As long as people in the US can't test their web app on "firefox for iOS" without first buying a plane ticket to the EU and getting an EU sim card, all eu-only browser engines on iOS will be second-class citizens.
I think the next logical extension is that actually limiting general public use across the entire world makes apple less compliant with the DMA. Mozilla will not be able to justify putting significant effort into the iOS port as long as it can only reach a small fraction of users, so in reality the way to get browser-engine competition in the EU is to mandate that apple _not_ impose EU-specific rules about what apps can be installed.
@javcasas for sure it's not practical if you want to develop with it, I was more thinking of testing on preprod/prod.
But maybe ngrok can be sufficient to test your local dev from the VM?
10 cents is the smallest of the associated expenses. You are ignoring all the other expenses.
For small amounts of usage, the cheapest I’ve ever seen is $1 per hour, with a minimum spend past $30, with various further strings attached. And most are much more than that.
But it's not $1 per hour.
For smaller businesses and hobbyists it feels like expecting support for all major browsers would be discouraging in a negative way. I appreciate digital art even if it doesn’t work in my favorite browser and a shitty online menu for a food truck is better than none.
Download the windows version from their website?
If Apple doesn't want to make their browser available for other hardware that's on them and they'll suffer the consequences. Blocking other entities from making their browser available on Apple's hardware is very different.
Being able to run cross-platform browsers on iOS does in fact make the very thing you're complaining about better.
I would love it if the EU did in fact force apple to release a cross-platform iOS emulator to allow web developers to properly test iOS browsers, but presumably apple would argue that there are strong technical reasons there (and the DMA differentiates real technical reasons from monopolistic arbitrary roadblocks).
For making browsers available across regions, that's very obviously not driven by strong technical reasons. Making cross-platform code has real technical burden.
Customers bought Samsung tablets to use our SaaS product. If you're in the right area of business, you can just ignore Safari.
> but presumably apple would argue that there are strong technical reasons there
They already have to make the appropriate iOS simulators and firmware for European developers. Making that available to American developers costs them nothing extra. They just don't want to.
I'd be pissed if someone did that for my browser engine of choice. Also, from what I understand, Apple still leads in accessibility, so this would be an asshole move towards consumers stuck in that ecosystem just because Google and Microsoft can't get their act together.
I read it differently. I don't think they said somehow block people from using their browser of choice, but that if you report an issue, the first thing tech support will do is ask you to use a different browser. I think it is reasonable.
1. A form that could not find anymore a picture when they selected it from the Mac Photos app. Apparently Photos creates a temporary file that disappears before the browser submits the form, when probably reads it again from disk. No problems when the picture is loaded from a normal folder. We should read the picture into the memory of the browser and add it to the form from there, of transition to a JSON request. My customer decided that it's a niche case and it's not worth working on it.
2. A slight misalignment of an arrow and a checkbox, but that also happens in a different way with Chrome and Firefox, so there is some structural bug in the DOM/CSS of those UI elements. We're working on that.
Except those issues I can't remember any cross browser or cross OS problems in the last years. If it works in Firefox it works in Chrome and Safari too.
Safari on iOS cannot be tested without paying Apple so I generally don't for my personal stuff either.
All of that said, American developers often can't even be bothered to support characters like ñ or é, so I think it's quite reasonable to expect an EU browser to be a second class citizen for American developers. We can work around that pretty easily by simply not buying products and services that don't work well in the EU.
I welcome the Safari walled garden because if Apple have to allow chrome on ios, that's the end of any cross browser testing (and the end of Firefox)
It's the perverse incentives where companies with a captive audience that can't easily churn will be the ones that ship broken half-arsed sites and not care.
One phenomena I am seeing more that makes me boil with fury is infinite captchas in Firefox. If Firefox increasingly gets excluded "for security" then...
This is driven by enhanced tracking prevention. If you turn that off for the respective site, then it goes away.
I can't figure out if this is true. I certainly get constant captchas, but everybody else I know who uses firefox is also ad-blocking, dropping cookies, resisting fingerprinting, forging referers, downloading embedded videos, etc. etc... A lot of us look like anonymous bot traffic because we are trying to look like anonymous bot traffic. I don't know what the solution would be.
VM is EU. Heck, it can be an ephemeral instance on EC2, so it would only cost money while in use, probably tens of cents or something.
If there's a will, there's a way.
And apple has some "nice" licencing nonsense around their software that makes VMs not the "obvious" solution.
Only real devices allow to test these aspects properly.
The status quo has all of the problems of a monopoly. Doing this or not doing this won't change that. But it will remove another barrier to consumers being able to do what they want.
Might as well get it over with quickly.
In case it's not obvious, these crutches should be removed.
Treat Google paying Apple for the use of Google's search engine and Mozilla for the same thing, as anti-competitive (they're token gestures propping up the monopoly).
And break Google up in multiple companies. Not sure along which lines but I would steer towards platforms (Android + Chrome + Search + Docs + Cloud; banned from entering advertising), Play Store, Ads.
The same thing should be done to Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Nobody has the guts anymore.
I think nobody has the manpower to deal with all the shit. The EU already regularly fines big companies, but for every fine they get away with so much.
Google also has bad incentives (Android, ads) but Safari is the IE6 of modern web.
It's the browser we're FORCED to have installed for the occasional shitty flight or hotel booking that doesn't work in Firefox.
How can you say this nonsense so uncritically?
How can you say this nonsense so uncritically?
We already went through this in the IE era, and it was an ugly period. We don't need to do that again. That isn't to say we need to endure the status quo, but we are in a dangerous situation where the fixes aren't easy or obvious.
Add this to your website:
<script src="https://eff.org/defend_the_web.js"></script>
If this would be only about security as Apple claims, there would be no reason to restrict this to the EU and to force Browser vendors to publish other engines as separate apps after they meet the security conditions Apple imposes.
Is that surprising in any way?
They've been asked to not reject third party browser engines in the EU. Check.
Google has plenty of developers in the EU so I'm not even sure what people want exactly.
how can people think like this
This is about securing the phone in Apple's interest against the desires of the user.
noo, that how law works
EU make an law that forces Apple to adhere, apple make changes that suit the new law
if its works in EU only then its working as intended
Apple may or (more likely) may not be complying in terms of allowing third party browser engines, but I don't see how you can argue that not implementing this _outside_ the EU fails to comply with EU law (which applies _inside_ the EU).
That's not to say they shouldn't allow this elsewhere (although it will just cement the Chrome monopoly - actually _decreasing_ competition and solidifying the incumbent's position) but I don't think you can argue that this law requires them to do that.
I don't think this is a secret - Apple publicly opposes these kinds of laws.
> And within the limits the law allows, they're doing everything they can to make it tedious and difficult to actually get alternative apps stores or browser engines on their OS.
Sure, it's unclear what the EU can do to oppose this though. If they push too far they risk invoking the wrath of the much more powerful US government.
You have progressive states passing similar legislation as the EU within the US so I bet they'll be getting the firm hand first if anything.
I think the discussion should focus more on why benefit is this small for users to switch.
With browser selection dialog, I think vendors have already 0 cost channel for UA. I don't think new binary would make a big difference.
Anybody has the number of committers to webkit from Apple? It would give us a good idea on the margin of the product.
Assuming 100 engineers costing Apple 500k per year, that's 50 millions in investment for 20 billion in revenue.
> For each 1% browser market share that Apple loses for Safari, Apple is set to lose $200 million in revenue per year.
They should be investing like crazy to make Safari the best browser out there instead of just relying on their monopole. And why the fuck is there no Windows version to make their iOS users happy?
Simple. Apple doesn't want you to use Windows. They want you to buy an expensive Apple computer instead.
So true. It didn’t occur to me that I had naturally assumed Safari to be worse, when it would have been better in a more competitive market. So by relying on monopolistic behavior, Apple is also partly responsible for the Chromium monopoly (that this law will help solidify).
Safari is actually a pretty great browser, both technically and from a user perspective, and the complaints often levied on sites like this all boil down to "Why do alternatives to Chrome exist? I'm lazy and want to just deploy whatever half-baked non-standard ad-benefiting nonsense Google threw into Chrome this month". There was a Safari for Windows for some time but they had a small enough uptake that they abandoned it.
Steps to reproduce: 0. Select a different default browser, delete the Safari app (just for good measure, even though it's not really possible just like deleting IE in older Win versions) 1. Open the Books app 2. Select text 3. Select Search 4. Press Search the Web 5. Safari search results open as you stare in disbelief
You know a company has long lost the innovation race when the company is run by the lawyers and bean counters instead of the engineers, trying to milk their product lines form 10+ years ago. I wonder how long until they resort to becoming a patent troll ... oh wait. Their final form will be selling ads to their users.
"But due process!!". For individuals and SMEs, sure. For mega companies, absolutely not. Getting to rake in billions of profits should come with a loss of privileges, not with a gain. That needs to be the trade-off.
If only they would give the same due process to the users and app devs before they close their accounts.
Companies want and exploit all the perks of the liberal democratic western societies that helped them make what they are today and reciprocate with defying the laws and tax avoidance, while bowing down to foreign dictatorships no problem.
The only way you stop them abusing this is to put an executive to jail. Because that's why they instantly bow down to China. Braking the law in China is a legal problem with personal accountability, breaking the law in the west is just an accounting problem that you can easily pay your way out of.
The moment you put someone in jail, everyone stops breaking the law immediately, because nobody likes the idea of going to jail.
In the USA any given administration can try something like that and one party or the other will work with whatever company is being sanctioned out of pure spite, or will know that divisions in the USA mean that all that a company needs to do is play just enough lip service to appear respectful to the current admin. Worse case scenario, they wait four years. See: nvidia flagrantly selling cards to the PRC through Singapore.
I disagree with the "dictatorship of the proletariat" ideology, but to be fair the remnants of it that survived Deng Xiaoping does seem to somewhat work in resisting the influence of foreign capitalists.
I have this installed and all links I can choose between Kiwi Browser or Firefox.
Apple is behaving like the Standard Oil Company of the 2020s.
That brings me to this: Chrome extensions are valuable and we know as early as the rumors of Apple being forced to open up, Google started working on iOS port, but really, is there any justification for bringing a browser engine to iOS? I really don't understand how will it be beneficial when the user probably will notice anything.
Also we only have like four players to enter: Google (which will come), Mozilla (broke and miss-managed as hell), GNOME Web (will never come), Ladybug Browser (they are crazy and will definitely come someday, but it takes a long time for them to be an actual player)
So my question is: Will all this effort even fruit?
Apple's WebKit is renowned to be lagging behind, refusing to implement crucial features and being rigged with bugs, hence limiting the capabilities and quality of web apps, and effectively preventing them to compete with native apps.
Getting other browser engines on iOS would be beneficial for developers, businesses and end user by making mobile web apps viable.
The CRA, which is now in effect, lists browsers as class I important products. Technical documentation, design documentation, user documentation, security conformance testing, a declared support period at the time of download, software bill of materials, the legal obligation to respond to and make all your internal documents available to market surveillance organizations, etc.
And if the EU doesn’t publish harmonized development standards by 2027, you will be required to pay a 3rd party to come in and analyze you, your design, and the security of your browser, and make a report to send to the market surveillance organization, who gets to decide if you have the requisite conformance.
Are you sure that anyone but the big boys want to make a browser in the EU?
Here is the law, please point out where I am wrong. Much appreciated :)
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L...
If you use another browser today even if it does use Apple’s engine, Apple’s not making search revenue from Google.
The second point is that it came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games and in app purchasing. Those apps are not going to the web.
Third, if the only thing stopping great web apps is Apple, why aren’t their popular web apps for Android and why do companies that produce iOS apps still create Android apps instead of telling Android users to just use the web?
I don't think you are correct to assume games can't go to the web. Any feature they need from native APIs can be added to the web. Full screen, gyro, vibration, multi touch, payment APIs, notifications, WASM and GPU support are already on the web!
But it’s not about the technology even then. Games make money via in app purchases by whales. In app purchasing is easy and they are able to tap into kids spending money. Most parents aren’t going to put their credit cards on kids phones. They will let kids do in app purchases with parental controls that are available on the App Store.
If the link goes to something that should open in another app (e.g. goes to instagram.com when I have the Instagram app installed), unless I satisfy its demands to install Chrome, it takes like 3 extra clicks to open in that other app.
Right now in many MRT stations throughout Taipei, there's ads for Safari. I don't think I ever in my life have seen an advertisement for a web browser until now. I guess now I know why.
v5v3•4h ago
Tepix•4h ago