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So Apple may provide a way to prevent their users from seeing captchas, but their competition is not allowed to. You see why this is a morally bankrupt position

• danShumway 3y ago
  It's bad for Apple to add attestation, but it's not a threat to the Open web when they do. It is a threat to the Open web when Chrome does. If that bothers you, support browser competition and consider breaking up Google. I'm sorry, but it is a fact that it is more dangerous for Chrome to take harmful web positions than it is for Safari to take harmful web positions. That's just the consequence of having a browser monopoly, and Google has to live with that consequence. Morality has nothing to do with it. I don't support attestation on Safari, but it matters more when Google does it. It's not "fair" because the market isn't fair, there is a dominant player and their actions matter more. Again, if that upsets you, get upset at the unreasonable power dynamics that Chrome has over the Internet. They are the reason for the extra scrutiny.
  • jsnell 3y ago
    When Apple is the only company allowed to ship browser features with such high and user visible impact as eliminating captchas, it will directly contribute to them increasing the market share of the devices people use to access the web. Once the majority of users are on Apple's platforms, the open web doesn't matter. It is whatever Apple wants it to be, which is most likely "dead". The rules have to be the same for everyone, and the discussions around the WEI on HN have made it clear they aren't. The other threads are filled with massive rants about how evil Google is and how amoral anyone working on this project must be. But then this thread on how Apple has been doing exactly the same thing has people for the first time engaging with the technological parts, and suddenly the critiques have turned to full-on excuses. "Oh, it's just a little bit bad when Apple does it."
    • danShumway 3y ago
      > When Apple is the only company allowed to ship browser features with such high and user visible impact as eliminating captchas, it will directly contribute to them increasing the market share of the devices people use to access the web. At which point we'll start criticizing Safari more frequently than Chrome. But I don't think you need to worry about that, I can't even run Safari on Linux or Windows in the first place. I already don't test any of my web projects in Safari specifically because I can't, I don't own a device that I can test Safari on. So good luck getting devs to build Safari-only websites. I think it's misguided for us to worry so much about a theoretical future monopoly that we avoid correctly prioritizing efforts to combat a present monopoly. Of course incidentally, "we" (whatever that means on HN) do criticize Safari all the time. "Safari is the new IE" didn't come out of nowhere. And another reason why this issue in particular matters much less for Safari is because those criticisms seem to have worked and I fully suspect at some point in the next 5 to 10 years it's very possible that Apple will be required by regulators to open up iOS to support multiple browser engines. And that will be great for certain parts of the Open web, I'm hoping that if iOS opens up its browser restrictions PWAs might get a lot better. But it's also very dangerous because it means Chrome's monopoly will grow even more, and it makes it even more pressing that we deal with specifically Chrome's dominance on the web. So there are plenty of areas where iOS presents a larger threat to user autonomy than Google/Android does (app store policies, user lock-in, sideloading, etc), and I have no shame about subjecting Apple to stricter standards than Google in those areas. This isn't one of those areas. > and suddenly the critiques have turned to full-on excuses I'm not offering a single excuse for Safari, it's bad that Safari implemented attestation. I am offering an accurate assessment of the threats that Safari and Chrome currently pose to the Open web. My standard rule -- consistently applied to everyone in every situation -- is "don't break the Open web", and even with both browsers implementing attestation, Google's implementation is breaking the Open web more than Safari is right now. > The rules have to be the same for everyone, and the discussions around the WEI on HN have made it clear they aren't. I don't get to set the rules, or else nobody would be doing attestation anywhere including on native app stores. But it is naive to look at a browser with 20% marketshare doing something harmful and to say, "well, this deserves exactly the same amount of attention as Google." It doesn't. I criticized Brave inserting its ads into webpages, but I'm not going to pretend that my reaction to Chrome doing the same thing wouldn't be a lot harsher, because Brave is not the dominant browser on the web. It's not a double standard to take context into account when prioritizing where coordinated community efforts should go. In this case, "fairness" for outrage over browser features effectively means ignoring the largest threat in the room to the web and pretending that we're not in a market with a dominant browser. But we are.