> Basically, if you want to have choice in a browser, don't use Apple products or a Microsoft OS.
I get the "Apple products" bit - Apple famously refuses to allow you to install your own browser engine under the hood on iOS. But Microsoft? Can you qualify that with some concrete examples?
This is about opening link targeted to edge
"Copy the following test link:
microsoft-edge:https://www.betanews.com"
you will receive support calls from people who don't run windows and thus don't have edge
regardless, web-apps that depend on a specific browser should not exist.
any feature that is not implemented in all major browsers should be considered experimental. it might go away. it's fine to use such features for experiments, but they should not be put into production and relied upon.
any differences in the implementation of the standard should be considered a bug. warning users about bugs is fine, but automatically redirecting me to some other browser that you deem working is not.
If one browser laggs behind then the rest shouldnt deploy?
This is crazy
[1] i am only counting major modern browsers here: chrome, edge, firefox, safari. you are welcome to support more, but these at a minimum.
Wtf.
Popular as hell services are constantly annoying users e.g reddit fb
Or arent or werent available on web at all - iirc instagram
If you have leverage then they aint gonna leave as hard as you make it sound
if it doesn't break then you have a graceful fallback which i did already suggest as an acceptable way to support new features in case they are not supported.
but if the site breaks in some way, it may prevent me to complete the objective on the site. if i wanted to buy something, and the site doesn't work because of that missing browser feature, then i will have to go buy somewhere else. it doesn't matter how much leverage the site has if i can't use it.
They're doing a huge amount of dark pattern stuff to avoid people from using other browsers these days.
But since then, I've used Windows 10 and now use Windows 11 on multiple devices, and in my immediate friends and family they all use it too, and this has not happened at all.
> opening of walled garden
Yeah, I wonder how secure those customers would be when any kind of third party app store can just show up and start releasing data stealing, virus-infested apps, with no oversight?
The idea that allowing a wild west of things because "freedom" is somehow better for the end customer is very shortsighted. I've never had to assist anybody in my family who has an iPhone, that cannot be said for Android however.
One of the major reasons of existence of the EU is to provide a common-level playground for everyone, where everyone has a reasonable chance of success based on merits. Forcing Microsoft to break up their anti-competitive bullshit back in the IE6 days was a good thing, and so is breaking up the engine and app store monopoly on Apple's side today.
Another reason of existence is waste reduction, and holy hell did the EU do a good job there by getting everyone sans Apple to agree on micro-USB, then on USB-C once it achieved reasonable market penetration for everyone including Apple.
These days I only need to carry two USB-C power bricks from Anker on vacations to charge everything I have from my array of phones to my laptops (corp and private), and once I find the money to upgrade my Sony camera, that as well.
Chrome: 65.6%
iOS Safari: 18%
All others: 16.4%
Personally, I’m more concerned about Chrome than iOS.
And for me, I feel having more choice on iPhone compared to Android. With android I would need to limit the apps that I install because of potential security flaws.
iOS wins all the security rankings (e.g. https://nordvpn.com/blog/ios-vs-android-security/ ), and it’s closely related to its lockin model.
This whole essay is really just Mozilla complaining that they aren't on anyone's radar anymore and should be disregarded as bullcrap.
Firefox once upon a time defeated IE6 despite home turf advantage, to say nothing of Chrome which played that game even better.
If Mozilla wants more market share, maybe they should make software people actually fucking want.
Also, using the OS default is also a choice. If someone uses Edge in Windows, that's a choice.
It's only iOS where users have no choice.
OS restrictions, if any, are not the reason Mozilla is dead in the water.
And yet, somehow, Chrome is still more popular. So what are those horrible tactics Google uses to brainwash people into using their browsers when both of their major competitors use their own operating systems to either harass or ouright force the use of their browsers for the users?
Mozilla is farting vapid air with this essay.
Agreed. If the doors open, then Google will fight for the iOS browser space. And their ability to leverage all of their properties is pretty powerful here.
If Chrome takes over iOS, then that's it. No one will bother with site compatibility for anything else. Firefox's chances to stay relevant in that world will be slim.
Because that's the only scenario where that happens and it's plausible - the exact scenario we were in with IE6 where Microsoft refused to provide a better browser and keep up with then new and much better Mozilla and later Chrome browsers.
Good product doesn't need monopolist lockdown to be used. If Safari as as good as Apple fans say it is, this massive change won't happen. If Safari sucks, then iOS users are better off with Chrome until someone better comes along. A lot of them will probably choose Firefox though, since it suits them better. Or Brave. Or Vivaldi.
It's called competition and drives towards better products for users. It's incredible how anti-free market some of megacorp fans here are. Outright refusing to allow existence of Firefox and other free browsers on iOS is a much worse take than we've ever seen from likes of Microsoft.
No, I mean that Google will use their search monopoly, along with their dominant position across other product areas to undercut the market share of any competing browser. Any merit Chrome has is dwarfed by the strength of Google’s ability to push it on users.
I have many complaints about Apple’s handling of iOS. But it seems to me that their stance on iOS browsers is the only thing preventing the web from becoming a Blink rendering engine monoculture.
I don’t like Apple’s approach. But I’m also concerned about the prospect of a Blink-only future.
Please, provide ANY proof, that Google has this crazy amazing power against the company that owns a platform and that easily caused a tank in Meta revenue by just slightly flexing the power on that platform.
And after that, please provide ANY proof that that megacorporation, richer and more competent than Google, cannot provide a browser that could even remotely compete with better user experience on the platform they themselves own.
Because what you're claiming is pretty crock that has no basis in reality or history.
You're exaggerating while also being abrasive and wrong ("is pretty crock that has no basis in reality or history"), basically.
Chrome didn't rely on word-of-mouth and geek evangelists to spread like FF did in the early years—Google leveraged their monopoly on multiple web products to do it. The proof is that they already did it once—a whole lot of users who truly don't give a shit which browser they run, ended up with Chrome, because Google told them it was better. The differences you list that make this situation seem different aren't actually notable barriers, as you imply they are. If anything, tapping an "install this!" call-out and following through in the app store is both an easier and higher-confidence action for most users than downloading a .exe installer file, running it, and clicking through the installer.
It's the web's destiny anyway. Its design lacks modularity to such a huge degree that a monopoly open source implementation is inevitable. There's no deep reason that has to be bad, Blink is open source and can be forked. In some ways it's not really clear what benefit the duplication between WebKit, Blink and Gecko brings to the table nowadays, as they implement the same specs in essentially the same way.
I hope that you're wrong! Google already has a tremendous amount of influence, and a Blink monoculture would give them near complete control of the future of the web. (And I think Google have been poor stewards of the web. But that's an entirely different conversation.)
Blink being open source is better than the alternative. Internet Explorer achieving total dominance would have been even worse. But it doesn't buy you that much. Under a monoculture, your fork of Blink could never deviate from the original meaningfully because sites wouldn't be built to standards, they would be built to work on Blink.
Google not being able to unilaterally dictate web standards is a good thing. For example, I'm glad we have WASM and not Google Native Client.
The hard truth is that 18% of traffic is probably 50% of the money.
In developed countries it's probably 75%-80% of the money.
I think this is some of the disconnect between users on this site who don't understand why people would possibly actively choose iOS even with the lockin. Most people do not want to use a product that is constantly updating and adding features in that are going to be taken out shortly, for something as basic nowadays as web browsing. If you're on the cool new technology people the average person likes rapid innovations. Once your tech is considered a commodity, then the average person wants a the equivalent of a toaster. Most people do not want to fiddle with their toasters or find out each day what new changes their toaster has. They want to put in bread, and get out toast. For browser, most people want to just be able to navigate to a handful of websites.
The restrictions are a feature and not a bug.
Precisely the reason why I have an iPhone and an iPad is because they give me 5 years of updates and even more of security fixes.
FF does the equivalent of a major iOS update several times per year, as far as the user experience of the update is concerned—iOS doesn't fill my screen with on-launch "hi! We updated!" notices unless the release is a big one and there's actually new stuff to tell me about, in which case they usually keep it short and to the point. FF opens & foregrounds a new tab to tell me about the exciting update (ugh) and sometimes also pops some call-out bubbles for Pocket or some other crap, way, way more often than any other software I use, and it's really annoying, especially for a piece of software I've been using exactly the same way since it was called Phoenix and before some of the people working on it were born, probably—none of the shit in those announcements has ever, once, been anything I needed or wanted to know about.
This, despite monkeying with UI and force-foregrounding unrequested content being UI poison for people with low computer literacy. I roll my eyes and close the crap; others get confused and are significantly delayed in doing whatever they actually wanted to do with the browser, on top of feeling confused and betrayed that their browser did something different when they opened it this time.
My Firefox install hasn't bothered me by opening any unwanted tabs in a couple years, at least? But it still updates on a system restart or when I tell it to -- it just reloads all the previously opened tabs without any UX burden.
but i have the choice to update or switch browsers if i want to, and that's the point.
the restrictions only remove choice. they don't add anything.
Like, seriously? No one's that stupid. Sure most people want a decent, clear default option, but no one want that to be the only option. At least not for themselves. Because for some reason I see many people arguing that other folks are too stupid for options and should be locked down instead. For their own… safety? convenience? And that just reeks of authoritarianism.
I just want to ask you something. I'm a software developer, able to build out of parts and configure a headless Linux box, unlock the bootloader on, flash and root an Android phone and use both successfully, and "Please OS vendor I want something simple, ... , please lock down my machine" is literally THE reason why I got an expensive iPhone as my last phone instead of a cheaper Android.
Would you say that I'm stupid?
What I think is really stupid is how many people seem to think that having the ability to change things means that they absolutely MUST go through all the settings menus and change things. What really galls me is how many so-called technologists even believe this. It comes up all the time in Gnome vs. KDE arguments, and I'm seeing the same mentality here. If you don't want to change things, then don't.
That sure does sound like a straw man argument to me. Are you sure you've really heard "pls don't make me change all the things, I don't like changing things" instead of the much more plausible "pls don't make me use a system where someone had to implement (and has to support) functionality that I personally don't need, and as a (possibly) developer myself I understand that this adds complexity to the system and places burden on BOTH the user and the developer"?
Yes.
99.9% of people are not like you.
They barely even know the difference between Windows and Google.
People who got online when smartphones entered the scene have a difficult time when I try to explain what "folders" and "files" are.
I do a lot of tech support for family and friends.
They NEVER enter settings or preferences for their OS or their browser.
They're afraid they'll "break something".
The disconnect between tech literate people like you, and what they think most users want - or even care about - is mind blowing.
Does anyone here remember the headache you'd get, when helping a family member, and you saw how many toolbars and viruses they'd managed to install, since you last checked their PC two months ago???
The lockdown is a feature - not a bug - in most user's minds.
And I has made my life so much easier.
I use Linux and side load apps.
But I'm so, so, happy that none of my family members are even able to do the same.
Right? I feel like my non technical social connections have an even greater learned helplessness from interacting with any sort of open to customization technology because they've learned that everytime they touch something the tool stops working in a way they don't understand. Most people are not going to spend days to weeks, and definitely not months to years learning how to tinker with and expertly maintain their technology.
I feel like technologists in this forum are acting like blacksmiths who would scoff at any of us for having purchased a hammer, rather than smelting the ore, forging the head, and carving the handle so we could have one that fit our needs perfectly.
But a profitable one
There's lots of stuff you're not allowed to do because we figured out the average person can't do it without endangering others.
There are complex reasons for this, but the end result is simply that IT is not ready for mass adoption. Software is still in its infancy - I suspect that the broader the possible implications of technology, the longer it will take it to be ready to be mass adopted. We gave up all hopes of ever proving program correctness in the 80s, then in the last decade we've given up all pretenses that we know what we're doing... and nobody saw a difference. By all rights, software should be confined to research labs and garages of nerds for quite a few more decades.
The problem is that this technology is too useful. It has too far-reaching applications in almost all spheres of human activity. When the software (and all layers below it) actually works, it brings small miracles to its users, enough that they're willing to pay a lot for a product obviously unfinished, rushed, that'll probably get killed after few years. They think that, yeah, it breaks all the time and I'm afraid to breathe in its direction, but it's ok, I'm strong, I can deal with it if I'm able to do X or Y.
Tl;DR? I dunno. Maybe developers should put more effort into professionalizing the field, but this kind of thing is impossible to rush. Or maybe the users should get a grip and accept that it's not developers who force them to use their products. The massive amounts of money involved, along with the life-changing potential of IT products, skew incentives so much that, currently, both developers and users pretend that it's all fine, even though it obviously isn't, and then both complain. Users are stupid, developers are lazy, but neither can live without the other any longer...
I would go even further and say it's not just so in the users minds, it is also so in the admins mind, whether that's a business setting where we have to make sure thousands of workers don't accidentially brick their PC (or worse: cause an infosec issue), or a family setting.
Though I have to say, that lockdown-feature comes with a rather heavy price tag attached, because, well, the systems in question do a whole lot more than just make the locking down easy, do they?
It would be great if commonly used Linux Desktop Environments allowed for a switchable (with root-privileges) "Lockdown". I'm aware that this is possible already, but requires too many steps and is too error-prone. What I want is a simple on/off-cmd offered directly by the Desktop-Suite for me to issue as root.
That would allow people like you and me to setup computers for non technical people to use easily, whith the benefits of both an open system, and the stability a locked down system provides.
Not just the grandpas and grandmas either:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/09/23/163212/todays-student...
The important thing to notice is that the median user's mind is neutral about features like lockdown, security, side-loading, and everything else, because they don't think about features. They think about concrete interactions, like "playing candy crush", or "talking to grandma/grandkid", or "buying stocks", or "trying that app that my coworker showed me".
And when they can't do it ... "it didn't work for me" ... they, ironically wisely, don't even speculate why it did not work. The folks you see on forums who recommend "doing factory reset and it'll work" or "clean the cache", etc... are obviously the "Dunning-Kruger poster kids".
Median users are monkey see monkey do, that's why if they see "it works on Ted's iPhone" then their thought is "I guess I'll get an iPhone". And ... it works. The US is iPhone-land.
...
And interestingly this hyper-pragmatic (arguably too narrow-minded) approach to technology is also what leads to the interesting cases when enough teenagers want Fortnite on their iThing. And that's when the generalizer machine of society can pick up this thing and sometimes it spits out useful principles. (Mostly we get just one more bad statute on the books.)
And the US device market is still the trendsetter, which is basically Appleistan.
Apple is the premium brand, the Goliath in the market, especially considering revenue and profit.
Even if there are many Android phones they are of various brands, and Alphabet/Google is not rocking the boat, F-Droid works relatively okay.
I could easily turn that characterization around. "Please OS vendor, I want something that just works, please don't add customization options that I will never use but if I accidentally select will effectively brick my machine for the technical skill level I have." I might be dating myself here but do you not remember all the complaints about something as simple as resetting a VCR's clock and parents just living with it blinking after a power outage until their technically inclined children took it upon themselves to fix it?
>No one's that stupid.
They don't have to be stupid, but that doesn't mean the time invested in learning the skills to modify and customize software and hardware is something they want to do. My original point was that people in this thread and others across this site keep talking like they cannot _fathom_ why someone would choose a locked down version of a product over an open one, and I pointed out why many people would.
>And that just reeks of authoritarianism.
Moralize elsewhere here. No one forced people to buy an iPhone and yet its massively popular. More open products exist for cheaper. Tbh the only who seems to be implying that people are dumb and pushing authoritarianism are the group who keeps pushing to break up these machines that just "work" that the market is showing a high level of preference for
Software and these hyperglobal platforms are where principles actually start to matter. (It did not matter even in politics. In principle free speech, sure, but also no generated kiddie porn, because ew. And it did not matter, but suddenly with the capability to force CSAM-detection on the world, we would think it now starts to matter, but no, people in general never heard about this, have no idea about this, and so on.)
So with that long intro, it turns out that if enough people want Fortnite on their iThing, or want to repair their tractor or car ... that can force some principles, and that's when people will suddenly care about "my device my blablabla".
Almost everyone I know owns an iPhone... and yet, almost all of them wanted a more open device and bought an iPhone anyway because it has a longer serviceable lifetime (due to software updates for a longer period of time), has a pervasive brick and mortar storefront that sells accessories, lets them use AirPods, has one of the best cameras on a mobile phone (and here it is maybe-interesting to note that Samsung devices are also pretty damned well locked down: you sideload a browser, sure, but you can't get filesystem access or modify any of its stock behaviors)... I could keep going, as Apple is actually an extremely competent company that has built a great product!
And yet, those people, when given the chance, were all very excited to jailbreak their phones to get more features. The people who are not technical has their technical friends do it for them. The people who did not have technical friends who wanted to deal with that much effort bring their phones to the little shops which do it for you. At its peak, despite being pretty hard to do, difficult to maintain, and complicated to take advantage of, we had more than 10% of people with an iPhone jailbreaking! That is an insane number of people to just write off :/.
Why fix it? What's the drawback in leaving it blinking?
They could fix it, they just didn't bother. Kids just have more free time.
Unless you want to record that show that plays at a time when you have to be out. That's when you call out to the kids to do whatever it takes (setting the clock is one of the things to do, but why bother with the details).
They like going to the app store and knowing there is at least some level of curation on the apps. If they suddenly have to start dealing with competing app stores and sideloading and menus and all that stuff their experience will undoubtedly be worse for it.
What made this strange thought pop into your head?
Apple takes a huge cut of the money spent on the app store, and everyone will have a huge incentive to move users to different stores if they can. This isn't difficult to understand if you thought about it for more than a minute.
Android supports it, but it's not just 1 click from a browser to get a new app store.
The restriction is against programs that can download and execute code from random places on the internet, and you only need to look at a family of Android malware that Google has been unable to keep out of the Play Store to see why.
>Known as Joker, this family of malicious apps has been attacking Android users since late 2016 and more recently has become one of the most common Android threats.
One of the keys to Joker’s success is its roundabout way of attack. The apps are knockoffs of legitimate apps and, when downloaded from Play or a different market, contain no malicious code other than a “dropper.” After a delay of hours or even days, the dropper, which is heavily obfuscated and contains just a few lines of code, downloads a malicious component and drops it into the app.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/joker...
Apple requires all executable code to go through the App Store's vetting process. Apps that download code to be executed have never been allowed, which is why you have the Webkit restriction.
Webkit can download and execute code. Your app cannot.
The article's conclusion that users need to be wary of apps downloaded from inside Google's walled garden should be all the warning you need about the danger of allowing random apps to download and execute code.
>With malicious apps infiltrating Play on a regular, often weekly, basis, there’s currently little indication the malicious Android app scourge will be abated. That means it’s up to individual end users to steer clear of apps like Joker. The best advice is to be extremely conservative in the apps that get installed in the first place. A good guiding principle is to choose apps that serve a true purpose and, when possible, choose developers who are known entities. Installed apps that haven’t been used in the past month should be removed unless there’s a good reason to keep them around.
Bear in mind one reason you may hear less about malware on iOS is simply that security researchers aren't allowed to sell products for it and they are blocked by the infrastructure from examining apps like anyone else is anyway, so they have no incentive or ability to figure out what apps are actually doing. On Android you can get APKs from the Play Store more easily, and APKs from third party stores very easily, and you're allowed to sell security apps into that market, so they have both means and an incentive to go find malware for it. Apple just point blank refuses to allow their commercial existence unless it's by selling vulns to Apple itself.
Nothing except the App Store review process?
We already have tech sites warning Android users to beware of apps inside the Play Store, because Google has been unable to block Android apps from downloading malicious code and executing it on a regular basis.
If you're happy with that state of affairs, by all means, buy an Android device.
That's why both platforms also use a sandbox. The dropper still needs to work within whatever permissions the app has been granted. App Review doesn't involve a full blown security audit of your app's source code and then a deterministic build process on top.
The point being that Apple doesn't allow information downloaded from random places to be executed as code in third party apps at all. This is literally the reason for the Webkit only policy.
Google does allow it, and they (very predictably) have no way to know if that code will be malicious or not.
Which is why Ars had to warn Android users that they had to be wary of apps downloaded from the Play Store.
Is the planned obsolescence a feature too? My 12 year old Mac laptop is dead because MacOS does not allow me to upgrade past a certain version, and the cryptography primitives do not update past that so no recent browsers support the platform. My only recourse is linux. In the future this will not be possible either because normal Linux doesn't support the new hardware, unless Asahi Linux really manages to take off.
I choose iOS because the hardware is good and _some_ of the software is good. I can't stand their business practices, and they don't actually get a lot of things right. They're just doing what MSFT wanted to do with their OS & software, except that they've monopolized the hardware too and somehow that's what protects them from antitrust.
That's usually because they never used or even know the existence of something better. Same thing was being said 15 years ago for IE. The average user was fine with it until they tried Chrome (or Firefox/Opera before).
I certainly know other browsers exist and I have even used them. I still don't care I just use what comes installed on the machine because like I said I don't care.
Could it be an age cohort thing?
I'm not interested in evaluating or comparing the features, but I'll use them if they suit my needs.
So sure, people won’t complain — they just accept that this is life, but life could be better if apple didn’t have monopolistic behaviors.
Yes it is for many people. They do not want to risk the chance of their tool not working for some nebulous chance at a better experience. The vast majority of people are not tinkerer's at heart.
The rest of your questions can all be answered with "Yes", as long as the tool does as expected. We are literally all in the 1% of people just to begin with by even configuring software in the first place.
What version of macOS are you stuck on? It can’t even run Sierra? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/109.0.1/system-require...
The bigger issue for me is increasing requirements. My 2012 MacBook Air went to absolute dog when upgrading to Catalina. Terrible user experience (which, I believe, is one reason why Apple sets requirements the way they do).
Browsers in general do often change with new temporary user facing features.
People choose iOS because it's a status symbol or they like the design of the interface. Not because they are afraid of updates.
(this is a very bad trend in the software industry, pushing updates on the user like if the software had the same importance to the user like it is for its developers, if the life's purpose for the user was to keep it the most updated and satisfy the software packages' needs, no, not at all, for users it is a tool not the center of admiration that want to nurse and cherish. it is a bad trend but that is not an excuse to do bad as well but a reason to make it better please)
Rememeber! : https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtwnnQLUUAI9O7g?format=jpg&name=...
But new standards in every 2 weeks? You are kidding, right?! : ))
And security updates as well every other weeks?! (or sometimes two in one day or in three days in between: just checked the update history) Are the software products in THAT poor quality, really?! Then those should not be released yet! Those are THE vulnaribility then. It is a scam then if this is deliberate - releasing poor products before securing just to occupy themseves for long long time to come finishing it, make it properly.... Maybe shouldn't include those standards in a heist, making thing even more complex so it is a hopeless battle agains the security leaks that make those products look like a sieve. Shouldn't rush things if ends up this badly that frequent and important and urgent patches are required.
Also no! Not only security fixes and new standards come, you are mistaken quite a bit. There are no separate updates for features and security. I checked. New features come bundled on how to do things differently, adding things as well. Bookmarks or whatnot - welded together with important stuff -, I do not care as I mentioned the product in features is good already and never missed those yet I am bugged against my will to get those too (good enough only means on the surface of course, not in security, in security it seems to be hopelessly and constantly below the minimum since urgent, immediate, install right away or you doom kind of messages come from here and there). Sometimes they even repackage, redesign, put elsewhere existing and frequently used things breaking the user flow again, making its usage more difficult for a time being while you get used to it (if you can, not always) just to ruin it yet again later. It is good it is free for the end user, for that sloppy quality breaking the usage and requiring frequent fixes no amount of money should be given. You woldn't if it was a car or a tool for the physical world.
There are hundreds of changes to standards in various stages. And bugs happen in those implementations.
In fact, standards related changes land in browsers source trees _far_ more often than every two weeks, that's just the iterative development cycle that they package these changes (_and security changes_) into.
The point of open OS is not to force its users to use unvetted apps. It is to give them an option to do so.
The argument that someone might want to use a restricted OS because they want to only use vetted apps is flawed. The reason is that the users can use an open OS in the exactly same way, if they choose to do so.
If iOS only allows apple approved apps a employer/school cannot force me to install a intrusive monitoring app on a iphone/ipad.
There are also two different tiers of MDM in the apple enterprise program. If its a bring your own device the device cannot be locked down to not let the users remove applications. It will also sevely limit the kind of information the MDM solution cant get out of the devices. These things can only be enabled on corporation purchased devices.
There is a good overview here: https://www.apple.com/hk/en/iphone/business/docs/iOS_Enterpr...
But maybe I am wrong, do you have examples of intrusive monitoring solutions that can be deployed (without exploits) on iOS?
My company iphone when I first turned it on warned me that whatever I did on it was being monitored by my employer.
It's by design from apple.
I of course put it in a drawer and forgot about it.
And the point of a closed OS is that "giving the option" is as good as forcing the users.
Because third party devs with clout (facebook, instagram, etc and generally anyone whose apps users "must have", even if it's just their bank or local dominant rideshare or chat app) will, given the option, force users to install unvetted apps.
From what perspective?
> third party devs ... will, given the option, force users to install unvetted apps
It is up to the users to allow e.g. Facebook application to install additional applications. No one, and especially no app, should be able to force them to do so on an open OS.
If you refer to predatory practices where an application would disable some of its functionality until an additional "unvetted" application is installed, then this is definitely an issue.
But it should be addressed by targeted measures against the offending applications and by educating the users. Not by taking away everyone's freedom.
In my opinion, the freedom of choice regarding which application runs on one's own hardware should remain with the owner to the largest extent that is practically possible.
Worse, there wont even be a vetted application. It will only be an unvetted application you'll be asked to sideload to get the functionality at all.
And soon: alternative app stores, with their own rules and no central control. From Adobe, Google, and so on.
>But it should be addressed by targeted measures against the offending applications and by educating the users
Has that "educating" and "targeted measures" ever worked?
I do not understand your reasoning. Any app store or in general any source from where an application could be installed implicitly provides a trust model. Whether it is Google's Play Store, a GitHub repository or e.g. John Doe's personal website. The users then have the freedom to choose whom they would like to trust.
> Has that "educating" and "targeted measures" ever worked?
Yes. Users are cautious before running anything as root. They check a browser addon before installing it. They do not open media from unsolicited e-mails. And so on.
It is, however, all besides the point.
Even if there currently were no effective targeted measures that could be used, it still would not mean that we should resort to undermining everyone's freedom, in my opinion. Not in this particular case.
There are legitimate cases where everyone's freedom is restricted in order to make the society a better place. For instance, we as a society have chosen to not tolerate stealing and we put the individuals who do so behind bars. This is broadly accepted because it brings benefits to everyone. We do not need to worry about being stolen from that much.
However, there is no general benefit to the society that I am able to see which would materialize as a result of limiting everyone's freedom to use their own devices. I can only see a lot of negatives.
I want this for myself and the surface area of our 500 or so staff.
It is not completely unlikely the conversation with cops. In their perfect world, everyone would sit quietly at home with hands on the table. Life is more messy than that though for obvious reasons. In other words, I understand the need to have some level of control, but some balance is necessary.
No argument from me.
What did I say though >> "We have an effective oligopoly"
I did not argue we have a monopoly. I argued we have an oligopoly at best ( if you count Pine and similar as viable candidates ) and duopoly at worst, which somehow manages to be worse than a monopoly for one reason and one reason only.. monopolies are more tightly regulated. Try talking about regulating current batch of market leaders and you will only hear 'private enterprise','if you don't like it, start your own', which completely manages to ignore the problem to begin with.
<< Some people want to sideload, and they can have an Android.
Hmm. Why is that statement somehow appear axiomatic why and does each sentence fragment logically follows one another? Why is it not 'some people want to use their purchase as they see fit so any device they pick they can do what they please with including "sideload"'?
<< some other people are pretty much satisfied with not being able to sideload, the uniformity it brings,
I would argue with that.
One. Not all users know it is an option. Two. Existence of various workaround to allow sideloading suggests otherwise.
<< the uniformity it brings
If there is one thing world needs now, it is not uniformity.
<< other perceived positive side-effects they see.
Would you be willing to elaborate?
No. Stability is a feature. Lack of choice is restrictive.
Chrome was able to outcompete everything else on Windows, despite Microsoft trying to prevent it. People actively installed it, just because it was better, also the so-called stupid users were able to install it.
If this was possible on apple devices, who knows? Maybe it would have been the end of safari.
Users just want toast, but they do prefer great toast above mediocre toast and will spend some effort on getting it.
The main difference between the Chrome/Windows and the current Apple situation is quite significant imo. Even though Microsoft tried their best to keep user share with IE like sneakily changing the defaults, installation of Chrome was always easy. Downloading and installation of Chrome was always an option and more importantly didn't require Microsoft's approval. That's not the case with iOS/iPadOS right now. A Chrome-like app couldn't be downloaded because Apple's not going to approve the app to be put on the App Store.
Also, from a user perspective, Safari is a good browser which manages to keep up with both Firefox and Chrome. This combination means that users don't really have that much of an incentive to switch.
To use your toast analogy, IE used to burn my toast to a sooty, carbonized block. Chrome used to do it perfectly. That's a pretty big differential in terms of performance. Now Safari isn't as bad as IE was in that era. So if it burns the edges every now and then, it's not really that big a deal simply because the user experience is more or less comparable to Chrome.
Users just want toast, but the difference isn't between great and mediocre anymore like it was with Chrome and IE. It's between very good and very good-ish.
This is precisely why I'm okay with Apple not allowing side-loading even though I would prefer greater choice. Apple's ecosystem isn't fundamentally as rotten as the Windows platform was in terms of performance. In fact, it's actually pretty good. Could things change? Sure. But as long as the user experience isn't shitty, I'm okay with the status quo.
(I use Firefox anyway, because I like its features and I'm a zealot too, but if on battery without a charger nearby, I use Safari.)
On mobile (iOS), yes. But power consumption comparisons tend to be on desktop (macOS) because the other browsers can't run on iOS at all. And I don't think Apple can enforce that API privacy on macOS because they unlike iOS they allow apps to be installed from outside the App Store.
Firefox has constantly been sussing out private APIs that Safari uses to improve battery life on macOS.
I cannot backup my phone data, I have to rely on the single app implementation and many of them have nothing about backing up data.
Add that I roughly get 2 years of security updates at most (I don't buy phones as soon as they come out), the consequence is having an expensive piece of outdated hardware.
I was going to suggest that Google stops implementing and releasing any new major Android feature, only release security updates. At least this way we would start getting security patches for longer...
For me, the biggest selling point of iOS is it’s lock in - be it in browsers or the store.
My phone is the centre of my privacy, and I want it to be as solid and as safe as possible.
So far nobody developed a mobile system that is more open and just as safe and robust.
If privacy was the main concern, you wouldn't be using any of the ad vendors, which includes apple.
Yes, apple does sell your data. They just don't want others to do it too.
There are plenty of smaller security focused phone vendors these days that doesn't intersect with user interest.
That is a false equivalence.
> Yes, apple does sell your data. They just don't want others to do it too.
This badly needs a source.
> There are plenty of smaller security focused phone vendors these days that doesn't intersect with user interest.
This badly needs examples.
To whom?
Just look at the front page of the app store, literal ad right there amongst numerous locations.
Their ad revenue has been expanding since 2016, and despite them hiding exact ad revenue in their quarterly, Tim Cook has mentioned in the investor call that "advertising and analytics, apple services revenue set an all-time record of 20.8 billion in q4".
You are conflating lots of categories that maybe you don't quite understand. Not everything is a conspiracy.
The strange part would be your weird definition of what constitutes selling user data.
According to your definition, Google isn't selling data to third parties since they now own the entire vertical integration when they bought double click back in 2008.
I mentioned safety and solidity - meaning - I want the phone to have as few attack vectors as possible. Ads have nothing to do with this.
Go disagree with yourself in the mirror, not my problem.
I couldn't also find any source for your claim that it's more robust than iOS. Care to provide a source for that?
Not every Android device has access to Google Play, yet Mozilla still doesn't provide an APK download for Firefox from its website to make sure those users can have their browser too, despite all of this complaining.
Well, actually, they "support" non-GMS Android devices in the sense that no Google services are required to run Firefox on Android. But you have to get the APK from unofficial sites like APKpure or APKmirror (trusting you're downloading a non-tampered file) or finding the appropriate build among all the releases in Github.
Perhaps the complaint is that they are not releasing to competing stores like Amazon? I would find it hard to believe that legit Firefox builds are not already on Fdroid
Right now only Fennec is on F-Droid (which has some changes that give you more user freedom than the default browser build…) but Firefox is nowhere to be found. Their build process is incompatible with the official repo but that doesn't mean they can't set up their own repo instead.
I guess they think everybody forgot about the many years and hundreds of millions of dollars that Mozilla spent trying to get people to adopt FirefoxOS. An operating system that… only allowed using Firefox as the web browser.
Really? Edge is the default option, they push you to make Edge the default if you are using Chrome or Firefox and every now and then they ask you to accept Microsoft's default Windows settings.
The show their MSN news by default, Bing is default, they show ads in the OS, they constantly ask you to log in to your Microsoft account, everything leads to MS 365 office products or MS cloud storage.
It's a horrible OS and I wonder how long this can fly by any anti-trust measures.
Ads on the start menu and stuff like that is horrible, I agree, but it's a different issue than browser choice.
Microsoft disabled the API that let's you change the default browser because Chrome and Firefox kept doing that automatically when you clicked a button. Mozilla reverse engineered the new method of setting the browser but Microsoft then cried foul because you're not supposed to be able to set the default browser from within your preferred browser unless you're Edge.
And then with every major update you risk your browser preferences being reset because of "bugs". I've had Google set as my default search engine in Edge (to avoid the desperate ads from MS) but that got reset one update. The default browser got reset twice. Microsoft assures us that these were bugs and mistakes and that they didn't intend to change user settings, though.
I have a hard time believing any of it ever since the day I got an ad for their browser in my start menu.
Duckduckgo is the default search engine. If I want Bing for some reason, I have to actually type it in the address bar.
I haven't gotten any ads in the OS, and the only time it tried to get me to log into a Microsoft account was once when I was first installing the OS 7 years ago. I use LibreOffice, not MS 365, and no MS cloud storage and nothing is pressuring me to switch. Google Drive is there in the rare cases I want to use it, and I still have a login to Dropbox if I want that.
I also never enabled Cortana or web results mixed into my local search or any of that other nonsense.
There's a whole lot of misguided FUD about Windows in the tech crowd. People who you would assume would know well enough to check the options they want or don't want at the time they install the OS. Doesn't require a tech genius to do basic configuration. It's kind of baffling how many can't figure that out.
An argument could be reasonably made that the defaults should be different, and if you just clicked 'Yes' to everything, you should get a configuration like mine. But that would be a bad faith argument. It's reasonable to set the defaults to things that match the OS company and for features to be 'On' (otherwise people wouldn't know they were there).
MacOS is the same about that stuff. Many of the defaults (backwards scrolling and hidden scrollbars) are practically unusable from a UX standpoint. They also default you to their own proprietary office software, browser, and other weird stuff with confusing UI. The keyboard isn't configured correctly and consistently by default (totally gets the editing keys wrong). Just like Windows or Linux, you have to configure it and choose which parts you want or don't want.
Windows 10 definitely nags you about Edge from time to time. Some windows updates will re-trigger the "setup wizard" flow and ask you yet again to switch browsers & setup a microsoft account instead of using a local account. Or an Edge shortcut will just be quietly dropped on your desktop.
It's not super often, but it absolutely happens. That said, the real kicker is in Windows 11 where they removed the ability to change the default browser in a single spot. You're instead forced to change the app handler for every mimetype & extension, it's extremely tedious.
What Microsoft OS restricts your browser choice?
This is wrong. Google is the worst offender; Apple is an under-appreciated hero.
I have to use some web pages- for taxes and public services, for my banks and so on.
Those pages don’t work in Firefox and the only reason they work in Safari is because people don’t have a choice on Apple devices.
Of course they have a choice: they could just have bought a google phone, but I have worked in ads long enough to know I want to stay as far away from Google as I can, and I cannot tell you how sad this makes me to see my choice being threatened just so you could use chrome if you “wanted” to.
How the issue you're raising has anything to do with Google? Google hasn't forced those devs to not care about Firefox.
Because Google benefits from this and not me.
I think you would have to be stupidly naive to believe this legislative lobby happened without their help.
> Google hasn't forced those devs to not care about Firefox.
The only people who know that are Google and those devs, not me and not you.
But Apple did force those devs to care about Safari, and the things that work in both Safari and Chrome usually work in Firefox, so if you care at all about browser choice, you should be very afraid of this: As soon as my bank can tell me to install Chrome in order to pay my bills instead of doing any more work supporting Safari (and by extension Firefox), you better believe they will.
Is it your device if it obeys someone else?
E.g. building code; electronic interference limits; road safety performance; emission limits; food safety standards...
Yet they can still be yours.
addendum: You're saying your analogy is fallacious, therefore I'm incorrect. Which I find rather confusing.
Edit: Ah Apple products, I didn't factor in iPhone/Pad, yeah I dislike iOS and don't use it for that reason.
Linux users (for desktop systems) don't have this problem, and for mobile, Android users can easily install Firefox (or better yet, Firefox Nightly) through the Google Play store and set it to be the default browser.
Basically, if you want to have choice in a browser, don't use Apple products or a Microsoft OS. And even the Microsoft OS isn't that bad these days. Apple is now the worst offender in forcing you to use your computing the device only the way they want you to.