How come Apple is installing itself as the qualified party to judge if a browser is good or not? It's rich coming from the company that has been feeding us Safari for so many years.
I don't mind the expectation for a certain level of quality on the app store, however it should not propagate to alternative stores.
Because some browser processes actually live outside of the sandbox. You need elevated privileges for a JIT.
Their requirements are fairly reasonable, too. Use a memory safe language or have processes in place to catch memory bugs. What that means exactly we'll have to wait to see. But I think given the nature of a web browser, that is an application that automatically executes code supplied over the internet, it not unreasonable.
These are sound technical reasons, and it would have been amazing if Apple had done it earlier, before being difficult.
However, the whole point of the here and now is to remedy the fact that Apple is in the "abusive gatekeeper" position. While they're both the platform and the competition, I don't think their proposal is a valid remedy.
One viable alternative (short of Apple divesting/spinning of Safari) is to delegate review of 3rd party browsers to an independent 3rd party. There may be others.
Safari has been holding back web development for many years. In this announcement Apple requires support for X features to allow a browser, but if you look at the page, Safari is worse than Firefox and Chrome/Edge.
The browser is unstable, has had large amounts of bugs and race conditions, refuses to add features that can make the browser a better competitor for apps unless forced to by regulation, and so on... Safari on iOS is garbage, and that's the way Apple wants it to be. It just has to be OK so that iOS users don't understand how bad it really is.
Literally 15 minutes ago a customer asked me if I could add push notification support for iOS, as Apple has refused to do so on iOS for many many years. But Apple did add it when the pressure around competition increased, so now it should work with updated iOS.
Apple is a shit company for consumers, and they are actively sabotaging the web to increase their profits. This is not just something I'm saying. When Apple was forced to allow other browsers in the EU, they announced that they would turn off support for progressive web apps in the EU(apps added to the home screen, push notifications they just added because they were afraid of this and so on). They did go back on it after developer pushback. I haven't looked into this, but I'm pretty sure that Apple has done something to make sure other browsers can't develop PWA features. Cause that is what Apple does.
I don't mind the expectation for a certain level of quality on the app store, however it should not propagate to alternative stores.