I want Firefox on iOS, and I want Tor Browser on iOS, and I want Lynx on iOS, and I want wget on iOS, and I want youtube-dl on iOS, and I want to run whatever the hell I damn well please on iOS.

Underhanded? It's pretty clear that your stated goals don't align with your real goals here.

Edit: I have a hard time putting into words why your arguments seem so deceptive to me. It is like whataboutism: the arguments you are making are technically functional but they just completely fall apart with any reasonable weighing of the pros/cons because it betrays the "intrinsic" goals (choice, browser competition, functionality, security) for "extrinsic" goals (browser diversity, but mostly the success of safari). This makes me think that you're secretly misaligned and that you actually hold those "extrinsic" goals as your intrinsic goals.

I can be clear and transparent here. My position is that if you actually care about browser choice the biggest elephant in the room is Chromium. The reality is Google has shown that it will leverage it's properties like Gmail and YouTube to get users to install Chrome; from nagware to just outright breaking sites on other browsers.

If you want to force Apple to allow different browsers without addressing this problem, then you are trading one company's monopoly on a single platform for another company's monopoly globally. And there is no reason to believe that Google will behave any better than Apple has. It's not like Google hasn't tried to skip the standards process before.

So when people argue that "it's for browser diversity" I have to consider them as 1.) naive, 2.) actually working for Google. 3.) just developers who are tired of being forced to target multiple platforms.

Do I think it's ethical that this is how this stalemate is handled? No; taking away user choice is limiting the freedoms of users.

Do I think Safari is amazing? No; I think Chrome on Android, today, is better than Safari on iOS. I may be harming users today by forcing them on Safari.

Would I fold if Apple only allowed Firefox/Lynx/Netscape? Yes; My problem is with Chrome, not with other browsers. But I think the number of people who genuinely want to Firefox is tiny in comparison to the number of people who would just install Chrome.

My worst fear is that once Chrome is allowed on iOS, then there is no reason for Google, or anyone else, to target anything other than Chrome; and that would ultimately be harder to fix. A year of Chrome dominance, where developers only target Chrome would fully entrench Chrome and make it difficult for anyone to build a browser that wasn't just a Chrome fork that emulated all of Chrome's bugs and unspecified behaviors. The alternate solution, where the Chrome problem is addressed first, then the fix is "just" passing legislation that opens up iOS. One fix involves just changing the behavior of one company. The other fix involves changing the behavior of thousands of companies.

Get FF or some other browser a healthy market share first and then talk about cracking open iOS.

Instead what happens is this internecine warfare where everyone shits all over FF for political reasons (most of which have no relevance to their day to day use of a web browser) and uptake of Tor/Brave is miniscule and most everyone sticks with Chrome.

"Get FF or some other browser a healthy market share first"

Why ? Open up the platform first.

One would say it would be disastrous to open a platform first and then take on Chrome because

1) Firefox cannot compete against Google endless resources m. Google will win, not a matter of it but will.

2) The time it takes to decouple chrome from google will be too long. It may just kill Firefox before any action can really be done.

Yeah I don't see why this math is so hard.

If you force Apple to open up iOS then Chrome just takes it over and Safari will take such a hit that Apple will probably have to kill it. Then Google will own 99% of the portal to the web.

I think I'm arguing with a bunch of Libertarians though who think that an unregulated market is some kind of magic sauce that will conjure up a Chrome competitor out of thin air, and not a recipe for monopolization.

Why are you so certain that Apple will have to kill Safari if Chrome and other browsers are allowed on iOS?

Because Chrome will instantly start to out compete it. And once Safari is pushed down below 25% share on iOS then sites will feel more and more free to avoid testing on Safari and push users towards just using Chrome. Not having two different engines to have to test against means that even more the web becomes something that works on Chromium by default and is totally broken on Gecko. That makes FF even worse, and Google will totally control Chromium and the engine that browsers like Edge and Brave work on top of and will be able to dictate (in the "dictator" sense of that word) what the engine does (and while they might be somewhat responsive to Microsoft, they won't be to Brave). And we already won the battle to keep Windows from tying the browser to the O/S on windows and watched while we lost the war and Google completely took the engine over. Cracking open iOS is going to let Google take over that platform as well, it isn't going to make life any better for Gecko or any other alternative engine.

How much cash does Apple have?

How much would it cost for them to fund firefox development to make it a stronger competitor?

Okay, Apple: do that. Also open up the walled gardens. You can make it a setting if you want to keep the beginner computer users safe.

Let Apple permit the use of OSS browsers with their native rendering engines - problem solved. Will they do this ? I guess not because it means their native app development is threatened.

As far as youtube-dl goes, you can run that on iOS via a Python interpreter such as Pythonista: https://gist.github.com/nneonneo/f6b2d659ba76542e7d27e13598a...

he just pragmatic, if the results are worse than now, someone will not do the "right thing" on moral

I hate to break it to you, but Safari isn't going to stop that from happening.

Thank you for proving my point.

Safari only has ~20% market share because it's has ~25% of mobile and nearly 50% of tablet and only because Apple restricts those platforms. If Apple opened up their platform that would vanish and Chrome would take over.

The platform being relevant and closed is the only thing stopping Chrome from becoming the next Internet Explorer 6.

OP here. That's actually incorrect.

We started OWA with a group of primarily Safari first developers, in that iOS Safari is our primary target platform. We've had over a decade of major issues from rendering bugs, to lack of functionality to our apps breaking for months at a time waiting for a patch. The severe underfunding of Safari/webkit coupled with a ban on competition meant that it was never going to be viable to ship Web Apps to iOS. So the question is, how do you convince the worlds richest company to invest a extra few hundred million/year into their own browser?

The answer is competition. Competition provides Apple a deep incentive to produce a capable, feature risk browser at risk of losing users to the other vendors. Each 1% of Safari users is worth 150m/year in google search revenue, a number so large it would make even Apple take notice.

As web developers we see the value in having browser engine competition, many of us lived through the IE6 era and know the risks of the monopolistic competitive behavior like we're seeing from Apple (Side-point: At no point did Microsoft ever ban the competition).

The status-quo where Safari/Webkit was both stifling the Web and Web Apps and providing no competitive pressure on Chrome/Edge/Firefox + the severe underinvestment from Apple meant that a regulatory solution was needed.

> The answer is competition

There is no competition. There is only Chrome.

This is what I was talking about. There will only be one result to opening iOS and it scares me.

FF/Opera are too small. Edge is small and really just Chrome anyway. If we had a healthy browser market I’d be fine. But we don’t.

Apple is, for the wrong reason, the only thing keeping us from total Chrome dominance.

I want one of these “just open iOS” calls to include the consequences of what they’re calling for and how they plan to deal with it.

> This is what I was talking about. There will only be one result to opening iOS and it scares me.

Why? Does Apple not have the resources to build a competitive browser? Do they not have the motivation? Do they not have the engineering skills? Do they not have a large and extremely desirable user-base who prefer to stay as much as possible in Apple's ecosystem?

Given all the advantages Apple has, how could it possibly be true that they can only get users by literally banning all competition on their main platform?

Replace Apple with Microsoft and you get your answer. Since when did having a trillion dollars guarantee success? Replace Apple with any company; do you think Google lacked the motivation and engineering skills to build a social network?

Ignoring much of the fact how Google would leverage it's existing properties to make sure you couldn't open a single web page without being nagged about installing Chrome; it would take a large amount of effort for anyone to compete to where Chrome is today and the result is that people would just Chrome.

And fine, I understand that as developers you don't want the burden of testing multiple platforms or being beholden to one platform that doesn't move as fast as Chrome. But to pretend this is about the "browser diversity" is where I have the problem. Just say you want Chrome and don't buy Google's framing that this about "open standards" when Google doesn't even hold Chrome to that standard.

> Since when did having a trillion dollars guarantee success?

So then your answer is that Apple's browser is significantly worse than competitors, and that users wouldn't use this much worse product if it were not for Apples anti-competitive behavior?

> But to pretend this is about the "browser diversity

> Just say you want Chrome

I think most open web supporters would be a lot happier if Apple even simply allowed Firefox.

That would still be massively better than the status quo.

Are you saying that all someone would have to do is argue for allowing just Firefox, and you would no longer do this thing where you attack some alleged secret motivations?

>So then your answer is that Apple's browser is significantly worse than competitors, and that users wouldn't use this much worse product if it were not for Apples anti-competitive behavior?

Yes. I hope it's exceedingly clear that I don't think Safari is God's gift to mankind.

>Are you saying that all someone would have to do is argue for allowing just Firefox

Yes. In fact they could be upfront and just say "just allow Chrome because I like developing for Chrome." But that's not what happens; it's "Apple is stifling competition because I want to use Netscape Navigator", when in actuality it's just developers that want to target a single platform, or Google who wants protect itself from Apple's power.

Maybe OWA is the exception here, but what I've found is the people making the most visible noise about this are connected to Google in some way. Consider this HN post from a couple days ago [1], where the author in his six-part series about browser choice, neglects to ever mention Chrome's dominance. Unsurprising that he was also a platform strategist at Google. You're telling me the guy who's job it is to make sure Google is an entrenched as possible doesn't like Apple's position on Safari? What a surprise. Then he tells you "don't worry about Chrome, this is about open standards!" - sounds underhanded to me.

At the very least, the cohort of users on Safari who can't switch prevents Google from just outright breaking some sites like Gmail and YouTube on every browser except Chrome.

[1] https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-brow...

Exactly. Let’s be very very clear here: the death of the open web will be not only because of Google and it’s internet multi-market dominance , but because of developers wanting to make their life easier, users and the future be dammed.

Apple can’t reasonably allow Gecko (Firefox’s engine) without also allowing Blink (Chrome’s engine). And we know which one is the 800lb gorilla here.

I love and support Firefox, and I even use it on my iPhone (yes, it’s reskinned WebKit, but it syncs my stuff).

I mean why not? It would actually be a pretty cool move to make Firefox a 2nd party browser on iOS given special privilege.

> Does Apple not have the resources to build a competitive browser?…

They do. They did. It’s called Safari. That’s how we got here.

What they DON’T have is any care about Windows/Linux/Android users. Apple makes their browser to make their platform the way they like.

If you want Apple to provide the competitive alternate browser on other platforms you’re asking the wrong company.

> Given all the advantages Apple has, how could it possibly be true that they can only get users by literally banning all competition on their main platform?

Google pushes Chrome with the #1 OS in the world (Android). With the #1 site, google.com. And the #2, YouTube.com. And gmail. And Google Maps. Maybe Waze. Chrome OS. GSuite.

They have an INSANE amount of power to push people to Chrome and off other browsers.

I’m not arguing pro-Apple. I’m arguing anti-Google.

Chrome is competition, and no, it's not alone: on the desktop market, where competition is not rigged as much as on mobile, Edge has 10% market share, and Firefox 7.5%. It's not insignificant.

> I want one of these “just open iOS” calls to include the consequences of what they’re calling for and how they plan to deal with it.

OWA has taken into account anti-competitive practices used by Google to gain browser market share, and made recommendation to mitigate or prevent them. In there submission to the japanese regulator [1], they include:

- 3.1.7: No Chrome Preferencing: > Google should not use their control over the operating system to provide unfair preference to their own browser, Chrome, either through the operating system or agreements with partners.

- 3.1.8: Website Transparency Obligations: > OWA suggests that where a Gatekeeper’s website does not support a browser which has above a 2% market share, they be compelled to publish a document containing detailed reasoning that prevents support of certain engines.

[1]: https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20HDMC%20(Japan)...

If you're taking the approach that iOS browsers are just re-skinned safari, then Edge doesn't count as it's own browser on desktop.

Yes it does, that's a totally different situation. Edge chose to use Chromium as its engine, Microsoft takes part in its development, they are free to remove or add any component from it, and if ever they wanted to they would be free to fork it and drop it for another engine at any time. None of that is true for WebKit skins on iOS.

Microsoft were were quite transparent about being forced to adopt Chromium because of the prevalence of Electron apps on Windows.

That wasn’t the reason.

Edge could just not compete with chrome, despite throwing hundreds of engineers at the problem. They tried, and tried, and tried.

In the end “edge doesn’t work” was just code for “edge is not chromium”

Electron was and is still a separate beast, Microsoft doesn’t even need to deal with that: third party developers do, they have to ship the binary.

Seems like you would certainly know! Thanks

Those recommendations are weak sauce. Websites are going to say stuff like “works best in Chrome!” and Google is going to encourage that. Nothing in those recommendations, assuming they’re even adopted, will solve that.

It’s disheartening - you have good intentions but almost everything you say is backwards.

Regulation on Apple only is the opposite of encouraging competition, it’s literally calling shots against the only fighter that’s pushing back on Chrome in a significant way - on market share, and maybe more importantly, on privacy and avoiding bloating web standards to further avoid total lock-in on V8.

Second, Apple has been accelerating greatly Safari development for years now and I worry your entire organization can’t admit it’s actually a great browser and has rapidly caught up in terms of correctness and features, and is now in fact leading in many ways. That it rejects some proposals isn’t inherently wrong, by the way, and the reasoning for many is just. I’m afraid if you admitted that, it’d pop a bubble in one of your core tenets, and given you made this mission driven thing with a single purpose, you’re sort of now forced into an intellectually dishonest place.

Because as a long time web develop myself who went from IE to Firefox to Chrome to Safari as my main browsers over the years, there’s simply *no doubt* that Safari as of a year or two ago started whooping Chromes ass. Like not even close, it feels like a different type of thing. It’s insanely fast, across so many dimensions, lighter, and I don’t get incompatibility almost ever anymore.

Your mission would achieve the opposite of what it wants - Apples platform isn’t a monopoly, Google's are. Google has a monopoly on Search, Browsers, and influence on the web. This would only strengthen the worse/stronger fighter. And it's all premised on a fundamentally unsound critique of Safari.

Why do I care if developing in Safari is hard for developers? If iOS opens up to chrome, it's game over for any kind of competition in the mobile browser war. Google will take over web standards and the death of the old republic will be complete. Android is your answer if you don't want Safari.

Lots of people want to explain why the government should force Apple to let native Chrome onto iOS.

I don't see anyone explaining what will force Google to continue supporting Safari once they have Chrome on iOS.

The reality is that they probably won't. Safari will break for Google services and pixels, and the only answer will be "switch to Chrome, things don't break there." Bye bye competition.

While I admire your stance on the internet being open I disagree.

Yes, opening browser engines would be good for the competition. But you missed one point: You assume all players will play fair in the competition. If all browser engines would be allowed over night, what would happen: Google will probably play really unfair. E.g. sadly the layout of Google will be messed up in Safari, youtube videos stutter/have lower resolution, everything is a lot slower, the performance will be sabotaged, but on Chrome everything will be working fine. There was even a precedent for something similar: [1]

This will probably come alongside with "Try it in Google Chrome", a lot of users would probably switch, thus the monopoly of Chromium would be unstoppable by pure market forces.

Yes, having only one browser engine is bad for the choice of the user, but it does have significant downsides.

Damned, if you do, damned if you don't

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...

Anti-Competitive Behaviour from google should also be addressed by regulators.

Our suggestions were covered in sections: 3.1.7 No Chrome Prefrencing 3.1.8 Website Transparency Obligations

https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20HDMC%20(Japan)...

As parent stated, Google can simply neglect to make their apps work well in Safari. They’ve done so in the past; GMail on Firefox was nigh-unusable due to a raft of dumb bugs for a long time, and it still uses substantially more CPU and memory than literally any other tab I have open on my browser. Right now they have to make an effort to support WebKit (Safari); as soon as they can push Blink (Chrome) to users, that motivation will go away.

To be fair, it's not like Safari is free. Should site owners have to pay Apple to make sure that their website shows up well in Safari?

That seems like it creates perverse incentives for Apple to keep Safari "broken".

In a discussion about encouraging browser diversity, are you seriously arguing that it’s an unreasonable burden on web developers to ensure their websites work on more than one browser engine?

> There was even a precedent for something similar: [1]

No there wasn't, unless you mean killing a 10 year old version of Internet explorer with a banner to a newer version of Internet explorer is somehow playing unfair.

Yes, there was. See this thread from Mozilla's former Vice President: https://archive.ph/2019.04.15-165942/https://twitter.com/joh... (or directly on Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686)

Maybe precedent was an unfair word - I apologize - but it shows, how Google can/could use the power of having one of the most used websites in order to influence the choice of the browser.

Open Web Advocacy has been very clear that they want competition on iOS, not Chrome specifically. The reason being that the absence of competition is currently allowing Apple to deteriorate the web experience on iOS, preventing the web and web apps from competing with native apps. Their objective is to lift these artificial limitations imposed by Apple and free the web.

OWA members have actually been actively reporting WebKit bugs and interacting with the Safari team to help prioritise features and bug fixes on Twitter and elsewhere, showing the goal is to improve the overall web experience on iOS, not allow Chrome to become dominant. Here is one of their detailed bug report: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84.

> Open Web Advocacy has been very clear that they want competition on iOS

And it is being pointed out, repeatedly, that the only actual real competition is Chrome. When Chrome becomes an option then websites will abandon any pretense of adhering to standards and just code to Chrome. You can't pretend the mobile browser landscape won't just end up mirroring that of the desktop.

The total browser share of iOS shifting to Chrome, even if Chrome only got 50% of iOS users, would put the total browser share of Chrome over 90%. There would be no impetus for any website to write for anything but Chrome.

Competition on iOS without real competition on the desktop already existing could quickly mean unbreakable Chrome hegemony.

That’s why I originally commented. If you focus on just one of those I believe there will be terrible unintentional consequences.

This whole chrome fetish thing you've got is actually the issue. Everyone thinks "there is only Chrome" so in a sense we all deceive ourselves. I don't know a single person anymore who uses Chrome. Maybe you do but that's not really the point. If you don't want a Chrome hegemony then don't fool yourself into thinking there is one and don't proliferate that ideology. Tell your product people that NO, you're not going to just ship the Chrome version and support Safari and Firefox later. Put in the work to make software work on other browsers. That's how you break the status quo. The amount of times I've seen some software company tell users "our product only works on Chrome" is disgusting. No wonder it's popular... people don't have a choice because of shitty software.

>I don't know a single person anymore who uses Chrome.

I find this very hard to believe. Everyone you know uses Firefox?

And Safari and Brave and Edge (so some use Blink).

So Safari and Chromium and Chromium. I'm not sure who the one here is deceiving themselves.

Chromium != Chrome. We're talking about some world where Google Chrome takes over everything not where Chromium derivatives compete with Google Chrome for browser market share based on features and merits. That latter outcome defeats the "chrome hegemony" which is what the person I initially responded to is complaining about.

Chromium dominance is effectively Google dominance when it comes to the open web. That is a world where Google no longer has to follow any sort of standards body because it is the standard. Another commenter, snowwrestler[1], put it best:

>With full control of the rendering engine on all platforms, Google can stop engaging with standards bodies. Web rendering standards will become simply what Google says they are, even if it is to their benefit. Imagine AMP but on steroids. When Safari stops rendering mobile sites correctly, there will be lots of helpful friends and family (and ads) telling folks to "just switch to Chrome, it's a better browser anyway."

>Google could also ship their own root certificate list and take control of Web PKI. Imagine Symantec but entirely at Google's option. Play ball or get security warnings. This would allow an end run around the democratization afforded by Let's Encrypt, for example. Controlling 99% of the client end of TLS confers just as much power as controlling the CA end.

All of these items are built into how Chromium renders the web. The other Chromium derivatives will be forced to swallow these changes because what are they going to do? Fork and maintain their own browser engine? Bisect patches from upstream forever? How many of these Chromium forks will have the resources to maintain their own fork of something as complex as Chromium?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31898439

A 95% chromium world is the same as a 95% chrome world in many regards.

Following Chromium upstream is an extremely hard effort if you have done any kind of non trivial changes to it. There are constant refactors and changes. This means that your chromium using browser can't be anything more than just a reskin of Chrome, which means that you don't have the agency to support some feature that Chrome chose to not support, and the features you do support are likely going to be implemented 100% the same due to using the same code, including the bugs. This leads to the same "code assuming the bug" issues that if everyone used Chrome.

Furthermore, Google has a monopoly on Chromium developers, with only few people contributing from the outside. Your Chrome reskin team will likely be very skilled in maintaining a Chrome reskin but if Google ever decided to stop the Chromium project in favour of a closed source Chrome, there would be nobody who knows how to properly maintain the fork going forward, neither at your company, or available for hire.

You are 100% at the mercy of Google if you do a Chrome reskin.

Through this logic, iOS already allows firefox etc to run on its platform, if Firefox != Gecko.

except the issue here is the rendering engine and who controls in at the top level.

I don’t wanna live in the world we’re 90% of the Internet only supports chromium, yet everything from Edge to Opera use it now. Firefox and Safari the last holdouts keeping google from dominating all web standards.

I want Firefox on iOS.

On the other end, the competition (namely Firefox) can't flourish either if all it can do is to be a skin with some sync features on top of Safari.

All Apple achieve with this is to slow down the inevitable, especially if the smaller players can't catch up because of it.

If Safari hadn't been lagging so far behind for years, I'm sure the sentiment to allow Chrome on iOS would be very different.