest among them is that (presumably?) in app webviews will still be WKWebView, powered by WebKit. So if you want your page to load inside Facebook’s browser (and you do) you’re still going to have to care about Safari.

j16sdiz 4y ago
There is nothing stopping facebook shipping a copy of chromium. It’s around 400MB already, and they don’t seems to care
- afavour 4y ago
  Fair point. They already do this on Android. For compatibility reasons you understand, not so that they can track absolutely everything you do, no sir.

dcow 4y ago

[flagged]

nerdponx 4y ago
It's not a tired argument, it's a concern. I think they're right to be concerned. Good things can have bad side effects.
- dcow 4y ago
  Its… not an argument? Have you lost your mind? It was presented as an argument for why it would be bad to let users have freedom to choose their mobile browser. Of course an argument can be born out of a concern, that’s obvious. But you can’t just dismiss a rebuttal by saying an argument is not real it’s just a concern.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Are we reading the same post? > I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari. Nobody in a suit can make a business case for not supporting iOS Safari, given its market share, and also given the fact that the entire C-Suite and senior management team at any given company are using Safari on their iPhone and iPad. A page not working on iOS Safari is a serious business problem that people will take seriously, today. This doesn't sound like an argument against the change, only a pessimistic outlook for its effects.
    - dcow 4y ago
      The argument is that the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome monoculture is iOS Safari.
      - nerdponx 4y ago
        Right, both things can be true. Apple has a closed web browser ecosystem, and that's bad for users. Opening up that ecosystem could possibly lead to even greater market dominance by Chrome, which would also be bad for users.

jchw 4y ago

Well, Firefox users may never make up quite as much marketshare as it used to, but it does have one advantage: we're a lot louder and more annoying than Chrome users when stuff is broken. It's a feature! (Okay, I try not to be annoying. But I'm pretty sure absolutely nobody is thrilled when I report bugs about Librewolf not working. Shoutouts to SoundCloud for eventually fixing one of said issues.) I doubt Safari will actually die on iOS. The truth is, Safari on iOS is kinda good. That said, honestly this whole line of thinking has gotten pretty tiring. I'm not really sure that an Apple/Google duopoly on browsers is really that much better than the seemingly inevitable Google monopoly. It's not like either of them are particularly good citizens, but Apple's relatively small influence has been very negative in a lot of ways. I'm not even a huge fan of using regulations to solve every problem, but even I must admit that EU regulations have done far more to start to reel in Google than Apple ever could, anyways. As for poor WebM support and pushing wgsl into the WebGPU spec, good riddance. It's really sad that Google can't be trusted more. There's a lot of people there who are doing good work on Chromium and other web-related projects, and it's besmirched by greedy decisions at worst and optically blind decisions at best. When I was at Google, I did spend a bit of my time trying to make some intranet stuff work better in Firefox... It's probably a token gesture at best, but oh well. You know we're at a weird point when the underdog competition in browsers is Apple, one of the richest and most resourceful companies of all time.

happymellon 4y ago
> Well, Firefox users may never make up quite as much marketshare as it used to, but it does have one advantage: we're a lot louder and more annoying than Chrome users when stuff is broken. Slack refuses to work properly on Firefox. I don't think they care that we are being loud about it.
- jchw 4y ago
  To be fair, I'm not even sure if Slack cares about web users at all. It just doesn't work that well, at least for me. (Though I obviously haven't tried it in a bit, so maybe it's good in Chrome now.)

can16358p 4y ago

Agreed. While being forced into a walled garden isn't a good thing, it has the current side effect giving iOS Safari a significant market share to keep Chrome from dominating to become the new IE and have all those "works in Internet Explorer 6 with 1024x768 screen" websites again but this time for Chrome.

amelius 4y ago
What if Safari is the new IE?
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  That simplistic a comparison is simply not worth responding to in any direct way. Safari is Safari and IE is IE. there are some clear differences between the two, in both mobile market share and total market share. That’s just the beginning.
- dijit 4y ago
  > What if Safari is the new IE? Let me know when safari has 80% of the browser market share. Even across mobile devices. EDIT: Guess Chrome has the same marketshare as IE had in 2009 (if not a little more), iOS has 18%, everything else is a footnote. https://i.imgur.com/WnAsXId.png https://i.imgur.com/WnAsXId.png
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  Maybe from the perspective of webdevs, from what it represents for users, that's Chrome. A Chrome monopoly may seem desirable, because they're catering to webdevs, but there's nothing they'd like more than having webdevs help them lasso all the users they can surveil and expose to ads as possible.
- can16358p 4y ago
  I get your point. However, unless mobile usage (vs desktop) gets to something like 90% and unless another 90% of that mobile is iPhone/iPad (vs anything non-Apple), Safari dominating like IE did is impossible. However, for Chrome, it is possible without the walled garden (not to defend it or anything, but it is what it is).

BarryMilo 4y ago

Internet Explorer used to dominate the market, now it doesn't. As it was, so it will be.

petesergeant 4y ago
Right, but the years when it did sucked
viraptor 4y ago
IE dominated because it was the default / only known choice for a while. Then Mozilla/FF was huge because of features (tabs). Then Chrome was huge because Google had bazillion $$$ to burn on advertising it everywhere. I'm not sure how we can move away from that local maximum this time. On the iOS side, Apple had the default + locked browser choice. Now they can try to outspend each other with Google there.
- matwood 4y ago
  When IE 6 came out, it was also one of the best/fastest browsers at the time. Heck, it even came with the first implementation of what we all call AJAX today. The problem was that MS declared victory and stop developing IE, expecting to use their OS leverage to keep others out.
  - forgetfulness 4y ago
    They lost the favor of web developers, because they thought that by pushing a crappy browser they could stall the advancement of web applications. They wanted to stifle the web and have people use IE the least as possible and have developers keep making native applications. Google doesn't have that incentive, it has the incentive to make the browser as shiny as possible to keep the loyalty of web developers, so that they won't campaign in a way that will make fewer people download their ads delivery platform. They want people to use Chrome
Devasta 4y ago
MS sat on their laurels and allowed everyone else catch up though. Through the living standard all google needs to do is keep Chrome updating at a frantic pace and no one will be able to come close. If MS doesn't have the capability of maintaining their own browser, the chances of someone else entering the market is basically nil.

tluyben2 4y ago

It might make Apple work harder maybe? For instance on my m1 MacBook Air, safari is vastly better for my battery life than chrome or ff for my workload. It makes a huge difference. That would make me use it over the others if that’s the same on the iPhone or iPad where battery life is even more important.

matwood 4y ago
To be fair, Chrome has gotten much better, but Safari is definitely the best.

andirk 4y ago

Tell the devs (any here on this thread? Please speak!) of _iPhone_ iOS Safari (which is somehow different than iPad) to support `MediaSource` and I'll sympathize. They are often behind the curve, and with the size of market share they have, I'd at least like a timeline of when very popular features will be exposed. Until then, they're the new IE to me. It's popular because it's the default and that's it.

chii 4y ago

Presumably, the people who care about web would only install firefox on their iOS devices, while the people who don't care would just keep safari. in other words, the chrome share of the iOS market would remain small. So a product manager cannot just say that it works on chrome and forget about safari. Unless, somehow, google manages to boost chrome's iOS marketshare up and above safaris'!

dtech 4y ago
I don't know the current iOS Chrome install base, but having everything synced is a powerful incentive I'd guess.
maxnoe 4y ago
> Presumably, the people who care about web would only install firefox on their iOS devices, while the people who don't care would just keep safari. Until they get large banners of "Please install the Chrome App to visit this web page"
- chii 4y ago
  i hope that doesn't happen. And i hope that users would rather just not visit those sites. A lot of sites already try to push you to use their app by using the same banner, unfortunately. Time will tell if this tactic will be successful.
  - the_other 4y ago
    Every time I log into a Google web app it tells me to use Chrome for a better experience. It’s happened in two, maybe three browsers in the last month. I have no hope for your hope. Google will pummel users into using Chrome, relentlessly.
rahoulb 4y ago
I know a lot of non-technical people who use Webkit-Chrome on their iPhones because they (have to?) use Blink-Chrome on their computers. Currently they just accept that "iPhone" browsers don't behave exactly like computer browsers, but if Google started a campaign saying "now you can get exactly the same behaviour on your phone" I'm sure it would influence them.

int_19h 4y ago

Why would Safari get displaced on iOS, though? Apple users tend to stick to first-party software even when options are available, unless third-party stuff has a significant feature gap (and keep in mind that we're talking about UX here, not how many APIs the browser supports etc). Did Chrome overtake Safari on macOS?

Devasta 4y ago
Consider, for example, MBNA in Canada no longer supporting Firefox. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32350109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32350109 Is the user, just some ordinary joe who isnt especially technical, going to switch banks to continue using FF or is he going to switch to Chrome and carry on his day? When google search, youtube, maps, and a bunch of third party sites all start recommending Chrome as well, what happens then? Most websites have financial incentives to only support one browser, if they can get rid of WebKit they will, standards be damned.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
  Firefox is off the beaten path. iOS Safari isn’t. Someone has to be ballsy enough to do make that first call. These kids calling it “the new IE” are being dramatic. iOS Safari as it is right now is nowhere near what IE was. Any meaningful organisation that makes the first call on not supporting iOS Safari is…to put it one way…not somewhere that I want to work. Because it sounds like the prioritises are being set by a nerd with a chip on his (yes, his) shoulder instead of what’s best for the user or for the business.
  - forgetfulness 4y ago
    Google will pay handsomely to a good bunch of "nerds" to gain dominance on iOS with Chrome as it did in other platforms, and then it will make business sense for independent vendors to drop support for anything but Chrome.
forgetfulness 4y ago
Google can prompt you to download Chrome in every service and every app of theirs you use, and every so often "innocently" break some aspect of their services if it's being touched by another browser. I remember back when their enthusiasts here, on HN, urged Firefox users to keep an open mind that Google products breaking on Gecko regularly was just because they were so busy making the web awesome! It was strange back then, but also the product of another era of the Orange Site, you saw more of that tendency to identify with businesses such as Google than with other individual people.

amelius 4y ago

> I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari. Unless web admins take action and e.g. show an annoying popup about web freedom on iOS and Chrome.

nvarsj 4y ago

> the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari It's not really a good argument. It should be about user choice. If Chrome is better than Safari, and I prefer it, I should be able to install it. OS locked down browsers is 1990s era MS anti-trust behaviour that significantly reduces overall competition. Mobile is king - if Safari/webkit wasn't so locked down on iOS, we may have gotten even a completely different player who made a really good mobile browser. Apple's behaviour is nothing short of monopolistic and there is no good defence of it imo.

danuker 4y ago
Anti-trust or not, the authorities are sleeping (perhaps paid well to do so). What are you going to do in response? I would restrict my site to work with even simple browsers like Links.
- piva00 4y ago
  I don't know, individual action has very rarely worked to meaningfully enact system change.
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    But at least you won't be part of the problem, forcing people to use Chromium.
michaelt 4y ago
> Apple's behaviour is nothing short of monopolistic and there is no good defence of it imo. What if we have a straightforward choice between an Apple monopoly and a Chrome monopoly? I've seen major online shopping websites deploy code that meant firefox users couldn't add items to their shopping baskets, and then classify it as a low priority bug because there was a workaround - using chrome.
yywwbbn 4y ago
Well IE was just better than the competition. IIRC Nobody prevented you from installing alternative browser back in the 90s or 2000s Whether Chrome is better or not is moot if developers design to only support it or offer a subpar experience when using other browsers

markandrewj 4y ago

If your website only works on one of the browsers, you are probably doing something wrong. It is not like it was in the 90s, it can pretty much be expected your website will work on all browsers, if you are following the current HTML/CSS specs and best practices.