6 ms·

To be honest, the entire state of mobile browsers could (and probably should) be an antitrust case in and of itself. It's just that the technical specifics are

To be honest, the entire state of mobile browsers could (and probably should) be an antitrust case in and of itself. It's just that the technical specifics are too complex for your average customer, let alone an aging judge, to understand. On iOS customers are always locked in on the Safari ecosystem (well, for now, the DMA will probably change that) - all browsers on the app store are just skins of Safari, not meaningfully unique browsers. I hope I really don't need to explain why Apple gatekeeping non-WebKit browser implementations is bad. Android is slightly better in that on the surface you can switch out the browser for say, Firefox (although Firefox on Android is a disaster), but... then Google does a sneaky thing and make it so that any in-app browsers will still be Chrome thanks to the System WebView. So nobody gets to escape the Google ecosystem. And in recent updates to AOSP, the vendor gets to force the System WebView to be set to the Chromium System WebView (or the Chromium Canary WebView, but that's... just the beta version). Not that that one matters a whole lot directly considering there are no competing implementations for the System Webview besides Vanadium (which is just a Chrome fork - you also had Bromite in the past but a spat between Vanadium and Bromite means that Bromite System WebView is dead) and a single "just pass through to your regular browser" implementation; Mozilla has a Firefox WebView implementation for Android but largely leaves the choice up to app developers to switch out Chromium WebView instead of making it compatible with the system WebView (so nobody uses it afaict).

jncfhnb 3y ago
I’ll fly to Europe if I have to in order to get an iPhone that can run Adblock on the mobile browser
- jmtulloss 3y ago
  Have you looked at nextdns? Works well for me.
- vehemenz 3y ago
  AdGuard and Vinegar work fine for iOS Safari. What do you mean by mobile browser? Or do you mean any iOS webview component?
  - superb_dev 3y ago
    Vinegar is amazing, combine it with SponsorBlock and you get a much better YouTube experience than the native app
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Apparently I was just ignorant. Thank you these look amazing.
    - vehemenz 3y ago
      No problem. I feel torn about advertising these extensions because YouTube might become wise to them, but I also want to pay it forward.
- opportune 3y ago
  I use Firefox Focus. It doesn’t block everything but it does stop most annoying ads. I doesn’t support “tabs”, but in vanilla Safari I find tabs to be a graveyard of things that I occasionally clean out but rarely actively use.
- stouset 3y ago
  1Blocker exists?
- xethos 3y ago
  Yet another alternative (to those already mentioned) is to run PiHole at home and Wireguard. This way you have one place to add domains, it works across all apps and browsers, and even away from home.
shadowgovt 3y ago
How many gigs of the very finite storage on my mobile device should I, as a user, be required to dedicate to every mom-and-pop browser engine that comes along? Storage is cheap but it ain't free on mobile, and it's not expandable without buying a new phone. Seriously though: especially if you're a developer, do a quick audit and discover how many copies of entire browser engines you have on your desktop machine. They get squirreled away in testing frameworks, one-off bespoke apps, hardware configuration control panels... I'm not immediately convinced that the phone ecosystem controllers going "No, we don't do that here" is a bad thing.
- vel0city 3y ago
  I wouldn't argue every browser needs to be pre-installed, but as it stands now you can't even choose to install another actual browser engine at all on iOS.
- noirscape 3y ago
  Assuming you're talking about Android here (given on iOS everything is just WebKit)... Do note that I have nothing against System Webview implementations. I think they're a great solution to avoid the current Electron hellscape we're seeing play out on the desktop, where every single bespoke application is running an entire copy of Chromium under the hood. The idea of just having a single copy of a browser running in the OS as a sort of backbone for in-app HTML pages/external links without launching the entire browser is a very reasonable approach, especially given phones have historically been much less powerful devices than desktops. The problem I have is the lack of user choice; you have no control as a user what your System WebView is. Google used to offer that choice, but then quietly let vendors slam the door shut (unless you go the custom ROM route or root, which is beyond the skills of a regular user), and the default they offer (afaict) means most vendors do that, with vendors assuming most users won't care about it, so why would it matter. In fact this is also why I really dislike the Firefox approach of making it something the developer chooses to switch out, not the user - it's just bringing the Electron problem to mobile. The user should be the one making that choice, not the developer. It really shouldn't be difficult to ask the user to pick from a list of browsers and then to actually respect that list. If a user says "I want to make Firefox my browser", then Firefox should also be the System WebView. Not to quietly put them back into Chrome (and therefore subject to Googles data collection practices) just because they clicked a link in an application.
darklycan51 3y ago
This I think that yeah FF is losing badly on desktop, but it doesn't help that the majority of people use mobile and Google/Apple have created a duopoly on mobile... it very literally should be an antitrust, and quick before it's too late for any other competing engine to catch up. I think we'll get to the point where they have had monopoly for so long that their policy making that they get to dictate as a result will be so ingrained inside of the web that it will be non reversible.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tomjen3 3y ago
If anything locking down iOS that much now probably means that Safari remains a viable browser. If people could install Chrome, I imagine we would have more of a monoculture of browsers.
- noirscape 3y ago
  If Safari only is a viable browser because of Apple literally being anti-competitive to it's users in other ways, I'd argue it's hardly viable at all. The reality is that we're most likely in a monoculture already when it comes to browsers (just on the whole); Firefox gets funded by Google as and Safari only is propped up because Apple does it's own anti-competitive practices in other areas (read: their gatekeeping of the App Store) rather than being a common choice because it's a good browser. There's also the fact that a lot of this is a tough thing to claim when by all accounts from webdevs... Safari is an unviable browser without Apple's anti-competitive behavior because Safari fucking sucks. It's the modern Internet Explorer of browsers; a lot of modern web APIs that both Firefox and Chrome use just... don't work on Safari because the system has bugs or weird design decisions that don't follow spec, which means they're not widely used because Safari is still there and holding back everyone else.
  - llm_nerd 3y ago
    "Safari fucking sucks. It's the modern Internet Explorer of browsers; a lot of modern web APIs that both Firefox and Chrome use just... don't work on Safari because the system has bugs or weird design decisions that don't follow spec" Absolute nonsense. The web developers who go off about Safaris are overwhelming terrible webdevs who want to stick a "Made for Chrome" button on their website and be done with having to bother dealing with other browsers. It's actually a bit hilarious when Safari is called Internet Explorer -- there was a time when Internet Explorer offered all sorts of crazy new stuff (just like Chrome today) which threatened the user's privacy and security, but webdevs wanted it so they stuck "Made for Internet Explorer" and dropped a bunch of ActiveX controls on their page. If anything Chrome is the Internet Explorer of the day. I'm pretty passionate about this because not only is it going to be incredibly damaging for the web when Safari is crushed (Firefox will be crushed simultaneously), it means whatever half-baked nonsense Google pushes out is going to be the norm.
seydor 3y ago
how can you prove that apple's gatekeeping of browser has an economic impact. the google deal is easy to assess
- noirscape 3y ago
  Apple is blocking an entire market of technologies from its platform outside of their own implementation by abusing the fact that iDevices have a single storefront they control. It'd be one thing if Apple made it so that the iDevices just are too technically incompatible with Gecko or Blink, but that's not the case. It's literally just a reviewer in their offices going "no, non-webkit browsers are against policy, not allowed". Like... there, that's it. Apple is abusing their monopoly in one area (the App Store) to force a monopoly in another area (the browser market on their devices). That's textbook antitrust.
  - seydor 3y ago
    still, whatever service is available on chrome is also available in safari. it s the app store that drives the gatekeeping
    - IntelMiner 3y ago
      [citation needed] given how much Safari's browser seems to laggard behind its peers
  - rahkiin 3y ago
    Well, and JIT is not allowed as it is a security nightmare. So that means no custom Javascript implementations.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    > entire market Which is realistically only Chromium. Unfortunate as it is Apple’s policies are the only thing keep Google from entirely dominating the browser market.
jwells89 3y ago
Chrome on Android also lacks support for extensions entirely, likely because Google is well aware that overwhelmingly the most popular type of browser extensions are adblockers. There are Chromium based browsers that get around this, but usership of those is low because most people just use the default browser. Seems like a fairly clean cut instance of conflict of interest. At this point Chromium and Blink should be spun out into a Mozilla-style non-profit, not only due to conflict of interest but also because it's a bad idea to have a single corporation in full control of software that has become critical infrastructure.
- noirscape 3y ago
  Non-Chromium browser picks also don't swap out the system webview, meaning that if you click say, a link in Slack/Discord/whatever other app, you still end up with the Chrome browser anyway. That's why I mention the system webview in the first place; it's a super insidious browser that solves a meaningful issue ("Electronification", where every desktop app is now running Chromium is solved by it's presence) but conveniently also grants full control back to Google, overriding other browser changes. (I once read some stats about this - system webviews are the majority of browser traffic on phones nowadays, because app developers love them; they can be tracked (the Google system webview reports back data to the main app about user behavior - IIRC the one Apple offers for non-browser apps is more of a black box though) and analyzed to see where users go from their apps, which helps with things like user profiling for advertisements). Given that Android lets vendors force it to Google's implementation on a kernel level, it's also very much an avenue Google doesn't want users to figure out to change or to have competing implementations for.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    > (the Google system webview reports back data to the main app about user behavior - IIRC the one Apple offers for non-browser apps is more of a black box though) That's correct, SFSafariViewController does not afford app devs any usage information whatsoever, is run out-of-process, and uses separate cookie/localstorage/etc from both normal app webviews and Safari proper making tracking more difficult. Also unlike Android's Chromium webview, SFSafariViewController utilizes the content blockers and extensions the user has installed unless the user specifically requests otherwise, so there's still some level of ad/tracker blocking happening.
johnchristopher 3y ago
> Android is slightly better in that on the surface you can switch out the browser for say, Firefox (although Firefox on Android is a disaster) When was the last time you tried it ? It has been my daily driver for years and I can't complain (ublock origin works on it :).
- noirscape 3y ago
  About a year ago? The main issues I had mostly boiled down to "the app felt clunky to use", pages not rendering nicely, issues while scrolling pages and buttons not being in places where they seem logical. Similarly, the way Firefox handles external links from other apps feels... bad? Like that's really what a lot of it boils down to; Firefox as an app just feels outdated to use. Then there's the fact that extension support in Firefox Mobile is aggressively locked to the Mozilla extension store and only a whitelist of stuff Mozilla approves (it draws extensions from a collection on the Mozilla extension store, so if your desired extension isn't in it, the only option you have is to override the entire thing by making your own collection and messing in about:config), and that kinda compounds to a strong "I'd not recommend it" for me. Firefox to me is a browser that at it's core should be respecting user choice and the Android implementation on that alone doesn't meed the sniff test; Mozilla lock-in even on minor things like this is a big dealbreaker. Chrome's feel with the rest of Android, for all the issues I have with it, is really well done. Firefox makes you feel much more like you're constantly struggling against Android to make a square peg fit in a round hole. I personally do use a Chrome fork (Cromite, which is a Bromite fork since Bromite's lead dev is MIA), just so that feel is preserved (while also having a solid adblocker and other privacy oriented features).
  - johnchristopher 3y ago
    Thanks for your detailed answer. I have only ever used firefox on android so I don't really feel its clunkyness and I only know of one major website I use (an e-commerce merchant website) with problems. Sometimes the sharing function is broken (no icons) but I can live with that. I also wish there were more extensions but as long as ublock is available it's okay for my usage. I should spend a day or two with Chrome or cromite to see what I am missing. All that being said, the latest firefox update pisses me of: now when you open a new tab and type news.ycombinator.com it will jump to any tab with the same url. I have >1000 tabs and the new behavior messses up the chronological order in which tabs were opened. It also jumps me back hundred of tabs backward at time. I dig a bit and found the bugzilla bug report, the original problem is about opening a new tab from the home tab and seeing how it took years to get the behavior changed and how the change has unintended consequences and people in the thread are "too much tabs is bad" kind of people I am giving up on reporting it.
Spoom 3y ago
> then Google does a sneaky thing and make it so that any in-app browsers will still be Chrome thanks to the System WebView. So nobody gets to escape the Google ecosystem. Are you sure about this? I'm able to use (and have been using) Firefox as my Android system webview, just tested now. And this is literally on a Google-designed device. Maybe I'm missing something. Disclaimer: Googler, opinions my own.
- noirscape 3y ago
  I... don't know what you changed because Firefox does not offer a system webview. They just... don't. Firefox offers GeckoView, but that's an app library that also does what WebView does, not a system application. There's not even any Firefox forks that build up a system webview because none of the forks think it's worthwhile after Google locked it down so much. The closest you'd get to a "firefox webview" is by installing a Magisk module/non-Google ROM that replaces it with a stub application that forwards any "open system webview" call to your regular browser (so it works like clicking an http link). In the past you could just install that stub on any old Android device, but Google locked it down by letting vendors set a signature that a system webview would need to adhere to[0] (as well as a ton of other restrictions). To be clear, I am not referring to what happens if you just click an http link in an app and the app just calls the browser. That setting respects browser choice. I am referring to the WebView[1] component, which a lot of apps use as a substitute for launching the browser and relies on an underlying app called the Android System WebView[2] to render the pages. For a legitimate usecase; in chat applications (ie. Discord), where a user might visit a website only to then want to immediately go back to the chat itself, the app instead just creates a WebView and... that one is always Chromium, and is nowadays enforced by vendor settings (so it can't be changed without root). In less legitimate usecases, this is done for tracking reasons. (Another big user of the WebView component for this was Facebook Messenger, but Facebook has switched to using an internal version of this webview component, for reasons only understood by Facebook and it effectively acts as a shadow "fourth internet browser" that is in practice a somewhat outdated version of Chromium.) [0]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/android_webview/docs/webview-providers.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/androi... [1]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebView https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebVi... [2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.webview&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
robocat 3y ago
> then Google does a sneaky thing and make it so that any in-app browsers will still be Chrome thanks to the System WebView Rubbish. Any app can use your own embedded browser engine - Google is not sneaky. It is just that the WebView is easy to use and you don't need to manage security updates. Apple doesn't give you the choice (I am fairly sure App store rules disallow you from embedding your own WebView implementation into an App).
yard2010 3y ago
Vivaldi is the best mobile browser I know! It has a builtin tracker and ads blocker. Made the change a year ago can't look back

jncfhnb 3y ago

I’ll fly to Europe if I have to in order to get an iPhone that can run Adblock on the mobile browser

jmtulloss 3y ago
Have you looked at nextdns? Works well for me.
vehemenz 3y ago
AdGuard and Vinegar work fine for iOS Safari. What do you mean by mobile browser? Or do you mean any iOS webview component?
- superb_dev 3y ago
  Vinegar is amazing, combine it with SponsorBlock and you get a much better YouTube experience than the native app
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Apparently I was just ignorant. Thank you these look amazing.
  - vehemenz 3y ago
    No problem. I feel torn about advertising these extensions because YouTube might become wise to them, but I also want to pay it forward.
opportune 3y ago
I use Firefox Focus. It doesn’t block everything but it does stop most annoying ads. I doesn’t support “tabs”, but in vanilla Safari I find tabs to be a graveyard of things that I occasionally clean out but rarely actively use.
stouset 3y ago
1Blocker exists?
xethos 3y ago
Yet another alternative (to those already mentioned) is to run PiHole at home and Wireguard. This way you have one place to add domains, it works across all apps and browsers, and even away from home.

shadowgovt 3y ago

How many gigs of the very finite storage on my mobile device should I, as a user, be required to dedicate to every mom-and-pop browser engine that comes along? Storage is cheap but it ain't free on mobile, and it's not expandable without buying a new phone. Seriously though: especially if you're a developer, do a quick audit and discover how many copies of entire browser engines you have on your desktop machine. They get squirreled away in testing frameworks, one-off bespoke apps, hardware configuration control panels... I'm not immediately convinced that the phone ecosystem controllers going "No, we don't do that here" is a bad thing.

vel0city 3y ago
I wouldn't argue every browser needs to be pre-installed, but as it stands now you can't even choose to install another actual browser engine at all on iOS.
noirscape 3y ago
Assuming you're talking about Android here (given on iOS everything is just WebKit)... Do note that I have nothing against System Webview implementations. I think they're a great solution to avoid the current Electron hellscape we're seeing play out on the desktop, where every single bespoke application is running an entire copy of Chromium under the hood. The idea of just having a single copy of a browser running in the OS as a sort of backbone for in-app HTML pages/external links without launching the entire browser is a very reasonable approach, especially given phones have historically been much less powerful devices than desktops. The problem I have is the lack of user choice; you have no control as a user what your System WebView is. Google used to offer that choice, but then quietly let vendors slam the door shut (unless you go the custom ROM route or root, which is beyond the skills of a regular user), and the default they offer (afaict) means most vendors do that, with vendors assuming most users won't care about it, so why would it matter. In fact this is also why I really dislike the Firefox approach of making it something the developer chooses to switch out, not the user - it's just bringing the Electron problem to mobile. The user should be the one making that choice, not the developer. It really shouldn't be difficult to ask the user to pick from a list of browsers and then to actually respect that list. If a user says "I want to make Firefox my browser", then Firefox should also be the System WebView. Not to quietly put them back into Chrome (and therefore subject to Googles data collection practices) just because they clicked a link in an application.

darklycan51 3y ago

This I think that yeah FF is losing badly on desktop, but it doesn't help that the majority of people use mobile and Google/Apple have created a duopoly on mobile... it very literally should be an antitrust, and quick before it's too late for any other competing engine to catch up. I think we'll get to the point where they have had monopoly for so long that their policy making that they get to dictate as a result will be so ingrained inside of the web that it will be non reversible.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tomjen3 3y ago

If anything locking down iOS that much now probably means that Safari remains a viable browser. If people could install Chrome, I imagine we would have more of a monoculture of browsers.

noirscape 3y ago
If Safari only is a viable browser because of Apple literally being anti-competitive to it's users in other ways, I'd argue it's hardly viable at all. The reality is that we're most likely in a monoculture already when it comes to browsers (just on the whole); Firefox gets funded by Google as and Safari only is propped up because Apple does it's own anti-competitive practices in other areas (read: their gatekeeping of the App Store) rather than being a common choice because it's a good browser. There's also the fact that a lot of this is a tough thing to claim when by all accounts from webdevs... Safari is an unviable browser without Apple's anti-competitive behavior because Safari fucking sucks. It's the modern Internet Explorer of browsers; a lot of modern web APIs that both Firefox and Chrome use just... don't work on Safari because the system has bugs or weird design decisions that don't follow spec, which means they're not widely used because Safari is still there and holding back everyone else.
- llm_nerd 3y ago
  "Safari fucking sucks. It's the modern Internet Explorer of browsers; a lot of modern web APIs that both Firefox and Chrome use just... don't work on Safari because the system has bugs or weird design decisions that don't follow spec" Absolute nonsense. The web developers who go off about Safaris are overwhelming terrible webdevs who want to stick a "Made for Chrome" button on their website and be done with having to bother dealing with other browsers. It's actually a bit hilarious when Safari is called Internet Explorer -- there was a time when Internet Explorer offered all sorts of crazy new stuff (just like Chrome today) which threatened the user's privacy and security, but webdevs wanted it so they stuck "Made for Internet Explorer" and dropped a bunch of ActiveX controls on their page. If anything Chrome is the Internet Explorer of the day. I'm pretty passionate about this because not only is it going to be incredibly damaging for the web when Safari is crushed (Firefox will be crushed simultaneously), it means whatever half-baked nonsense Google pushes out is going to be the norm.

seydor 3y ago

how can you prove that apple's gatekeeping of browser has an economic impact. the google deal is easy to assess

noirscape 3y ago
Apple is blocking an entire market of technologies from its platform outside of their own implementation by abusing the fact that iDevices have a single storefront they control. It'd be one thing if Apple made it so that the iDevices just are too technically incompatible with Gecko or Blink, but that's not the case. It's literally just a reviewer in their offices going "no, non-webkit browsers are against policy, not allowed". Like... there, that's it. Apple is abusing their monopoly in one area (the App Store) to force a monopoly in another area (the browser market on their devices). That's textbook antitrust.
- seydor 3y ago
  still, whatever service is available on chrome is also available in safari. it s the app store that drives the gatekeeping
  - IntelMiner 3y ago
    [citation needed] given how much Safari's browser seems to laggard behind its peers
- rahkiin 3y ago
  Well, and JIT is not allowed as it is a security nightmare. So that means no custom Javascript implementations.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  > entire market Which is realistically only Chromium. Unfortunate as it is Apple’s policies are the only thing keep Google from entirely dominating the browser market.

jwells89 3y ago

Chrome on Android also lacks support for extensions entirely, likely because Google is well aware that overwhelmingly the most popular type of browser extensions are adblockers. There are Chromium based browsers that get around this, but usership of those is low because most people just use the default browser. Seems like a fairly clean cut instance of conflict of interest. At this point Chromium and Blink should be spun out into a Mozilla-style non-profit, not only due to conflict of interest but also because it's a bad idea to have a single corporation in full control of software that has become critical infrastructure.

noirscape 3y ago
Non-Chromium browser picks also don't swap out the system webview, meaning that if you click say, a link in Slack/Discord/whatever other app, you still end up with the Chrome browser anyway. That's why I mention the system webview in the first place; it's a super insidious browser that solves a meaningful issue ("Electronification", where every desktop app is now running Chromium is solved by it's presence) but conveniently also grants full control back to Google, overriding other browser changes. (I once read some stats about this - system webviews are the majority of browser traffic on phones nowadays, because app developers love them; they can be tracked (the Google system webview reports back data to the main app about user behavior - IIRC the one Apple offers for non-browser apps is more of a black box though) and analyzed to see where users go from their apps, which helps with things like user profiling for advertisements). Given that Android lets vendors force it to Google's implementation on a kernel level, it's also very much an avenue Google doesn't want users to figure out to change or to have competing implementations for.
- jwells89 3y ago
  > (the Google system webview reports back data to the main app about user behavior - IIRC the one Apple offers for non-browser apps is more of a black box though) That's correct, SFSafariViewController does not afford app devs any usage information whatsoever, is run out-of-process, and uses separate cookie/localstorage/etc from both normal app webviews and Safari proper making tracking more difficult. Also unlike Android's Chromium webview, SFSafariViewController utilizes the content blockers and extensions the user has installed unless the user specifically requests otherwise, so there's still some level of ad/tracker blocking happening.

johnchristopher 3y ago

> Android is slightly better in that on the surface you can switch out the browser for say, Firefox (although Firefox on Android is a disaster) When was the last time you tried it ? It has been my daily driver for years and I can't complain (ublock origin works on it :).

noirscape 3y ago
About a year ago? The main issues I had mostly boiled down to "the app felt clunky to use", pages not rendering nicely, issues while scrolling pages and buttons not being in places where they seem logical. Similarly, the way Firefox handles external links from other apps feels... bad? Like that's really what a lot of it boils down to; Firefox as an app just feels outdated to use. Then there's the fact that extension support in Firefox Mobile is aggressively locked to the Mozilla extension store and only a whitelist of stuff Mozilla approves (it draws extensions from a collection on the Mozilla extension store, so if your desired extension isn't in it, the only option you have is to override the entire thing by making your own collection and messing in about:config), and that kinda compounds to a strong "I'd not recommend it" for me. Firefox to me is a browser that at it's core should be respecting user choice and the Android implementation on that alone doesn't meed the sniff test; Mozilla lock-in even on minor things like this is a big dealbreaker. Chrome's feel with the rest of Android, for all the issues I have with it, is really well done. Firefox makes you feel much more like you're constantly struggling against Android to make a square peg fit in a round hole. I personally do use a Chrome fork (Cromite, which is a Bromite fork since Bromite's lead dev is MIA), just so that feel is preserved (while also having a solid adblocker and other privacy oriented features).
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  Thanks for your detailed answer. I have only ever used firefox on android so I don't really feel its clunkyness and I only know of one major website I use (an e-commerce merchant website) with problems. Sometimes the sharing function is broken (no icons) but I can live with that. I also wish there were more extensions but as long as ublock is available it's okay for my usage. I should spend a day or two with Chrome or cromite to see what I am missing. All that being said, the latest firefox update pisses me of: now when you open a new tab and type news.ycombinator.com it will jump to any tab with the same url. I have >1000 tabs and the new behavior messses up the chronological order in which tabs were opened. It also jumps me back hundred of tabs backward at time. I dig a bit and found the bugzilla bug report, the original problem is about opening a new tab from the home tab and seeing how it took years to get the behavior changed and how the change has unintended consequences and people in the thread are "too much tabs is bad" kind of people I am giving up on reporting it.

Spoom 3y ago

> then Google does a sneaky thing and make it so that any in-app browsers will still be Chrome thanks to the System WebView. So nobody gets to escape the Google ecosystem. Are you sure about this? I'm able to use (and have been using) Firefox as my Android system webview, just tested now. And this is literally on a Google-designed device. Maybe I'm missing something. Disclaimer: Googler, opinions my own.

noirscape 3y ago
I... don't know what you changed because Firefox does not offer a system webview. They just... don't. Firefox offers GeckoView, but that's an app library that also does what WebView does, not a system application. There's not even any Firefox forks that build up a system webview because none of the forks think it's worthwhile after Google locked it down so much. The closest you'd get to a "firefox webview" is by installing a Magisk module/non-Google ROM that replaces it with a stub application that forwards any "open system webview" call to your regular browser (so it works like clicking an http link). In the past you could just install that stub on any old Android device, but Google locked it down by letting vendors set a signature that a system webview would need to adhere to[0] (as well as a ton of other restrictions). To be clear, I am not referring to what happens if you just click an http link in an app and the app just calls the browser. That setting respects browser choice. I am referring to the WebView[1] component, which a lot of apps use as a substitute for launching the browser and relies on an underlying app called the Android System WebView[2] to render the pages. For a legitimate usecase; in chat applications (ie. Discord), where a user might visit a website only to then want to immediately go back to the chat itself, the app instead just creates a WebView and... that one is always Chromium, and is nowadays enforced by vendor settings (so it can't be changed without root). In less legitimate usecases, this is done for tracking reasons. (Another big user of the WebView component for this was Facebook Messenger, but Facebook has switched to using an internal version of this webview component, for reasons only understood by Facebook and it effectively acts as a shadow "fourth internet browser" that is in practice a somewhat outdated version of Chromium.) [0]: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/android_webview/docs/webview-providers.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/androi... [1]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebView https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebVi... [2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.webview&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

robocat 3y ago

> then Google does a sneaky thing and make it so that any in-app browsers will still be Chrome thanks to the System WebView Rubbish. Any app can use your own embedded browser engine - Google is not sneaky. It is just that the WebView is easy to use and you don't need to manage security updates. Apple doesn't give you the choice (I am fairly sure App store rules disallow you from embedding your own WebView implementation into an App).

yard2010 3y ago

Vivaldi is the best mobile browser I know! It has a builtin tracker and ads blocker. Made the change a year ago can't look back