The choice isn't Apple's walled garden OR Google's web dominance.
The choice is: Apple makes a broken browser with no available substitutes to make more money off the app store, OR they will need to actually invest in their browser and compete with Google.
The EU has wisely decided that Apple forcing people to use a broken browser is anti-consumer.
So now, Apple will need to compete in the browser space as well.
It's amazing how fast Apple has started to fix it's many problems in Safari all of a sudden, <sarcasm>I wonder what the reason could be...</sarcasm>
You’re greatly overstating the problem of using Safari. Google’s devrel team has astroturfed a lot about that but if you’re the average working web developer it’s been easy to support all of the evergreen browsers for years - the big win was dropping IE11 support — and you’ll see a significant performance or battery life win by dropping Chrome, which the average user will appreciate a lot more than not having WebMIDI or sites nagging them to enable push notifications.
The mistake here is seeing only one company abusing its market position when it’s really two. While I don’t like how Apple handled this — Firefox deserved better — it’s also the case that Google used their dominant positions in search, email, maps, and video to promote Chrome. I’d be a lot more comfortable allowing Chrome on iOS if it was accompanied by regulatory action banning that and requiring Google to do real QA on other browsers and not use proprietary Chrome APIs on their production sites, which held back Firefox and Safari performance on YouTube for ages because they were using the web components standard instead.
> if you’re the average working web developer it’s been easy to support all of the evergreen browsers for years
All the browsers bar Safari.
> you’ll see a significant performance or battery life win by dropping Chrome, which the average user will appreciate a lot more than not having WebMIDI or sites nagging them to enable push notifications.
I think the average user would much rather have a browser that follows web standards.
Why?
Because 90% of the apps on the app store could just be websites instead.
And what difference does that make?
Apple can't take a 30% cut off a website.
> I’d be a lot more comfortable allowing Chrome on iOS if it was accompanied by regulatory action banning that and requiring Google to do real QA on other browsers and not use proprietary Chrome APIs on their production sites, which held back Firefox and Safari performance on YouTube for ages because they were using the web components standard instead.
This has nothing to do with Chrome, or allowing Chrome on Safari. It has everything to do with the developers at youtube not updating their own service. Any regulations/QA would need to lie with the youtube team, not the chrome team. iOS users shouldn't have to suffer being locked to a historically bad browser because of it.
> I think the average user would much rather have a browser that follows web standards.
Which specific unimplemented standards are preventing your work? I’ve opened plenty of bugs in all of the major browsers and it’s decidedly not the case that they’re mostly Safari.
Last year’s interoperability push ended with a noticeable lag for Chrome:
> This has nothing to do with Chrome, or allowing Chrome on Safari. It has everything to do with the developers at youtube not updating their own service.
Yes, we know. Now think about whether it’s possible that working at the same company might make them less quick to prioritize work which undercuts a key selling point their company spent billions marketing. It’s not like the YouTube developers didn’t notice the big effort to put Chrome banners all over the site was a management priority.
Anyone who remembers how Microsoft products used to have weird bugs when used in non-IE browsers knows how that could end.
> Which specific unimplemented standards are preventing your work?
Still no proper Opus support, where it was available in Firefox 10 years ago.
Also bugs. My experience is that it's a common occurrence that I make a change, and it works correctly in Firefox and Chrome, but it breaks in Safari and I need a workaround just for it.
As soon as this happens, Google Chrome will be the winner with the other Chromium-derived browsers on phones for iOS. This has also already happened on Android when the user has the choice.
This will just cement the Chromium dominance and the EU has made that worse.
Firefox is no where near competitive enough to unseat Chrome or Safari.
> As soon as this happens, Google Chrome will be the winner with the other Chromium-derived browsers on phones for iOS.
Not necessarily.
Just look at how well Safari has started doing all of a sudden in the Interop 2022 report: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022
Safari went from worst to best in cross-browser issues.
The fact of the matter is, the year that Apple realised that they weren't going to be able to escape or hold up the EU's coming regulations to open iOS to other browsers, Safari suddenly became important again.
Why would they do this if they were just going to concede the web to Google?
The choice isn't Apple's walled garden OR Google's web dominance.
The choice is: Apple makes a broken browser with no available substitutes to make more money off the app store, OR they will need to actually invest in their browser and compete with Google.
The EU has wisely decided that Apple forcing people to use a broken browser is anti-consumer.
So now, Apple will need to compete in the browser space as well.
It's amazing how fast Apple has started to fix it's many problems in Safari all of a sudden, <sarcasm>I wonder what the reason could be...</sarcasm>