I won’t go into whether that’s true, but I don’t think the EU has any objection against companies selling (or attempting to sell) bad products.

The EU is acting because they think companies effectively do not have the choice of going around Apple to reach their customers, and that is limiting competition.

No, there are no flashy Amazons, Googles or Apples (or more frivolous and damaging stuff like AirBnbs, Ubers, etc.) from the EU but that doesn't mean it has lost the hardware and software dimension, if you meant "consumer hardware/software" I could give you a little more credit but since you've been beating the same dead horse for a long while on your anti-EU comments in HN it's pretty hard to start any meaningful conversation to understand your point of view.

You don't like the EU, that's ok, just try to bring more meaningful arguments than this childish us-vs-them that seems to crop up from you quite constantly when Europe is talked about around here.

Apple doesn't have to do business here, they can leave if they think the regulatory environment is not favourable for their business needs. The vast majority of people here won't care much or at all.

If you want to do business in the EU you follow EU laws, you don't need to do business in the EU if you don't want to, it's your choice to abide by them or not. The incentive to participate is in the EU being a huge and rich market.

Not to speak of "Buy American" laws which there's multiple (granted EU is "granted" "American" status under these laws -- but that can change at any time).

Europe's protectionism is mainly in foodstocks. And that protectionism is in part motivated by real reasons -- that of food safety (American cows injected by Bovine somatotropin, a harmful to humans, growth hormone, etc) or heritage (protected geographical status).

Conversely, Europe has a very liberal taxation regime for American corpos. That's why Ireland is the tax haven it is (same for Luxembourg and some others).

Not allowing iPadOS to be a full fledged OS, when it literally can (an iPad is just a Macbook Air with no keyboard at this point) is intentional attempt to reduce consumer surplus. The state can intervene to limit such technically unjustified attempts. And it should. And it does (thankfully).

My experience with Arc (which I would assume would be heavier than Chrome) has been that it adds a lot of scary entries in the Resource Monitor App, but doesn't impact my day-to-day use on my 16 Gb M1 MBP.

With Safari, on the other hand, I've experienced audio stutter and delays when using resource intensive wep-apps like YouTube, Figma, Netflix and others.

The actual UI is a lot more complex. On the front page there are dozens of dynamic categories that are filled out with high-res thumbnail images, and the content starts autoplaying within a few seconds when you stop on an item.

Now, I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good interface (personally I hate overactive autoplay). But from an engineering POV, clearly there’s a bunch of prefetching and cache management that needs to happen to make that UI look seamless, without loading pauses or missing content at any step. And media caches do qualify as “resource intensive.”

I have never experienced audio stutter and delays like the upthread commenter claims.

Dark patterns in finding this setting that 99.999% of normies would not even know of, ever. But equally a plausible excuse that "there is a setting to shut it off". Right.

Edit: and reading further it seems like it may have largely been an issue with malicious extensions.

I rarely see people using Chrome on a Mac.

https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?opt...

Ha ha, because they are unable to quit the app.

Only this time controlled by an advertising company that only created Chrome so it can enforce pro-advertising policies such as long lived first party cookies.

Both Safari and Chrome are today's IE in different ways.

Just because something works in chrom(ium) does not mean it should work on “the web.”

Safari has more than double the number of standards tests that fail in their browser alone than anyone else.

They are stupidly behind where they should be and intentionally did their best to cripple the web platform as a viable app platform to iOS.

Yes, Safari has more failures, but I would not call it “stupidly behind.” Safari is a decent browser and works well (I use it everyday professionally and personally and have next to no issues).

EDIT: I’d like to point there are a lot of “failures” I’m glad are actually not implemented in Safari (e.g. the accelerometer API should not exist in a browser, nor should the API to make my device vibrate, etc.).

It’s not by any reasonable standard a decent browser judged against its peers.

They do less and they do it worse but with more people than Firefox at least.

Most likely, but like I said above, I’m glad for that.

> with the highest number of bugs by a huge margin

I don’t know… The last time I tried to use the web (I had no other choice) I had a bug in Firefox, which did not exist elsewhere… My usage was the most basic there is. Literally showing a page w/o js.

As usual YMMV, but honestly I’m pretty sure most of the hate Safari gets is not deserved.

No! There’s literally absolutely no reasons why this should be true. As long as you’re not lied to and that the situation don’t change, you buy whatever you want, but don’t go complaining later that you cannot do what you want with what you bought.

Apple has always be very clear from the start: they have a closed ecosystem (which is being pried open by the EU currently, which I find baseless as per my previous §, and that I dislike very much as one of the reasons why I buy Apple devices is because of the close ecosystem, not despite it).

You can feel however you want about it, your opinion as a customer is one of the last things considered when proving anticompetitive harm. No company ever, not the least of which being Apple, has ever escaped anticompetitive scrutiny for being "very clear from the start". If anything, it just goes to show how incapable and reluctant the US is when forced to regulate it's own domestic business.

Apple is only relevant because they're anti-consumer by enforcing a platform monopoly. That shouldn't be the case for many other reasons and that's why they're identified as a Gatekeeper. Erasing the pretend of the browser market is a necessary sacrifice, although it's also a welcome one since it makes Google's behaviour impossible to defend and makes it obvious for all to see.

Mozilla gets big cuts from Google to exist as fake competition - without Google money they're probably unsustainable (especially since Mozilla is putting money anywhere but improving Firefox even though Firefox is also missing quite a few things).

Everyone else is using Chrome reskins and Google deliberately makes it difficult to make any Chrome fork stand out from others by making sure the codebase is put together in such a way where it's impossible to really differentiate a fork beyond some token UI reskins. (Just see how the response to WebManifest v3 getting forced is from all the Chrome reskins, where they admit they may not be able to keep v2 around. That's entirely because the Chrome source code is borderline impossible to keep a "nice fork" with.)

To put it as straightforward as possivle; I don't want an IE 2.0, I want Google dragged to trial for their behaviour on the browser market. If that means revealing that Chrome is an "IE 2.0" it's something I wouldn't mind. It's about the greater goal here, even if the first step is a painful acknowledgement of reality. Google's perverse incentive with Chrome needs to be more obvious and Apples fake competition by being anti-consumer makes that more difficult.

They recklessly add any random API with very little thought given to privacy and security. Which is why advertisers have been able to create browser fingerprinting that can be close to 99% accurate.

All cheered on by fools who think Safari and Firefox are stagnant by being more careful and pushing for standards.

They do think about privacy, they just want you to have none.

Web developers love chrome because it's turning the web browser into the lowest common denominator operating system. It's a terrible idea. I want native apps, I hate web-apps, I hate Electron apps. They all have UI tweaks that don't fit in with native apps, are typically slower and more bloated.

But because most web developers are useless, its all that is ever built these days.

IMHO that ship has sailed.

With the current state of the web, what JS needs to do and what it needs access to, any mainstream web browser needs to become an OS in all shape and form. Managing Skype or Zoom on the web is so far away from displaying Craiglist 20 years ago, and users sure want to be able to open a link and interact with the service without having to download an app.

And this acceleration in web "pages" becoming full fledge apps is of course partly caused by Apple and its control on what can and cannot be distributed in the AppStore and middlemanning all payments. And god forbid to have multiple versions of the same app with different users for instance.

~80% of web usage is looking at web-sites, and most of them are already a bloated mess of JS. If anything, the web would be much better if more sites were like craigslist. That ~20% is not worth the cost in terms of privacy, security, complexity, battery usage. I would rather a native app, or use a competing service that provides one.

Dealing with the security and privacy aspects of those would be enough to get near the complexity of an OS. And to note...looking at the facebook app for instance, being native doesn't seem to be a protection from bloat, it will there either way.

On the web as a static thing, sure 80% of the web is fine as a static information. The 20% on the other hand are things we care a lot about, and I personally hate the "why don't you install our app?" prompt on every damn site. Reddit is the poster child of this, and god no I don't want their native app.

To each their own I guess.

I look at the emails/calendar on the web _because_ I do not want notifications and other junk/distractions. I do not think it is big deal for people to have an email client app on their phone if they want their functionality.

I totally get that you prefer notification on your apps and no notification on the web, the same way people enjoy notifications on their watch and not on their phone, or only read their mail and calendar on their laptop and keep nothing on their phones, etc.

There is an infinite number of combinations of what people want, the whole purpose of these rulings is to let users manage the state they want instead of Apple dictating what is allowed or not solely based on their business interests, even if it those can align with your preferences for instance.

All this apple-related HN web-browser drama is not about what _users_ want, it is only about what app developers and companies want.

- Dark patterns to trick you into Google Pay

- Those stupid sign in with your Google account dialogs you can't disable and make the website input glitch in weird ways, steal focus and I don't think they can even be dismissed with esc.

- The "Lens" sidebar

- Bimonthly popups about "themes" and "Ad Topics" dark patterns

- Copying console.logs is now broken in weird ways as of a few updates ago

I should really find a fork which is focused on not adding on top.

? I'm absolutely for Apple opening up to allow other browsers, but for me Safari is at least fine. I use it for preference on macOS too, it's very resource-efficient.

Somewhat niche yes but I loathe chrome for that behavior.

Is there a way to turn that off?

> Most developers put the majority of their effort to optimising their apps for the web and the best extensions are made for Chrome on desktop

Also, I’m guilty of this as a safari user, lol. My extension is available on Chrome + ForeFox but it’s too much of a pain to make a free extension for safari.

Note that Chrome on Android doesn't support extensions either, especially no adblockers.

> People are voting and the vast majority like and chose to install Chrome

Is it really users voting when Chrome is the only browser that works with some websites?

Apple is the only thing standing in Chrome's way of becoming a global browser monopoly. The last time this has happened it was devastating for the web. The web is also way smaller than it is now.

What frustrates me the most though is how aggressive and pervasive all the big tech companies have become. Attempts to regulate one seem to benefit another. In this case, regulations to force Apple to open up their platform walled gardens will primarily benefit Google and Meta. On the other hand, the regulations to rein in the latter companies (GDPR) seem to have largely failed and only serve to widen their moats with barriers to entry.

It honestly feels like we've spawned a multi-headed hydra and it's only going to grow more heads (LLMs?) as regulators struggle to keep up. Does anyone have any different ideas on how to solve this?

You're changing one monopoly for another in the name of convenience. This is the wrong way to think. We have Firefox and Safari for a good reason, and should support them as to not make another IE.

Where does it fall down? Some of the later RFPs for web technology (bluetooth, battery level, etc) aren't supported but I think I agree more with Apple than some random web-app developer.

Chrome is the new IE. Forget that.

This hasn't been true for a few years. When I bought my first iPhone a few years ago (the iPhone 12 in 2020), Safari indeed was a piece of junk. But starting the very next iteration cycle (iOS 14 or 15 I think) they fixed almost all the issues I had with it (tons of bugs, including rendering issues on some sites, but also quality of life features, like moving the URL bar at the bottom).

At first I used Safari because there was no other choice, today I use it because it's a decent browser and doesn't drain battery too much. Even if Firefox with Gecko or Chrome with Blink were available, I would stick with Safari.

I have a M1 laptop and one-before-last iphone SE that cannot open a ticketing website from a major global airline on Safari without an OS update. Irony being I can open the same website on all chromium browsers and firefox without an OS update.

If this is not a completely broken experience, I don't know what is.

The website works on the Safari that comes with the latest OS. I can't update the Safari version without updating the OS with a 14GB update. Nevermind the extremely annoying hassle of having to backup the devices before the updates "just in case".

I don't have to do that for any non-Apple browser while using the same Apple laptop. [0]

I think it was the late and great Joe Armstrong who said, in a tongue-in-cheek remark on object oriented programming,

"You want a banana, but to get the banana you need the gorilla holding the banana and the [goddamn] rain forest it lives in." (brackets might be my frustrated addition.)

[0] there were other websites that would work seamlessly on other browsers but would throw security errors that disappeared after the OS update, including an email provider that is regular posted about on HN.

If you're sweating your socks off trying to get a plane ticket last minute on the go, someone telling you for whatever reason to update your OS can kindly fuck-off.

That's utter contempt for your users and a non-option pure and simple. The only real option is to hug and hold onto your non-Safari browser for dear life.

What I want from my iPad is to be able to dual-boot into macOS. Everything else are small steps with the intent of postponing the ability to run a full-blown OS on the device.

Incidentally, you can run Chrome on the iPad if it can run macOS.

Literally the only problem is lack of thirdparty apps, but apart from a great downloader and adblocker I don’t really need much.

I don’t even want alternative stores, now my mother can download unverified apps from shady sources, before that was too difficult for her to do.

If chrome/google is so good then why aren’t people buying pixels for it? Why does google need the EU to break iPadOS?