So no, you can't choose. When we say "you can choose" we need to realize that this is only good when you can make an educated, informed choice. If you can't, you need to be protected. And that's Apple's role.
Random choice is not a choice. Would you have your infant "choose" what drugs to take for headache for example? What criteria will they use? Pill shape, color, size and flavor. Well that's basically also our proverbial mom and pop picking a browser engine.
Furthermore browser engines have this peculiar habit of getting into everything. Open any app at all and it's probably using WebKit without you realizing it. What if the app uses some random outdated fork of Netscape, why not? Do you realize what "choice" you made by opening that app?
No.
There is no reason to prevent competition in such a market, and hopefully regulators will become aware of the issue and act on it soon.
Not one reasonable and intellectually honest person expects that the average phone user out there even knows what a browser engine IS, let alone compare two of them, or know where it's used (when it's not even disclosed).
Keep in mind smartphones are even more widely used than "computers" in general. So I guess even 8 year olds now are expected to do a security analysis on the browser engine their game uses before playing.
Delusional.
Probably more than 95% of car owners do not understand how the engine of a car works. So, following your reasoning, it would justify having no competition in the car market?
Thankfully most of the world chose the free-market economy model, of which free competition is a pillar. There is no reason for the web browser market to be an exception and justify obstructed competition like Apple does on iOS.
And drop the ad hominem rhethoric please.
Also you should review what "ad hominem" means. Saying "no one intellectually honest would say 2 + 2 is 5" is not ad hominem.
Ad hominem doesn't mean "don't say bad words about me and my opinions". Ad hominem would be disregarding an opinion not by discussing the opinion, but by discarding the opinion based on WHO said it.
It's in fact very hard to commit ad hominem against an anonymous person online who has said nothing about themselves. If they said "I have a history of delusions" and I said "therefore your opinion has no merit", that's ad hominem.
The fact that despite that you constantly hear people complaining about "ad hominem" online is just that much funnier. Strawman is another one that most people love to say, while having no clue what it means.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/barrierbreaker/two-misundersto...
I don't know or care who said the above opinion. I care about their opinion and their opinion was delusional.
Thinking the world at large knows, cares, and can make "informed choices" about the browser engines used throughout their phone apps is delusional.
Also, there's nothing "subjective" about whether all smartphone users are web developers, and therefore happen to care about browser engines.
But, "Delusional" is often associated with name-calling, so it sounds more like you're calling the person delusional, rather than what they said. Something like "This sounds delusional to me" would avoid that confusion.
But even if I decided to call the commenter names, that wouldn't be ad hominem (link above on details).
It's rude, it's uncivilized maybe, we can have qualifications like that. But it's not "ad hominem", because "ad hominem" isn't about "you insulted someone".
> So no, you can't choose. When we say "you can choose" we need to realize that this is only good when you can make an educated, informed choice. If you can't, you need to be protected. And that's Apple's role.
I'm getting strong deja vu to arguments over authoritarian nanny states in this.
Even if I accept the contentious value judgment that people need to be guided and protected by an entity that has strongly conflicting interests to them, I still don't think this is a strong argument as the default browser would still be Safari. People with little to no understanding of what a browser is are hardly going to download some outdated fork of Netscape.
why do they have to make this choice, why can't they just use safari?
My 80+ year old grandma made the informed choice to use Firefox on macOS. She can't use Firefox on her iPhone. She wants to use Firefox everywhere. She disagrees with you.
Not necessarily - if an app I am required to use for work chooses to use Chrome/whatever as its engine, for example, I don't have a choice there. Same for my bank / doctor / school / etc.
Definitely.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3243284/firefox-users-are-...
https://www.pcmag.com/archive/google-accused-of-tracking-saf...
Would you give a pass to Apple for how they handled privacy in the past and not to Mozilla who comparatively had only a few hiccups ?
Service providers where mostly in the deal to get user data, and Apple’s push on privacy only started well into Cook’s tenure.
But you have trust in them in their current business position (it only was “the early days”). By that token I don’t think it’s unrealistic to assume at some point you’ll find other companies that are either new or show they changed enough to get your trust.
With regards maps, although what this has to do with your original question is beyond me, Apple informed the user very clearly on where the data is from and what data they were collecting, they still do. It was originally a combination of TomTom and OpenStreetMap, by the way.
Also, Jobs was pushing privacy in 2010 - "Privacy means people know what they're signing up for, in plain English and repeatedly. I believe people are smart and some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you're going to do with their data."
I agree that companies can change. Big companies rarely do. I'm concerned that it's only a matter of time before Mozilla make the decision to switch to blink, which would be the end for them and the open web.
Interestingly, of the complaints made in this article, 6 are Editors Drafts, not agreed upon standards, or Working Drafts, again experimental un-agreed 'standards'. I'll concede that a working draft is close enough to being standardised. The rest, bar one, are implemented in WebKit. So the complaint in the article is that the WebKit project is holding up the web by not including Google's experimental features in a bid to say Apple should be allowing other, less secure rendering engines on a platform where users store a ridiculous amount of PII. It's being framed as 'freedom' - I'm sceptical. They'll be caterwauling about 'choice', but by enforcing 'choice', there is very real, and frankly sinister, risk that it will be lost irrevocably along with any semblance of an open web. Careful what you wish for.
I would be A-OK with that if the alternative engines provided the same privacy and security guarantees to me that Mobile Safari does (with penalties for breaching those guarantees.)