I believe Valve's been a bit on edge (no pun intended), about Microsoft forcing games through their store as well.
Mozilla was helping us out of these walled gardens. There's even the SSB support they've been working for PWAs on desktop. Instead of bundling Electron, you could likely just target ESR Firefox and your app icon just launches this URL (this is what Peppermint OS does). Instead now you have Chrome and all of these Electron apps all competing for who can chew up the most RAM.
Knee-capped? For years Safari had the best PWA support compared to Android.
And at first it even asked developers to make PWAs, and they said "no, we want native apps".
There isn't a defined spec sure, but they idea is to give Web Apps somewhat equal footing with native apps while having potential be more secure being tied to browser sandboxing, extensions, settings, etc. This doesn't appear to be in Apple's goals given those missing features. You can see devs begging for push notifications for years--and it works on desktop Safari.
At work, this is the specific feature we want above everything else in our PWA experience. Apple's been reluctant to say the least to allow repackaged Web Apps in their store, but can you blame developers when features like this are missing but present?
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-chrome-web-st...
things are much more likely to go the iOS route given it's already ARM.
There’s no other shoe. There's no known technical reason why all the major browsers shouldn't be available natively when ARM Macs start shipping in a few months.
Why would Apple allow other browser engines that are slower, less power efficient and don't respect user’s privacy at least as much as Webkit to run natively on iOS?
Apple continues to add features to block ads from tracking users across the web and to lessen the impact of fingerprinting by trackers.
Certainly Google has no interest in adhering to these principles if it were able to run natively on iOS—they're the only major browser on macOS that allows unchecked fingerprinting and ad tracking.
There's your problem. Apple doesn't own the device.. I do.
Apple can "recommend" I use Safari all they want (not unlike MS does with Edge) but if I own the device I should have the right to run any software I want. Full stop.
Practically speaking though, this is all command-line heavy and developer centric. Your typical Chromebook user can't/won't.
I'm actually grappling with this issue right now.. I'm a long time Firefox user and picked up a Lenovo Duet ChromeOS device to serve as a replacement for my cheap Android tablet.
Turns out.. I really like the form factor and am using it a lot (typing on it right now!). But the Firefox Android apps are a pretty terrible experience and since I don't plan on using this for dev, I don't want to jump through all the crostini hoops. So here I am, using Chrome..
If anything, at the moment Apple is doing more for the web diversity than anyone else. They have a non-negligeable market share and can force Google to abandon at least the most outrageous plans for Chrome.
Not that they are angels, of course... It's a pity that Mozilla failed to find a better revenue source that would include keeping Firefox alive.
What’s the alternative here? I can’t imagine opening up a new computer and not having some kind of web browser pre-installed.
* Forbid alternative browser engines on their platform.
* Bundle their browser in a leading operating system.
* Use their massive Web properties to drive downloads of their own browser.