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geuis 16 hours ago [-]
I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched. It was amazing. It was such a relief to move away from IE and all the arcane levels of details I had to remember back then to artisnaly get IE to behave like a moderately modern (for then) browser.
Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking. Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution.
Now these days the only thing keeping me tied to chrome is finger muscle memory. The death of manifest v2 is the 2nd to last nail.
Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.
The problem is I use safari on iOS. Generally not a bad browser. Equivalent and superior to Chrome is certain aspects. I don't really need to run Chrome on my phone. Safari is good enough. However... for a local build only I use maybe it's possible.
Yizahi 10 hours ago [-]
That's some next level revisionism. When Chrome launched there existed for many years a fast, modern and extremely nice to use browser already.
pronik 9 hours ago [-]
At that time, Mozilla refused to implement some new CSS standards as they deemed it impossible in their engine. Chrome came along and a year down the road Firefox had got the features for some reason without much trouble. Revisionism is failing to accept that Chrome ate Firefox' lunch within months, for extremely good reasons.
Yizahi 9 hours ago [-]
You are talking about a completely different set of events happening years after the events I'm discussing. Both of us are correct, because that's two different topics.
desolate_muffin 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe just quit assuming everyone is clever and just clearly state what, specifically, you are referring to.
7 hours ago [-]
ChrisRR 6 hours ago [-]
Do you mean Firefox? Because when Chrome was released, it was blazingly fast compared to firefox
RunSet 2 hours ago [-]
Also Chrome got its initial market share largely by paying third parties to bundle it in their installers in the mode of Bonzi Buddy and Virtua Girl.
As one would expect of a browser made by the world's largest advertising corporation.
midtake 10 hours ago [-]
As I remember it, Chrome was way faster than Firefox, but I was in high school and probably stupid. Firefox wouldn't catch up to Chrome until Quantum, which was amazing when it first dropped, but now Firefox is slow again.
pjjpo 5 hours ago [-]
> Firefox is slow again
Currently I am feeling this too but only for one site, GitHub. Which is where is spend most time during the day...
Quite sad, I don't know if it's GitHub's fault or not but Firefox needs to figure out what's going wrong here soon or people like me may be literally forced to Chromium.
da_chicken 9 hours ago [-]
No, Chrome was way faster than Firefox. You were not wrong. It grew right alongside HTML5, and Chrome put a lot of effort into V8. Firefox was definitely better than IE or Safari, but Chrome could do everything that Firefox did without the memory usage that Firefox had. It's funny how memory usage is now abysmal on Chrome, too.
Yizahi 9 hours ago [-]
I've tried Chrome too on that wave of hype, including on some pretty slow machines. Like the Eee PC, and for a few months, not few hours btw. It wasn't perceptibly faster than Firefox, at it had its own slowdowns, just a bit differently. For example as I remember, Chrome often rendered a page visibly faster than FF, but it was actually unusable and frozen static "image" of sorts for a few brief moments, and only then it become active. FF had a slower time rendering, but at all times it was not frozen statically, just some elements were loading. Things like that. In the end, I returned to FF not because Google had some bad rep back then, but purely because Firefox was better and more pleasant to use. I'm still baffled how that "FF - slow!" campaign worked out eventually.
roryirvine 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, they were both much of a muchness when taken as a whole, though some people definitely did find that one or the other was notably faster for their typical workloads.
But Chrome won the vast bulk of its market share not because it was technically better in every way, but because they spent much more on marketing at the exact time IE entered terminal decline.
x0x0 2 hours ago [-]
> a fast, modern and extremely nice to use browser already
That's some revisionist lies. Slow, crashy, a memory pig with a big leak problem, stuck on a single process architecture. It was none of fast or modern. Whether it was extremely nice to use is debatable, but lots of people rapidly voted by switching.
It very regularly crashed and took down the entire process.
It's fine to lament the Chrome monoculture, but we misdiagnosis it if we don't remember the seeds were sown via Mozilla's incompetence. They made it crystal clear they couldn't and wouldn't do better, and the next 5 or more years made that inarguable.
mmcgaha 10 hours ago [-]
I hope you are talking about Opera?
adithyassekhar 9 hours ago [-]
Opera peaked at 12. I had it installed even till 2016? The later versions completely lost the plot for what a browser is.
Also had safari 5(?) on windows because I liked seeing a progress bar for page load. Which opera 12 also had.
Maybe I just like progress bars.
Yizahi 9 hours ago [-]
Both of them, Firefox and Opera were like that for years.
jdub 15 hours ago [-]
> old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched
steady on, youngster
abroadwin 13 hours ago [-]
To be fair, that only tells they've been in the industry since at least 2008.
dualvariable 13 hours ago [-]
I used NCSA Mosaic before Netscape Navigator, and gopher and wais before all that.
onion2k 12 hours ago [-]
The day Mosaic added an <img></img> tag was the day it all started to go wrong.
chrismorgan 10 hours ago [-]
There has never been a </img> tag: elements that in DTD days (HTML 2–4) had EMPTY content model, and which these days are called void elements, cannot have an end tag. If you write </img>, it’s a parse error, though in practice all implementations you care about will ignore it.
FranOntanaya 10 hours ago [-]
I'm kind of happy though that <marquee> still works. It's deprecated for a reason, but reminds me of when the web somewhat tried to have a language of common elements rather than being just a sandbox of styles.
Lio 11 hours ago [-]
Oh yeah, I used Gopher at uni. I think this whole world wide web thing is probably a fad. :P
jimmydddd 5 hours ago [-]
---old enough to have been in the industry when ChatGPT launched.
pjmlp 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I still remember 8 bit home computers being sold as "build it yourself" at electronic stores.
wodenokoto 13 hours ago [-]
> It was such a relief to move away from IE and all the arcane levels of details I had to remember ...
Why hadn't you moved on to Firefox?
scrame 3 hours ago [-]
Because your clients used IE by default, relied on ActiveX controls, or were forced to by corporate IT policies.
klustregrif 12 hours ago [-]
Back when Phoenix launched it was not a reliable alternative to IE or Opera, it was more like a sign of protest. You’d use it to tell the world that you didn’t care if most of the internet didn’t work for you, as longs as you where “sticking it to the man”.
I remember developing web pages with the purpose of ensuring they would work in both, so Phoenix was my main driver, but whenever anything was “done” the real work started of also getting it to work in IE, it was always a monumental effort. Sites with buttons for “go here for pheonix/go here for ie” where common. My friends who worked in the windows ecosystem mostly saw Phoenix as some “crazy hipster trend” and didn’t have a care as to if anything they made worked in it or not.
wodenokoto 11 hours ago [-]
There was half a decade between the Mozilla Browser stopped being called Phoenix and the launch of Chrome. Firefox usage peaked at some 30% of desktops the year after Chrome was released.
It's not like Firefox wasn't a "viable" browser at the time. It was quite mainstream.
yoz-y 9 hours ago [-]
Moving from IE to Firefox was a much more memorable experience than going from Firefox to Chrome. But yeah, first Chrome was fast. I’m quite sure any of the today’s browsers would be fast if running in the pre-react world though.
bryanrasmussen 11 hours ago [-]
>but whenever anything was “done” the real work started of also getting it to work in IE
due to IE not being a standards compliant browser.
As others noted, Firefox was around for a long time before Chrome and was not called Phoenix all that time, so it sort of seems like you looked at a piece of technology a month after launch, didn't like it, and refused to took at it again for 10 years? I mean that right there is at the level of moral complaints, not just performance or rendering.
klustregrif 31 minutes ago [-]
I’m still using Firefox, I was adding the perspective from back in the start of “why didn’t you just move over from IE” like everyone would just move because an alternative existed.
Most didn’t and i get it. I am not the norm. I also ran gentoo back then which is not an option for most computer users.
Also being “technically most standard compliant” doesn’t mean anything to the average user who’s just angry that their browser isn’t showing their MySpace page correctly.
Calm down. Not every bit of real perspective on software short of “Firefox is perfect” is an existential criticism of it existing.
rob74 10 hours ago [-]
> due to IE not being a standards compliant browser.
Yes, but unless you wanted to exclude >90% of users, you could still not ignore it...
bryanrasmussen 8 hours ago [-]
I never said one should ignore them, I just implied the post seemed to slam Firefox ("Phoenix") for a situation that was IE's fault.
Gud 12 hours ago [-]
It absolutely was. Phoenix became immediately superior to IE.
Never fell for the Chrome trap.
pjjpo 5 hours ago [-]
Seriously never used Chrome?
Gud 4 hours ago [-]
I never used it as my main browser
eptcyka 8 hours ago [-]
> You’d use it to tell the world that you didn’t care if most of the internet didn’t work for you, as longs as you where “sticking it to the man”.
This is eerily similar to how I feel about using Firefox today. Not that I am sticking it to the man - I just want there to be diversity in the market and not have every viable option be a way for a megacorp to have presence on my computers.
ahartmetz 9 hours ago [-]
I've been using Firefox since I think basically its 0.1 release as Phoenix in 2022 and it already worked great at the time, no need to keep IE around (which I couldn't after switching to Linux in 2003). In fact, for years it was my "always works" fallback because I was using Konqueror otherwise. Firefox had two name changes in quick succession - Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox, but it was already over in 2004 so it's weird to keep calling it Phoenix for the more important time after that. In response to the name changes, there was a funny extension to randomize the name so you got "Firechameleon" and "Hypnodinosaur": https://github.com/miraleung/firesomething-2/blame/master/de...
csnover 12 hours ago [-]
Phoenix launched right at the peak of IE’s market dominance and that name lasted about a year, so if you are remembering it that way, it was very early. By 2005, Firefox had ~10% global market share; by the time of the first Chrome release in 2008, Firefox had ~25% global market share[0]. So the OP had plenty of time to switch away from IE before Chrome showed up.
In any case, nobody got to quit dealing with the misery of IE6 until some YouTube engineers did a little caper[1] that gave everyone else an excuse that their big brain business bosses would finally listen to.
I hope ladybird will take be the same type of successor to chrome, but this time not in the hands of a corporate organisation.
monegator 12 hours ago [-]
you know we already had firefox back then? anyone with half a brain only used IE for the institutional website with ActiveX that wouldn't work otherwise
chpatrick 11 hours ago [-]
You had to make your website work for IE users with weird tricks because among other things it had a different way of rendering CSS.
krige 12 hours ago [-]
And Opera! God I miss old Opera.
rob74 10 hours ago [-]
> Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution
And things went downhill from there...
pjmlp 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this is one area where I look forward to Rewrite in Go and Rewrite in Rust keep doubling down, unfortunely Rewrite in Java or Rewrite in C# are grandpa technologies and not fashionable.
rienbdj 9 hours ago [-]
It’s a shame.
Rust compile times are an issue for agent throughput.
C# can approach Rust speeds with some effort, but generally has faster compile times and is less verbose.
A good context for why the market dominance of Chrome is such a big deal.
dv_dt 9 hours ago [-]
I went back to Firefox on desktop and phones when it was clear Chrome was going the way of IE in terms of being too large a market share for it's own good or the good of users and developers. These days its much better than when Chrome first came out, but I also toy with librewolf or other even more user oriented alternate browsers.
weezing 10 hours ago [-]
>I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched.
So basically not very old. Also Firefox existed long before and had pretty significant marketshare. In some countries it was well above 50%.
yareally 16 hours ago [-]
> "Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place."
You wouldn't be worried about vulnerabilities that the vibe coded browser could produce? I use plenty of LLM generated code, but a browser wouldn't be something I'd try on the Web.
simondotau 15 hours ago [-]
So long as you don't distribute it and it doesn't become popular, don't underestimate security through obscurity. Malicious actors won't know about this homebrew browser's (presumably many) hypothetical flaws.
mlazos 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah I use the Xbox edge browser sometimes, even popups break because they’re like wtf is this.
Projectiboga 15 hours ago [-]
He's describing a chromium fork not a full on vibe coded browser.
keyle 14 hours ago [-]
That doesn't protect you from browsing banking sites and your potential crypto wallets.
xeonmc 15 hours ago [-]
In a way, cryptography is the ultimate security through obscurity.
koito17 14 hours ago [-]
Well-designed cryptographic systems are designed so that you can understand everything about the system and still not get inside.
It's pretty much the exact opposite of security through obscurity.
LocalH 1 hours ago [-]
Only if you're limited to knowing exactly how the actual cryptography works. If you understand exactly how the key derivation works, and know how that is seeded, then you can very much get inside.
avhception 11 hours ago [-]
I think they meant it in a tongue-in-cheek way, as in: my private key is "obscure"?
simondotau 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nonamee 12 hours ago [-]
It would be nice benchmark for models. Something like generate web browser from web standards in rust, c, and a language of your choice. An automatic judge would score the results by amount of found vulnerabilities and functionality. We could also see if generating code by LLM in rust makes it safer or if language doesn't matter anymore. And you know that it will work eventually, because AI labs need models capable to write new fully working models themselves to reach AGI or whatever you call it.
testing22321 12 hours ago [-]
> I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched. It was amazing
Mi was a web dev then too, forced to develop for ie6.
At the time I remember asking why is google making a browser? How do they make money, and in the long term will their browser work for my best interests, or theirs?
So that’s why I’ve always used Firefox.
boxed 12 hours ago [-]
> Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking
I think you're misremembering or you didn't try Safari at the time. The first version of Chrome was not very different from Safari which it was just a shell of anyway.
reichstein 11 hours ago [-]
The first Chrome did use a fork of WebCore, the HTML part of WebKit, as its rendering engine, but added its own V8 JavaScript engine. The speed of JavaScript was the main differentiator. And _that_ was very different from Safari, and every other existing browser ... The quote is correct.
V8 kept getting even faster, including adding faster RegExps, which pushed the other browsers to speed up their JS too. Firefox is now using that RegExp implementation too, even if they're not using V8.
WebKit was itself a fork of the KHTML browser engine. And just like WebKit diverged from KHTML, Chrome diverged from WebKit.
kalleboo 6 hours ago [-]
My memory as a Mac user switching to Chrome when it came out was that the performance was basically the same as Safari. I'm sure V8 was faster than JavaScriptCore, but the web wasn't nearly as JavaScript-heavy as it is today so it wasn't something you noticed in normal use. Maybe if you were a heavy gmail-in-the-browser user.
The main reason I stuck with Chrome was the tab isolation. WebKit was super crashy back then, with Safari crashing several times a day just browsing the web. In Chrome only one tab would crash instead of the whole browser. This was one of the original selling points in addition to performance.
I switched back to Safari when I got my first Retina MacBook Pro, since Chrome had terrible performance in HiDPI for the first two years of retina Macs.
5 hours ago [-]
procone 15 hours ago [-]
> Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.
> The death of manifest v2 is the 2nd to last nail.
Yeah. I think Google underestimated how many people they pissed off here.
There is a reason I and many other think that Google has to be disbanded.
Either way welcome to the resistance!
azuanrb 19 hours ago [-]
Kinda bugs me when people who are against Safari/Apple are also the same people pushing Chrome/Google. Sometimes it feels like web developers these days are basically Chrome developers.
I do get it. Chrome has the majority of users, so it’s easier to just develop and test on Chrome and know you’ve covered most of your users.
But isn’t that just pushing us towards a Chrome monopoly? Safari holding back some web features is annoying, sure, but having Chrome decide what the web should support and everyone else having to follow doesn’t sound much better to me.
floydnoel 17 hours ago [-]
I agree, and it amuses me that the Chrome advocates call Safari the new IE! My mortgage website and DoD website and VA.gov, etc all don’t tell me I have to use Safari or they won’t work. No, they say I must use Chrome (or sometimes Edge).
As soon as Apple is forced to allow Chrome on iOS, I won’t even have that opt-out available to me. If you want to use Google, they have a whole mobile OS you can use. Why take away my choice as a consumer that prefers Safari? And Apple's on the device they build and sell? Not to mention all the security flaws that would entail...
rendaw 7 hours ago [-]
IE stood for a lot of things, and I'm guessing they're talking about the "failing to implement standards" part rather than the "websites that proscribe use" part.
floydnoel 7 hours ago [-]
that completely misses the point of the IE problem, which was developers forcing IE due to not testing any other browsers. badges saying "works best/only in IE" were not due to any failed standards IE didn't meet.
i think as developers it's easy to forget that, and just think about our own difficulties having to maintain IE compatibility. but that was the post-IE transition era, not really having to do with the "IE problem" of being forced to use IE for certain sites as with Chrome today. At least IE back then wasn't spyware like Chrome is today.
leptons 14 hours ago [-]
>As soon as Apple is forced to allow Chrome on iOS, I won’t even have that opt-out available to me.
Those are quite the mental gymnastics you're doing here. You know, you could just choose not to install Chrome, right?
>If you want to use Google, they have a whole mobile OS you can use.
If someone bought an i-device, they don't get to choose, Safari is forced on them.
>Why take away my choice as a consumer that prefers Safari?
Calm down, nobody is taking away your choice by allowing Chrome to run its own browser engine on iOS. You're totally delusional and making shit up that would never happen.
Apple is the only one that's forcing you to do anything. They are the ones that took away your ability to choose. You seriously sound totally brainwashed.
amazingman 12 hours ago [-]
The implication was that website makers won't be forced to support Safari because they'll just decide to require Chrome.
soraminazuki 6 hours ago [-]
It's not even implied, it's very explicitly stated in the second sentence but GP chose to attack a straw man anyways.
leptons 9 hours ago [-]
If Safari weren't a piece of intentionally hobbled crap, maybe it could compete.
Maybe Apple shouldn't hold back web standards to force people to install native apps where Apple can extract 30% of all purchases from the apps.
azuanrb 9 hours ago [-]
Hold back Chrome standards, you mean? Features that work in Chrome but not in other browsers. There are even features that work better in Safari than Firefox. Not everything Chrome pushes should automatically become the standard.
Personally, I don’t care about most of those Chrome specific features. I use Safari because it’s fast and battery efficient. The fact that it’s not made by a company whose main business is advertising is a nice bonus.
Sure, Apple has an advertising business too, but it’s nowhere near the scale of Google’s.
labcomputer 13 hours ago [-]
Ok, I'll bite: How would you choose not to install Chrome? You would just... not use the web? Some choice.
sharts 13 hours ago [-]
this is the same as when IE was the standard
boesboes 9 hours ago [-]
Which was the point
leptons 9 hours ago [-]
You must be trolling, you can't be this stupid.
thegiogi 11 hours ago [-]
Wait you can’t install chrome on iOS? I can see it in the Apple Store - is that a regional thing? I’m in Europe.
stnikolauswagne 10 hours ago [-]
I think this is referring to the fact that the chrome IOS app is just a chrome wrapper for web kit and not "actual" chrome.
pjmlp 9 hours ago [-]
They are, we are one step away to rename Web as the ChromeOS Platform.
Additional note those are also the same people pushing Electron garbage, Chrome in a box.
cyanydeez 12 hours ago [-]
I haven't searched caniuse recently, but has safari stopped cock blocking PWAs?
janinge 6 hours ago [-]
caniuse doesn't differentiate between markets, but it appears that even here within the EU we're now back to being allowed to use most basic features.
However, previously you got an exemption on the 7 day TTL on Web Storage, by being installed as a PWA. This must have been too generous. I guess they figured that if you combine lack of stable local storage, with no support for the Background Synchronization API, nobody should be able to implement anything of value on top of these APIs.
And just in case this isn't enough, let's just hide the install option even deeper than before. On iOS the path is now something along the lines of
1. Tap site's domain name
2. Meatballs menu
3. Share
4. More (Meatballs again)
5. Scroll until you find "Add to Home Screen"
6. Leave "Open as Web App" switched on
7. Add (upper right corner)
There is no obvious install prompt, and no clear browser level affordance. Nothing in the flow even tells you if PWA functionality is supported by the website. You might end up with just a weird shortcut that opens a URL full screen.
desolate_muffin 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks I hate it
thegiogi 11 hours ago [-]
Im not sure, but I regularly add apps to dock or Home Screen. Not sure it’s the same.
cyanydeez 2 hours ago [-]
yeah, that might just be urls masquerading on the PWA to shade Apples complicity in hating a web standard.
16 hours ago [-]
tcfhgj 15 hours ago [-]
I push Firefox not chrome though
TheDong 1 days ago [-]
First let us install other browser engines on iOS, and then we can talk.
Safari has the most obscene monopoly of any browser ever. IE 6 came pre-installed on windows machines, but you could always install Mosaic or such.
Google Chromebooks come with Chrome as the only default browser, but you can still run Firefox on Chromebooks just fine (even in two different ways, the supported android app version, and the semi-supported linux terminal + launching firefox that way).
Heck, iOS's monopolistic behavior is so bad that multiple regions (the EU + Japan) have already ruled against their behavior, though in reality Apple has complied in a way that makes it impossible to actually make a second browser engine for iOS still (going against the spirit of the law, but the courts haven't caught up to them yet).
Safari is also an awful browser in that it requires someone to buy an expensive machine to see if their site works on it.
I can run a windows trial copy in a VM to see if my site works in IE, I can run Chrome or Firefox on linux to verify if my site works in them. I can install a free android emulator on any common OS to see that my site renders right in those.
But Apple doesn't give me a legal way to freely run an iOS simulator nor even a macOS VM on my linux machine, I have to pay money, to buy their hardware to see if my site will work on Safari.
And even worse, Safari is the browser with the largest number of rendering bugs and quirks currently, while also having a huge number of users (since iOS users can't install another browser), so any web developers are basically forced to shell out for apple hardware.
simondotau 20 hours ago [-]
The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice. As the only major platform that hasn’t been functionally taken over by Chrome/chromium, iOS represents the last real defensive line against Google owning the web.
Remember, you are a web developer, not a chrome platform developer. Don’t be complicit in Google’s slow-moving coup.
The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform. Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
ryandrake 16 hours ago [-]
> Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
Wild how low the bar has gotten. The web would be so much better if there were ~10 browsers, each with around 10% market share. Web sites would have to suck it up and put some effort into browser testing and compatibility. And stop relying on features of a single browser. I remember writing software that had to work on over a dozen platforms. But developers today can’t manage to support more than one browser?
Gigachad 14 hours ago [-]
It's been a long time since I've encountered an issue with a particular browser. After IE was gone, unless you were using bleeding edge features everything that works in one browser works everywhere else.
If your website doesn't work on one browser, you probably need to raise a bug report for that browser rather than change your site.
13 hours ago [-]
jonhohle 13 hours ago [-]
Back in my day I’d test on IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and links/links2/lynx.
doginasuit 19 hours ago [-]
> The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.
This is a wild statement. For an individual user, what is the point of browser diversity if you are locked into your browser by OS? A weird number of people here are okay with this particular example of anti-consumer behavior simply because it offsets the chrome monopoly. That's not a healthy web, that's competing layers of dysfunction.
simondotau 19 hours ago [-]
For an individual user, what is the point of browser choice when developers stop testing in Safari and instead say "if it doesn't work, install Chrome". That's not giving the consumer a choice.
doginasuit 18 hours ago [-]
The Healthy Web in 2026: Some users can't have a choice so other users can.
simondotau 14 hours ago [-]
Unironically and emphatically yes. Choice is predicated on diversity. You can have diversity without choice, but you cannot have choice without diversity.
If diversity fails to occur naturally, some amount of forced diversity helps to keep the ecosystem healthy.
Dylan16807 17 hours ago [-]
Nobody called the current situation healthy. But it could get a lot worse.
Though an interesting consequence is that allowing iOS users to install firefox but not chrome would be a strict improvement over the current situation.
simondotau 15 hours ago [-]
It would be a strict improvement if it wasn't a red carpet for Google to make the obvious legal arguments.
tcfhgj 15 hours ago [-]
People can just not buy cages, i.e. phones from apple
simondotau 15 hours ago [-]
I agree. Consumers should be allowed to buy a cage or not.
tcfhgj 15 hours ago [-]
Well, they are, and then complain they are in a cage
simondotau 14 hours ago [-]
They shouldn't complain. Non-cages are available.
labcomputer 13 hours ago [-]
Are they? Or are a bunch of Chrome fanboys and web devs complaining on their behalf?
edoceo 19 hours ago [-]
There are three choices: use Safari for sub-par site experience, use Chrome for compatible, don't use the site.
simondotau 19 hours ago [-]
Yes, except the Safari experience is only sub-par because the developer chose to use some bleeding edge feature that doesn't fall back gracefully, or is relying on a Chrome bug, or a lax feature implementation in Chrome.
There's no reason for Safari to have a sub-par experience except for the laziness of some web developers.
doginasuit 18 hours ago [-]
> There's no reason for Safari to have a sub-par experience except for the laziness of some web developers.
How about a browser with a captive userbase that has less incentive to stay up to date with web standards?
Your argument is that we should expect developers to target/test their app on many different browsers where any random CSS property behaves differently. They will have to buy a device just for this purpose. Because it is obviously developers who should have to pick up the slack here, not Apple.
ryandrake 16 hours ago [-]
Developers should develop for the web, not one particular browser. There are desktop and native mobile applications that manage to work across multiple operating systems and cpu architectures, and you’re telling me web developers can’t test their shit on a handful of browsers and configurations?
Rohansi 13 hours ago [-]
You're correct but it's not always this simple. Apple drags their feet with the implementation of some standards and sometimes there is nothing to fall back on. Many of those standards are just bringing functionality available in native apps to the web so we can only speculate that they do it to keep apps on the App Store. One good example is push notifications: they took a long time to support it, and the "Add to Home Screen" requirement makes it almost worthless.
simondotau 4 hours ago [-]
That’s not a good example, that’s literally the worst example you could have possibly chosen. Push notifications are an anti-feature. It is a disgusting embarrassment that they were ever considered part of the web platform, and I admire Apple for rightfully resisting it.
Safari is a better browser because it doesn’t support them.
Rohansi 4 hours ago [-]
I see that reaction a lot but it doesn't make sense to me. Yes, there are apps that abuse them, but that is why it requires your permission. Exactly like how native apps require your permission to send you push notifications. So why are push notifications only acceptable in native apps?
> Safari is a better browser because it doesn’t support them.
It has supported them since iOS 16.4. The issue is they made enabling them so high friction for users that you're better off publishing a WebView wrapper to the App Store instead. More work for app devs, worse experience for users, but great for Apple because it's still on the App Store.
crab_galaxy 18 hours ago [-]
100vh, PWAs, and full screen support that isn’t absolute garbage aren’t exactly bleeding edge features
simondotau 18 hours ago [-]
Being able to block trackers and not use ridiculous amounts of RAM aren't exactly bleeding edge features either
philwelch 15 hours ago [-]
The user could have bought an Android phone instead.
However, if Apple allowed different browser engines, eventually no one would be able to choose anything but Chrome regardless of what phone they bought.
verdverm 17 hours ago [-]
One analogy I think of every time this comes up on HN is the kernel and linux. Why do we not speak of a similar lack of diversity?
To me, chromium is the kernel and the browsers are the distro. We do like that there is a shared kernel in linux, yes?
I acknowledge that this is reductionist, as there exists another lack of diversity for consumer operating systems, in there really only being Windows and Mac / iOS and Android.
simondotau 15 hours ago [-]
The Linux kernel isn't a good comparison because kernel development is not led by a corporation with its own distinct commercial interests. Sure Linux a monoculture, but it's a uniquely healthy one.
And the Linux kernel isn't a good analogy because the web is a standard, not an implementation. In that sense it's more akin to UNIX, or IP-based networking.
verdverm 14 hours ago [-]
I do share your thoughts and sentiments at other times (and peer commenter too). The contrarian in me likes to offer up this analogy, though I interpret it much more loosely than the HN critiques I earn each time. To me there is an argument I feel can made that a shared "browser" kernel has some advantage in, for example, security. More eyes, more contributors, which number more organizations than Google these days
I will add that I appreciate your response, generally, but especially the missing hyperbole. This civil discourse is very preferable.
TheTon 15 hours ago [-]
Linux isn’t a good analogy to Chromium due to the differences in history, licensing, and project governance.
Linux is GPLv2, it has many outside contributors, it was built from scratch, and it has Linus as a neutral party as the final decider in terms of the direction of the project and what gets included.
Chromium is a mix of LGPL, BSD, and other licenses depending on the component. Chromium was originally forked from WebKit; it isn’t a from scratch project. Google decides what changes get merged to Chromium.
TheCoelacanth 4 hours ago [-]
It's a balancing act.
Lack of browser diversity is bad because it puts too much control in the hands of the only browser vendor.
Lack of browser choice is bad because it puts too much control in the hands of whatever browser vendor they use.
We need both for a healthy web.
realusername 9 hours ago [-]
> The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform. Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
There's multiple issues with Safari and people complaining aren't "lazy". To start with it's a much buggier browser than Firefox or Chrome. Sure if you go on caniuse.com, almost everything is marked as supported but with Safari in reality it's always ""supported"" and you will deal with non-sense bugs, most of the features are sort of 95% there and they stopped development claiming it's good enough. They also have very poor QA and regressions happen often.
Next, Safari is the last non-evergreen browser, it's still tied to the OS and thus lags behind in updates.
And to finish with, Safari is also only available on Apple devices (harder to test with) and tied to a specific OS version (how are you officially even supposed to test the bugs on version X without paying a third party company? I don't know).
I'm not against Safari but Apple really needs to put some money to make it more modern if they want to actually compete with Firefox or Chrome without their OS lock-in.
hungryhobbit 19 hours ago [-]
>Remember, you are a web developer, not a chrome platform developer. Don’t be complicit in Google’s slow-moving coup.
This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding, much like how many think standards groups (e.g. W3C) decide how the browsers works.
(Standards groups can invent the best feature ever for the Web ... and it won't matter in the slightest if browser makers don't adopt it. ALL STANDARDS ARE SET BY BROWSER MAKERS ... the standards bodies are just the mechanism they use to do it.)
Likewise, the browser a web developer user uses is already set for them. EVERY web dev (except those at companies big enough to care about the "long tail" of browsers) uses one browser: the most popular one.
It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"
simondotau 18 hours ago [-]
> This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding
No, it doesn't. I wasn't talking about web standards bodies. I'm talking about the practical reality of the web as a platform that is resilient against slight differences between browsers. Such resilience can only come from developers who understand that their job is to target the web and not just Chrome.
It is you who misunderstands:
> It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"
You are literally arguing for the web to become the Chrome Platform for the convenience of web developers. Sure we can have other browsers, so long as they're perfectly compatible with Chrome's quirks. This is precisely what it means for the web to be the Chrome Platform, not the open web. We've already reached the point where it's assumed that Chrome is perfect and anything that deviates from Chrome is someone else's bug. It's sad.
vrganj 20 hours ago [-]
Safari is a dirty monopolist on mobile just as much as Chrome is on desktop.
simondotau 20 hours ago [-]
I reject your assertion because it promulgates the lie of "browser choice". The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.
A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.
randbyte 17 hours ago [-]
There is no browser engine diversity on iOS. Reskinned Safari doesn’t count.
simondotau 14 hours ago [-]
That's not what diversity means. I agree there's no browser choice on iOS.
Choice is what the individual (supposedly) has. Diversity is what actually exists across an ecosystem. iOS is the last bastion of browser diversity, because despite all this supposed "choice", it's pretty much all Chrome everywhere else.
randbyte 5 hours ago [-]
On the contrary. There are plenty of choices on iOS but no diversity.
LocalH 1 hours ago [-]
Reynard exists for those who can sideload or jailbreak iOS:
But there is no browser diversity on mobile. I'd like to use Firefox on iOS.
simondotau 19 hours ago [-]
There is absolutely browser diversity on mobile. ~30% of people are using Safari on iOS. ~70% of people are using Chrome on Android (and have the "choice" to use Firefox but don't).
edoceo 19 hours ago [-]
Maybe folk mean that iOS only uses Safari rendering regardless of which wrapper is running? Meaning Apple users don't have a choice, one rendering engine only, not diverse.
simondotau 19 hours ago [-]
No, vrganj said mobile. There is browser diversity on mobile devices by virtue of operating system diversity on mobile devices.
leptons 14 hours ago [-]
You're delusional. Safari is forced on every browser on iOS, you install Firefox but the browser engine is Safari. You install Chrome but the browser engine is forced by Apple to be Safari.
This isn't browser diversity, iOS is a browser monoculture, it's all Safari under the hood. How can you not understand this??
simondotau 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
leptons 18 hours ago [-]
>I reject your assertion because it promulgates the lie of "browser choice".
The only lie being told in all of this is the one Apple tells when you install Firefox on an iOS device. It's not Firefox you're installing, it's Safari. Every browser on iOS is Safari - you have no choice at all.
>The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.
Then put your money where your mouth is. If Safari can compete then let other browser engines on iOS. If it can't then it deserves to die. Artificially inflating it by forcing on iOS isn't the utopia you think it is.
>A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.
Apple iOS is a monocoulture - every browser is Safari whether you want it or not.
There's no argument you can make to escape the fact that Apple is helping nobody but Apple by forcing Safari on iOS.
bigyabai 19 hours ago [-]
> The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.
Says who? I certainly don't agree with that statement, the "web as an open platform" was unrecognizable when proprietary clients were the norm.
simondotau 19 hours ago [-]
If web developers stop ensuring their sites work in Safari, consumers will be forced to install Chrome. That's not browser choice. An open platform means that CONSUMERS get to choose which browser they use, not web developers.
(And before you say it, consumers can choose Android, where 99.9% of people use Chrome, but apparently that's okay because they "chose" it.)
themacguffinman 17 hours ago [-]
If web developers stop ensuring their sites work in Safari, their sites will still work in Safari because Google ratifies and publishes the web standards that Chrome follows so that Safari and other browsers can follow it too, something that Safari actually does less than Chrome.
Consumers choosing Android isn't a choice of which browser to use, it's choosing which operating system to use. That doesn't sound like you care that consumers get to choose which browser they use, that's letting Apple choose which browser that Apple consumers use then telling them they can choose a different operating system instead.
bigyabai 19 hours ago [-]
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. How can you get web developers to test their websites in Safari, when the majority of Mac devs haven't opened Safari in ages? We have the answer already. Safari doesn't compete on it's own merit.
WebKit is a second-class citizen on the web, and we can argue about why that is, but nobody can sincerely deny it. Apple's strategy has been dead in the water for over a decade. iOS lost.
simondotau 19 hours ago [-]
Safari is still relevant and iOS hasn't lost; the very existence of this thread serves as a clear rejection of that framing. If Safari wasn't competing, or if iOS had lost, nobody would care.
Meanwhile we have people bitching and moaning and meanwhile, as a Firefox user, I go to Safari when I encounter a website that doesn't work in Firefox. Because at the end of the day, developers are forced to test in Safari, and that is a Good Thing. No developer is forced to test in Firefox.
leptons 18 hours ago [-]
>the very existence of this thread serves as a clear rejection of that framing.
The existence of the "Switch to Safari" campaign is a clear rejection that Safari is competing - it's not, it's the laughing stock of web browsers in 2026, it holds the same place that IE6 did in the early 2000s.
>Because at the end of the day, developers are forced to test in Safari,
I'm not forced to test in Safari, because I don't have money for an iOS device. So Apple users can continue to suffer with whatever browser they use on their i-device. I really don't care, and Apple has done this - not me, because they offer no way but purchasing their hardware to test their wonky browser engine.
And yes, you can emulate an android device on MacOS, so don't bother trying that again. You don't need to purchase an android device to test on android.
simondotau 15 hours ago [-]
This (incredibly lame) campaign is only referring to macOS, not iOS. The grandparent asserted that "iOS lost."
On macOS, Google plays with a lot of dark patterns to get people to install Chrome. I can't count the number of times I've visited my sister or parents and seen Chrome on their Mac, and their explanation is "because Google told me I needed it."
That's not choice either.
bigyabai 14 hours ago [-]
Sure it's choice. I use Firefox on Linux; I have to forego a handful of websites, but nothing is a dealbreaker. YouTube works, Gmail works, my life isn't interrupted without Chrome installed.
It sounds like your family is using Chrome because it's more convenient. It's 2026, we can't blame anyone given what Safari spent the past decade doing. Apple does not provide convenient Safari sync for Windows and Android devices, which comprise the majority of smart devices sold. They don't support the normie extensions that people use on Firefox and Chrome. Safari lags behind Chrome in features, WebKit lags behind Blink in cross-platform support, and Apple doesn't allow Safari forks to boost their market share. Apple draws very clear and arbitrary lines in the sand, and then redrafts them once they finally change their mind about PWAs or notification support. By the time it reaches Safari, your parents have been using the feature in Chrome for 8 months.
We may have to agree to disagree. Apple's incessant marketing for their own inferior, ad-ridden packin software is part of why I left macOS to begin with. It's infantilizing to be told that I can't be trusted to make a smart decision, when Apple's own suggestion is a half baked, self-serving alternative. I empathize with Mac users that ignore Safari because that's exactly what I did on my Mac, too. I'd have been using Chrome if Firefox wasn't an option. And I still would, because WebKit is a dog's dinner on my OS.
simondotau 13 hours ago [-]
Just because you are able to make informed choices doesn't mean everyone can. Nor should everyone be expected to.
If you think my mother or sister have the faintest idea what a web browser is, or how one might be better than another, then you haven't met my mother or sister. To suggest that they made any kind of informed choice is absurd. They were influenced by marketing, plain and simple.
Personally, I'd be fascinated to see an in-depth study showing what percentage of web users chose their browser based on true/objective criteria, as opposed to marketing, brand preference, herd mentality, or wrong assumptions. Is exposing someone to marketing really what we mean by choice?
It's worth remembering that choice isn't necessarily the pure good we intuitively believe it to be. Western consumers have an extraordinary choice of food, yet that hasn't necessarily translated into healthier diets. This is especially problematic when the choices themselves are shaped by corporations whose interests aren't well aligned with the consumer's.
bigyabai 13 hours ago [-]
99% of Mac users are installing Chrome or Firefox using Safari. They are objectively assessing it in a real-world test, and deciding that Safari lost. You're lucky there's no convenient way to uninstall Safari from the OS, the user telemetry would be a bloodbath.
Apple is a corporation too, and they have their own (quite sizable) financial interest in gimping the web as an alternative to native app distribution. Apple used to recognize this, and prioritized interoperability with OpenGL and OpenCL as a hedge against the web becoming the only cross-platform API that the Mac supported. The Apple of today has abandoned those interests and lost all pretenses of humility. They are equally as mask-off as Google or Microsoft is, pushing Metal and WebKit just as shamelessly as Microsoft crams the corpse of DirectX into things. This isn't a charity project, it is another way for Apple to control iOS software distribution, their primary service cash cow, Tim Cook's pride and joy. Apple is happy to give Google money for their Apple Intelligence integration, this isn't a grudge that they take seriously.
Apple could have supported KHTML upstream, and killed Blink in the cradle. They could have made Safari a billion-dollar cross-platform product, and won. They made this horrible bed, and now they want to users to moralize Google's victory. Why would anyone, knowledgeable or naive, insult themselves by standing with Apple here?
I do use safari in my playwright tests, and it led to me doing a note on my known limitations page - that those tests take longer than Firefox and Chrome, my daily drivers. But, that could be due to using it on Linux maybe. I do hate having to dig out ios devices for app testing.
waterTanuki 17 hours ago [-]
Browser diversity is merely an after-effect of Apple having complete control over iOS, if it was profitable to let Google coup the entire web, they would do it in a heartbeat.
It's obvious Apple isn't doing this to "protect the open web" because if that was true, they wouldn't have stopped developing Safari for Windows.
leptons 19 hours ago [-]
>The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform
Maybe you don't understand that I have to spend several hundred dollars for the privilege to debug Safari's shitty bugs. That's FUCKED UP. It isn't "being lazy". I shouldn't have to spend money so I can cater to a shitty browser. And Apple does some weird-ass things with their browser that make it wonky, and you can't debug some things without an apple device. Touch events are one particular iffy thing Apple does differently, because "think different" apparently means "we do whatever the fuck we want so pay us to debug things that shouldn't need debugging".
>Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
Give me $500 to buy an Apple device and I'll fix things so it works for the shitty browser iOS users are forced to use. It has not a single fucking thing to do with "being lazy", and you're a shitty person for suggesting that's how this works.
simondotau 19 hours ago [-]
I've had to pay thousands of dollars on Android devices I don't want in order to test my website and fix shitty Chrome bugs. I sucked it up. You can too.
If the cost really is an issue for you, I'm sure you know that you aren't forced to pay $500 to Apple. You can easily find hand-me-down Apple devices that still runs a current operating system for a pittance -- or free if you have a network of friends or family. No need to pay Apple anything.
leptons 18 hours ago [-]
Well that's some nonsense. You can install the Android emulator on MacOS, or whatever OS you use for developing - you can't do that with iOS. You have to purchase a mac to do it.
And I can't even buy only an iOS device, because the iOS device has to connect to a laptop/desktop version of Safari to use its debugger - so I need to purchase two Apple devices!, just to debug the mobile device.
I wouldn't be complaining if I could install the iOS simulator on any other platform - but even on iOS the iOS simulator sucks badly, and it only works on MacOS. It doesn't "simulate" touch events correctly, as they function differently on a real iOS device.
simondotau 15 hours ago [-]
Tell me you're not a web developer without telling me. Many of the Chrome/Android bugs I've had to deal with are touch/swipe/drag interactivity issues which cannot be reliably tested in simulators, especially because the fix often involves experiencing the affordances with your own finger tips. Real testing requires real access to real devices used by real end-users. This is as true for Android and Windows as it is for iOS and macOS.
Nobody says you need to pay Apple anything. Apple devices can be incredibly cheap on the second-hand market -- potentially free if you have friends or family. An older Mac and an iPhone 11 are all you really need. If that is still too much for you, then what can I say? I don't see Microsoft giving you a Windows PC or Google giving you an Android device for free.
I suppose you can quit your job and become a chef, but you'll still have to buy your own set of knives and an apron.
leptons 9 hours ago [-]
No shit, shelock. Of course a real device is better. But 99% of iOS problems I've been able to solve using Browserstack (paid for by my work). It's the 1% of iOS bugs that they had to buy me an iPhone and a Macbook to fix. I don't get to use those devices to debug my own projects. That requires me to spend a lot of my own money. I've never had any problem with any touch events on android browsers - but I'm sure I would if Safari were on Android, because Apple is the only one that does crazy shit with their mobile browser because they tHiNk DiFfErEnT.
simondotau 4 hours ago [-]
My previous response stands as a perfectly adequate response to your last post.
19 hours ago [-]
srcreigh 23 hours ago [-]
Agree that it should be easier to test on safari from other platforms.
But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.
I can’t make it website owners problem that their site doesn’t work on non-Google browser. Apple can.
Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.
thunderbong 22 hours ago [-]
IMHO, that also should be addressed from the legal perspective very strongly. But forcing Safari for every Apple owner is certainly not the solution.
simondotau 20 hours ago [-]
That's ridiculous. You can't solve a monoculture with the legal system. The only solution is forced diversity, and to that end, I congratulate Apple for being the last guardian of the web as a truly open platform.
(I still remember when communities like Hacker News were screaming and howling at Apple for daring to rid the web of Adobe Flash, a corporate-owned proprietary monoculture cluster-f**k of security vulnerabilities. The virtue of Apple's influence on the web is painfully obvious in hindsight.)
jdub 15 hours ago [-]
> You can't solve a monoculture with the legal system.
You absolutely can, and we absolutely have. You believe this because anti-trust action was derided as anti-growth in the latter quarter of the 20th century, by people who knew exactly what they were doing (see also: banking deregulation).
It's one of the major reasons we're stuck with such horrendous corporate and individual wealth inequality today.
Google should never have been allowed to buy DoubleClick, ship a browser, or ship general-purpose client operating systems.
simondotau 14 hours ago [-]
Okay fair, you can avoid a monoculture with the legal system. Bit late for that now, unfortunately.
Silhouette 13 hours ago [-]
It wasn't really any better when Apple killed things off. For years afterwards I was running into devices that had embedded Java applets for configuration over the Web that no longer worked. Sometimes I'd run into an academic's personal web page that had examples that used Flash or Java and no longer ran for the same reason. There was a lot of useful legacy code that got broken overnight when Apple led and others followed in killing off these kinds of plugins.
For all the claims about security problems - and there were many and the complaints were valid - people seem a bit too willing to overlook the much greater attack surface of modern browsers that still incorporate similar flexibility and functionality but through other protocols and native Web standards now instead. For better or worse today's "evergreen" browsers roll out new functionality more quickly than before but their most important innovation was introducing frequent automatic security updates to a general non-technical audience at a time when that certainly wasn't the default for most desktop software. Take a look at how many significant security issues get fixed in any of the major browser on each update cycle and you can see that even today this is still far from a solved problem.
cwaffles 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, you can. See the landmark United States vs Microsoft 2001 antitrust case.
duskwuff 16 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure that's a great example. Even though Microsoft lost, it had no real consequences - the company was not forced to split, MSIE remained a core component of Windows, and Netscape was still forced out of the market because they couldn't compete with free MSIE. By 2003 or so, MSIE was up to ~95% of the market.
GeekyBear 20 hours ago [-]
Allowing Google to use their control of the web to kill the most effective method of blocking ads is the solution?
No.
People need to stop using Chrome and Chromium based browsers and use browsers based on implementations of the web standards that are out of Google's control.
Firefox on Android supports the full version of uBlock Origin.
Chrome on Android doesn't support it.
xoa 22 hours ago [-]
>IMHO, that also should be addressed from the legal perspective very strongly
Then do that FIRST (or at the same time). Don't give us, yet AGAIN, the tired bs song and dance about how you'll make things worse first and then totally someday address the other part properly, and oops what a surprise that turns out to be too hard nevermind.
>But forcing Safari for every Apple owner is certainly not the solution.
Objectively it is a solution though. Because it's been done, and it's been more effective than nothing, while meanwhile nothing has happened from a legal or political angles. If a better solution can be done down the road great, but a hack dealing with a problem non-optimally can absolutely be better then just having the problem completely unaddressed. And count me skeptical that any government is going to have the will or capability to actually address what a lot of us already hate about not just the Chrome monopoly but that entire approach (I don't in fact want my web browser to be a full lowest common denominator operating system with low level hardware access thanks). I dislike much of what Apple does now but I'm glad their selfish interests have happened not to align that way either. Until monopoly lock-in gets better addressed, one of the main ways to push back is via another monopoly lock-in that has different incentives.
Gareth321 11 hours ago [-]
> Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Then maybe Apple should invest a fraction of their fortune on making Safari better. Competition is good. Apple doesn't care about competing because they have a monopoly. If they were forced to actually improve WebKit and Safari, maybe people would choose to use it.
cpt_sobel 10 hours ago [-]
And instead they choose to keep the browser diversity alive by taking away your right to choose (your browser in iOS). A sad state of affairs that this is the only thing keeping us from complete Chrome monopoly.
HumblyTossed 21 hours ago [-]
> But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.
It's my device. I should be able to whatever the hell I want with it.
simondotau 21 hours ago [-]
You bought it knowing that you couldn’t.
ApolloFortyNine 20 hours ago [-]
If the one other competitor didn't allow it, then would we be allowed to complain in your mind?
This argument is terrible, we're lucky the one other competitor, for now, allows installing what you want or people like you would argue everything is fine.
simondotau 20 hours ago [-]
If nobody makes the product you want, that is called a business opportunity.
Timon3 16 hours ago [-]
I'll happily give it a try, if you can give me a small loan, say 100 million dollars.
simondotau 13 hours ago [-]
I said it was a business opportunity. Not necessarily a business opportunity for you personally. But if a gap in the market did exist, it would be an opportunity for Microsoft, or Meta, or Dell, or... I hear Firefox wanted to build a phone...
Timon3 9 hours ago [-]
Okay, and now let's finish the thought: why don't Microsoft, Meta, Dell and co. invest in this space?
HumblyTossed 18 hours ago [-]
So? There are TWO platforms to choose from. T.W.O.
Your argument ... isn't one.
21 hours ago [-]
freecodeio 22 hours ago [-]
if someone told me you have to use ie6 so chrome doesn't take over every browser, then I'll just use chrome
SoftTalker 21 hours ago [-]
At the time the roles were reversed. The spin was "use Chrome to break the IE browser monopoly." And Chrome was a better browser, and much faster. It worked.
simondotau 20 hours ago [-]
Firefox broke the IE monopoly. Chrome rode Firefox's coat-tails with exclusive access to advertising space on the #1 website in the world.
bigstrat2003 17 hours ago [-]
No. Chrome was so much better than Firefox it wasn't even a contest. Firefox, when it came out, was honestly pretty crap - I tried it and went back to IE in pretty short order because it was noticeably faster. Chrome was a huge leap over either IE or Firefox when it came out, and people switched for that reason.
simondotau 14 hours ago [-]
That is a weird alternative history. Even by Firefox 1.0, it was a dramatically better browser than MSIE in every conceivable metric -- except for support for Microsoft's proprietary extensions like VBScript, ActiveX, and NTLM auth support. (It also failed to replicate some of MSIE's most outrageously terrible bugs.)
When Chrome was released, Firefox was four years old and had already gained 33% market share with momentum on its side, mostly through word of mouth. Chrome was a bit better in some respects, a bit worse in others, but it had the Google marketing juggernaut allowing its market share to skyrocket.
freecodeio 8 hours ago [-]
chrome started picking up on firefox when they released 4.0 and started doing some heavy UI updates which made it feel chonky, whereas chrome was this smooth looking browser that paid attention to webview realestate by putting the tabs in the topbar
srcreigh 21 hours ago [-]
Not if ie6 is your only option
leptons 19 hours ago [-]
>But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.
And giving Apple a monopoly is a better idea?
>Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Forcing users to use the Safari browser engine when they install Firefox or anything else is not the way to protect anyone from anything. It's abusive in its own way. And Apple is not going to save anyone from Google. People are still using Google services through Safari, because they are services Apple either sucks at or doesn't offer.
>Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.
So you're fine giving over all control to Apple. Apple already has way too much control. Being on the W3C board, they use their power to block any browser API that could make web browsers more capable, which would cut into their native app mafia racket where they charge 30% of any purchase done through an app. They don't offer any alternatives, or any changes - they just squash anything they see as competitive to native apps. That's how fucked up they are. They are literally holding back progress for no good reason - not security, not for privacy, it's purely for their own greed.
bigyabai 22 hours ago [-]
I'm getting some serious "Microsoft has to protect Internet Explorer from evil competitors like Netscape" vibes from this comment.
Safari simply sucks. If WebKit was any good, then Apple wouldn't have to worry about allowing third-party engines onto iOS. The situation on Mac tells us everything we need to know.
bloppe 21 hours ago [-]
> But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.
Easy. Just legislate that the only browser allowed on iPhones is Firefox. That way, Chrome can't monopolize the web, and iPhone users get to have a decent browser.
robotnikman 22 hours ago [-]
>Safari is also an awful browser in that it requires someone to buy an expensive machine to see if their site works on it.
I remember a long time ago they used to make a Windows version of Safari you could download and install, but at some point they stopped.
2III7 22 hours ago [-]
For testing one could use any other webkit browser. Most of them have similar rendering quirks to Safari.
wongarsu 22 hours ago [-]
Anecdotally that's not enough. I've deal with multiple quirks that only happen in Safari but not in linux-based webkit browsers
floydnoel 8 hours ago [-]
I'd be super interested to hear about those!
oneplane 20 hours ago [-]
They still have webkit builds for Windows and Linux etc, and you still don't need to buy anything special to run it. I think they also have a (mostly?) headless one, and a mini-browser which is intended to test the engine (so it doesn't have things like bookmarks or profiles or anything like that, a good fit). Similar options exist for FireFox and Chromium so it's not really a Safari/Webkit special. Usually gets used when you use a standard containerised browser testing CI step.
Either way, if someone is still manually testing their website instead of using a standard automated testing system you're probably not really in a league where this matters anyway.. and if they are, you probably have a device farm already.
Not sure where the "my thing is so important, I have to test it on a real device, but I can't pay for it" niche is.
giancarlostoro 17 hours ago [-]
> Apple has complied in a way that makes it impossible to actually make a second browser engine for iOS still (going against the spirit of the law, but the courts haven't caught up to them yet).
Damn thats pretty evil, I just looked it up. For those curious, Apple forces you to release your EU app with a different browser engine specifically for European users as a completely separate app, meaning you would have Facebook World edition with WebKit, and Facebook EU Edition with whatever new engine they want. Basically not worth the hassle to maintain two separate apps.
Gareth321 11 hours ago [-]
It's even worse. Apple has taken malicious compliance to a new level with the Digital Markets Act and alternative browser engines. Apple requires a strict compliance regiment. Developers need special authorisation, and must meet extensive security, privacy, and vulnerability management requirements. All of those are opaque and up to the subjective determination of Apple's changing whims. Meaning they'll go out of their way to deny an engine (or update) for any or no reason at all.
And it gets worse. Developers have reported limitations on testing, restrictive contractual terms, and uncertainty surrounding updates when users travel outside the EU.
Not even Google has managed to navigate this gauntlet. Our EU leaders are asleep at the wheel.
lkbm 14 hours ago [-]
> Safari has the most obscene monopoly of any browser ever. IE 6 came pre-installed on windows machines, but you could always install Mosaic or such.
Mosaic was a fair bit earlier, but yeah, I ran Netscape 4 until Mozilla M18. Never used IE as my main browser in many years of Windows use.
EDIT: I guess Netscape 4 and Mozilla M18 were both pre-IE6, too, but still Mozilla/Firefox for the IE6 era.
creatonez 10 hours ago [-]
> But Apple doesn't give me a legal way to freely run an iOS simulator nor even a macOS VM on my linux machine, I have to pay money, to buy their hardware to see if my site will work on Safari.
Try GNOME Web (Epiphany). It's webkit based, keeps up with Safari, doesn't disable access to the Safari devtools, and it sends the exact same user agent string. Should be essentially bug-for-bug compatible. It's otherwise an anemic browser, but you don't need much for testing.
ch_sm 21 hours ago [-]
I‘m a long-time Safari user, and I still prefer it, but I nonetheless concur with everything you said in this post.
Lammy 19 hours ago [-]
And lest anybody say it's not possible, I personally use a jailbreak tweak for this on my iPhone 11 / iOS 18 / Dopamine 3.0 that works flawlessly:
Agreed but ironically it's this monopoly that keeps webkit in the game
floorsthelimit 22 hours ago [-]
I only use Apple hardware. I’ve never used safari only Firefox or brave. I don’t understand why you are saying it is a monopoly.
wongarsu 22 hours ago [-]
On macOS it isn't an issue. But on iPhone all the browsers are just different user interfaces for Safari's rendering engine
floorsthelimit 20 hours ago [-]
Oh wow. I didn’t know that. Is that true for brave too?
hnav 20 hours ago [-]
Basically not possible to do JIT (needed for decent JS perf) on iOS for 3p apps (since that requires pages that are both writable and executable) and then on top of that Apple bans 3p browsers specifically in markets where they're allowed to.
busymom0 18 hours ago [-]
When submitting apps to Apple, all browser apps are required to and are basically glorified WKWebViews. Apple doesn't allow any other browser engines when submitting apps to app
Store.
kwanbix 22 hours ago [-]
At least on iOS, if I am not mistaken, you can only run the Safari Engine. Even if you run Firefox or Chrome, it is running Safari under the hood. That is what I understand. Please, correctme if I am wrong.
warkdarrior 22 hours ago [-]
At least in US, Firefox on iPhone is basically a reskin of the Safari engine.
dylan604 21 hours ago [-]
Can you use some of the cloud providers that now allow for a macOS instance? I know I know, but maybe better than nothing?
tharos47 21 hours ago [-]
No because apple mandate 24h leasing minimum time.
chasil 20 hours ago [-]
Safari has real problems compared to Chrome on other platforms.
Primarily, incognito mode is difficult to access. Android allows a shortcut to be dropped to start in this mode.
Cut and paste is also awkward and uncomfortable in Safari compared to Android.
My first move on iOS is to install Firefox Focus, to get Safari's history under control.
hbn 22 hours ago [-]
If it's browser monopolies you're worried about, Apple beginning to allow other engines on iOS is going to instantly cement Chrome as the only browser in the game.
Apple's Safari enforcement is the only reason Chrome hasn't completely taken over.
bitpush 21 hours ago [-]
"The only just monopoly is my monopoly"
simondotau 19 hours ago [-]
Having websites say "if it doesn't work, install Chrome" is the opposite of consumer choice.
bitpush 18 hours ago [-]
Not trying to be glib but isnt that on the website and not Google/Chrome?
I want to use Screen Studio, but it is a MacOS only app (and I'm on Windows). Is that Apple's fault?
simondotau 17 hours ago [-]
Apple doesn’t claim that it’s proprietary operating system is an open platform. The web is supposed to be an open platform.
bigstrat2003 16 hours ago [-]
But there's also not consumer choice now. If devs are so lazy as to only test on Safari because they absolutely have to, you can bet your bottom dollar they aren't testing Firefox or anything else if it comes along. Therefore, if Apple keeps the Safari monopoly on their platform, you have only the choice of Safari on iOS, and only the choice of Chrome everywhere else. So there's no consumer choice even if you get your preferred outcome here.
Diversity is not an intrinsic good. It only is good inasmuch as it enables other things which are good. If the browser diversity we have (limited though it is) isn't actually providing choice to consumers, I don't see how it provides any value even if we do preserve it.
simondotau 15 hours ago [-]
Diversity is an intrinsic good in an open platform, even if it impedes things which are good.
hbn 21 hours ago [-]
There is no monopoly right now. Chrome and Safari are both in use enough that you generally need to test against both.
Once real Chromium is available on iPhones, there will be a monopoly.
infecto 19 hours ago [-]
First let us pick the search engine we want tobusey
Apple used to release Safari for Windows, but then for obvious reasons it stopped.
Apple is all about control.
FireBeyond 21 hours ago [-]
When you install Chrome, which you cannot accidentally do, and when you set it as the OS browser default, which you also cannot accidentally do...
... the next time you launch Safari, it will say that the default browser has been changed, "Did you mean to do that?" and of the two options presented ("Keep using Chrome" or "Switch back to Safari") the Safari option will be the default.
zsoltkacsandi 22 hours ago [-]
> First let us install other browser engines on iOS, and then we can talk
Just checked in the App Store, I can install Firefox, Opera, Brave, and many many other browsers on my iPhone.
dylan604 22 hours ago [-]
Those are not the same underpinnings as their desktop/Android brethren. All of these iOS apps are still using WebKit.
molszanski 20 hours ago [-]
Ask your LLM for details but
TLDR
Apple since mid 2024 was forced by EU and Japan to allow other engines.
There are hurdles but the path is open.
Both Chrome / Blink and Firefox / Gecko have made prototypes but haven’t moved past that.
It seems that there is no money or will to see it through.
So it’s not all “Apple bad doesn’t allow it”
greazy 20 hours ago [-]
> Ask your LLM for details but
No, mate. You need to provide details. The onus is on you to support your claim.
greggsy 1 days ago [-]
Forgive my ignorance.
How is the iOS engine requirement considered a monopoly?
cassianoleal 1 days ago [-]
Because Apple controls the only browser engine that runs on iOS and iPadOS. There are no alternatives. Chrome, Firefox and other browsers are just the browser chrome on top of the Safari/WebKit engine. Apple will not allow anything else.
alt227 23 hours ago [-]
> browser chrome
Bad choice of term!
latexr 22 hours ago [-]
Fun fact, the Google Chrome team was very aware of “browser chrome” as a term when they named their browser. They make that clear in the introductory comic.
iOS and iPadOS aren't the most dominant OSes, so therefore this can't be a monopoly.
foolswisdom 21 hours ago [-]
Apple isn't the most dominant business on earth, so maybe they can't do anything in violation of antitrust?
Not how it works. You define a relevant market, and the market of iPhone users (which a stable market, there are barriers to just switching to android tomorrow) can be used for evaluation.
20 hours ago [-]
kyralis 19 hours ago [-]
This really is a grey area. You can't define "the market for electricians in my local town" and get any antitrust protections. Defining the market is a huge part of how politicians make this political and therefore something they can profit from.
ur-whale 1 days ago [-]
iOS is a de-facto monopoly in the first place.
mingus88 24 hours ago [-]
Ridiculous take
Android’s global marketshare is 70% of mobile so you would have to declare a monopoly as “things I can run on an iPhone” as your position for that to work
There is plenty of competition and choice to iOS, you just won’t find that on Apple hardware for reasons that have held for three decades
lxgr 23 hours ago [-]
> so you would have to declare a monopoly as “things I can run on an iPhone” as your position for that to work
Yes, that's pretty much it. A similar concern applies to Google and Android.
alt227 23 hours ago [-]
But you can install other OSes such as Graphene on Android phones, I dont think you can do that on iPhones can you?
On a lot of Android devices you can't install ANY other custom OS because of locked down bootloaders. If you want GrapheneOS specifically that list is even narrower due to 1. official support 2. hardware security features just missing from the devices.
alt227 10 hours ago [-]
Can you install any other OS on any iPhone at all? As far as I am aware the best Android phone for installing non stock OSes on is the Google Pixel itself, Googles own 1st party phone.
floydnoel 7 hours ago [-]
I have seen Android booted on an iPhone. It was a long time ago, and I don’t think anybody continued working on it because... why do it when you could already buy an Android device?
Also, I'm curious... can you really install an OS besides Android on a Pixel, etc? AFAIK it's just different distros of Android, it's not like you could install BSD or something, right?
handedness 17 hours ago [-]
Sure, but on many, you can, which supports their point.
Painting Apple and Android devices with the same brush in this particular regard doesn't make a lot of sense.
joemi 22 hours ago [-]
That's not how monopolies work, though.
lxgr 21 hours ago [-]
It's absolutely how they work. If there's only a single grocery store in town (and for whatever reason others can't be opened), is that somehow not a monopoly even though there are several pharmacies and hardware stores?
mingus88 20 hours ago [-]
You can buy whatever phone you want. Many of them can run multiple OSes if that’s what you want. There is not a single mobile platform in town.
When Ford sells me an F150 I don’t cry about them having a monopoly on their Sync platform. That’s not now monopolies work
lxgr 11 hours ago [-]
If you don’t like the town with only one grocery store, you can move to any other place you want.
And what about the other mobile platform (singular)? That one’s also making it harder and harder to sideload apps.
joemi 20 hours ago [-]
That's not a good analogy for the situation. A better grocery-based analogy would be if there's only a single Bob's Grocery in town (and for whatever reason more Bob's Groceries can't be opened) but there is a Sally's Groceries in town. Then Bob's Groceries isn't a monopoly. The only thing Bob's Groceries is a monopoly of is Bob's Groceries, which is a useless tautological argument.
Apple has neither a monopoly on phones nor on app marketplaces.
lxgr 10 hours ago [-]
They don't have a monopoly on phones. They do have (something like) a monopoly on app distribution on the iOS platform.
Maybe monopoly is not the right legal category, and maybe what they are doing is perfectly legal and always will be, but I don't think the fundamental point can be argued away with analogies like these.
floydnoel 7 hours ago [-]
Bob's Grocery likewise has a "monopoly" on distribution of products in their store. They have no control over Sally's Groceries.
Still not any kind of monopoly
mingus88 20 hours ago [-]
Does Ford have a monopoly position on the F150 because I can’t run Linux on it?
imthatsteve 23 hours ago [-]
Did you read the post you replied to?
Are you just being pedantic about the definition of monopoly or did you fail to understand the problem as it was explained.
Do you use ios? If so do you like using broken websites? Do you have no desire for things to function as intended?
Id imagine its very annoying as a developer to have your things broken for no reason other than pure corporate greed.
If you do use ios then you probably enjoy paying more for an inferior product so ig this is more of a feature than a bug.
simondotau 19 hours ago [-]
> Id imagine its very annoying as a developer to
...test on more than one browser platform? Seriously? Is this how lazy the industry has become? Is this how far we've fallen?
Having websites say "if it doesn't work, install Chrome" is not choice.
protimewaster 23 hours ago [-]
Why would I use the global market share to determine if someone has a monopoly, though? It seems like a flawed way to determine how much choice consumers have.
For example, there's a monopoly on garbage service where I live, but he company with the monopoly has basically 0% of the world market.
snapcaster 23 hours ago [-]
How do you defend a company with 30% marketshare being a monopoly but the other company with 70% market share isn't? I can see the duopoly argument, but no idea how apple could be a monopoly by itself
protimewaster 22 hours ago [-]
I'm not defending anybody. I'm just saying, if I live in a market where one company has 99% of the market, somebody coming in and saying "There's not a monopoly. They only have 30% of the global market! " isn't going to make me feel any better, because I don't live everywhere in the world. I live where I live, and that company has 99% of the market there.
I just don't think the 30% of the global market number is relevant to anything in terms of arguing if somebody has a monopoly. Are there even any countries who use a definition of "monopoly" that uses global marketshare to determine if there's a monopoly? Surely those definitions all look at marketshare within some specific region?
floydnoel 22 hours ago [-]
that argument doesn't relate to this discussion at all, though. you aren't limited to only buying Apple devices in your neighborhood, are you?
protimewaster 21 hours ago [-]
There are entire countries where one company has 93%+ marketshare. Yes, maybe people can go to another country where the marketshare is different, but do we all seriously think that the global marketshare not resembling a monopoly definitely means that there's no one market where a monopoly exists?
I imagine trying to effectively use (or market) a competing product in a region with 93%+ marketshare is a painful experience, regardless of whether the global marketshare is more balanced.
Using global marketshare hides details like that. Apple could have 100% of the market in China and India, and Android could have 100% of the marketshare in the rest of the world. This would put, worldwide, Apple at about 35% and Android at about 65%. I would argue there are clearly monopolies in that case, though, even if the worldwide numbers are 65 and 35.
floydnoel 18 hours ago [-]
ok, so in which countries does iOS have 93%+ or 100% marketshare (as you claimed)?
bigyabai 23 hours ago [-]
Being a monopoly isn't illegal. So many discussions gloss over this fact, and people get at each other's throat over hypothetical abuses and ad-hominem scenarios.
Abusing a monopoly is illegal. Alphabet and Apple are both unquestionably monopoly businesses, and make incredible year-over-year revenue through market-damaging services like AdSense and the App Store. If they are allowed to continue, then other Fortune 500 businesses will copy their decisions, thereby destroying genuine market value that they provide in exchange for safer, more exploitative revenue streams.
In the case of AdSense and Apple's App Store both, I think that any fair FTC investigation would conclude they are shakedown services that harm the greater economy.
snapcaster 22 hours ago [-]
When nothing is stopping you from using an alternative i just don't see it
bigyabai 22 hours ago [-]
You could have said the same thing about Windows during it's antitrust case.
Fat lot of good that logic would do Microsoft when they were deliberately gimping competitors.
mithr 20 hours ago [-]
You couldn't have, though. Market share was a part of that Microsoft decision. At the time, they had 90-95% of the global market share — there were very few competitors. Apple has a higher though still in the 50s percentage-wise market share in the US, but a 20-30% share globally. Alternatives are much more viable in Apple's case, and often cheaper. You have to want an Apple device to get one, and it's very easy to get an Android instead and not lose out on any important software or functional ability.
In addition, I think Apple has so far somewhat successfully argued that they have reasons for restricting their ecosystem that aren't just a thinly veiled "because we want to crush competition". They argue that their devices are safer to use, and that allowing arbitrary software full access to the system would compromise that. Similarly, they limit third-party software from tracking you. They certainly aren't saints, and I disagree with a many of their choices (their app store cut could've decreased long ago, for one, and they're now adding ads into their own services) but they often seem like the only large corporation of their kind that even tries to have a set of beliefs and care about their users, and I think intent should matter.
I personally like that there's one popular ecosystem that has a particular perspective, and another competing popular ecosystem that has a totally different perspective. If you think all of the above is bullshit and Apple sucks, you're free to use Android and install exactly what you want on your phone. I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.
bigyabai 19 hours ago [-]
> I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.
Apple is responsible for market damages inflicted onto software distribution by picking-and-choosing who gets to ship, and where their money goes. It is reflected in Apple's astronomical service margins, which unfairly reward them with even higher ROI than the iPhone hardware itself (!!!), somehow. It is seen in Apple's back-room negotiations with Amazon, Netflix, Google, Epic and X, where they use their de-facto power to force unfavorable distribution terms and draw up protection fees. It's present in their entitlement system, which gives Apple the option to artificially hamstring competing services that want to integrate with iOS. It's inherent to Apple's developer program, which has been used to revoke software signing certificates when Apple simply disagrees with a competitor.
Do we really think they deserve that money and power? It's not encouraging them to make smart choices.
In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option. A factory-new iPhone could use all of Apple's offered services with a hardware-attested eFuse that says the device was never jailbroken. If a user wants to do foolish things like play Fallout: New Vegas with Proton, give Dropbox system-level integration a-la iCloud, use an updated RCS client instead of iMessage, install Fortnite or use a third-party app store, then Apple can give them that choice without endangering other people. It isn't impossible, they already do this with macOS, running the same XNU kernel, and with an architecturally indistinct ARM chip.
That would alleviate the market damages that Apple is responsible for, and create a positive pressure on iOS development to improve software-wise. Right now, Apple is being rewarded for extorting their competitors, pettily attacking consumers, blocking software features, stuffing ads[0] into first-party apps, and visually degrading iOS. They are clearly being protected from software alternatives that offer a less-invasive alternative to Apple's disgraceful OEM packins. Which is a shame, since Apple was historically not opposed to taking advantage of free software and making high-quality packin software that legitimately did compete against alternatives, like QuickTime and iTunes.
> In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option
But… they do offer their services as an option. One option is to use their devices and services, and another is to use a different, equally popular company’s devices and services. Why should they be forced to make hardware that can be used in ways they don’t think it should be?
I agree that Apple could change or build many of the things you’ve described. You’d like them better if they did. Maybe I would too. I still don’t understand why they should be required to. It feels odd to say that the market would only be fair if they were forced to be more similar to their main competitor in one of the core ways in which they’re different.
bigyabai 12 hours ago [-]
> I still don’t understand why they should be required to.
It harms the market. There are good indie devs and companies being unfairly punished for trying to ship good software on iOS. Apple's double-standards are the #1, red-alert issue.
The secondary issue, and one that upset me, is that it encourages Apple to make worse products. If Apple has an adjustable taxation knob that users have no control over, they can extort developers in exchange for making the platform worse. Apple knows that alternative App Stores and billing methods will destroy this status quo, which is why they invest millions lobbying against Europe's common-sense DSA/DMA laws. If the United States adopted a similar regulation, then Apple's financials would crater, jeopardizing their company's future simply by making iOS behave like a normal Mac or PC.
Apple should not be gambling their future on an exploitative status-quo, they should be reinvesting in capabilities, security and making products that people want to buy. Just like Google and their AdSense monopoly, I think Apple's terrible choices are informed by a captive revenue stream that they abuse to boost their quarterly reports.
21 hours ago [-]
jasonlotito 23 hours ago [-]
> How do you defend a company with 30% marketshare being a monopoly but the other company with 70% market share isn't?
One allows you to install different browsers, the other does not.
Being a monopoly isn't illegal (in the US). It's what they do that matters.
Now, that doesn't mean Apple is a monopoly with iOS, because the Sherman act doens't dictate it only looks at US only markets. It look at what makes sense in the context. Of course, a court could decide that regardless of what the numbers are internationall, what matters in this case is just the US market.
Trying to predict that is useless at the moment though because the US courts are all over the place.
yipinwong 23 hours ago [-]
As much as I am pro-android, this is a dumb take.
Numbers say otherwise.
brunoborges 1 days ago [-]
Can you be more specific on how iOS blocks other browsers? You mean for embedded browser engine in apps?
iOS does not allow third party browser engines. Every browser you download from the iOS App Store is using 'Safari Lite' under the hood. It's ostensibly for security, but it's more about control.
slashdave 19 hours ago [-]
> It's ostensibly for security, but it's more about control.
The security angle is easy to understand.
Not sure why Apple cares about control.
But it easier just to want to make Apple seem bad, so there's that.
bliteben 23 hours ago [-]
I would bet the security claim holds up, I have definitely seem more RCE mentioned from Chrome than from Safari.
I would bet Google's track record would easily allow them to defend this in court. More an issue with Google though.
lxgr 23 hours ago [-]
I guess that might have something to do with the fact that Chrome is vastly more popular than Safari, and also available on many more operating systems.
ajross 22 hours ago [-]
No, it's definitely about control. Allowing an arbitrary browser means allowing access to platform stuff from portable (gasp!) APIs. And Apple doesn't want that. They want an iOS app to be the primary face of everything important, and the other stuff to be an expensive port.
And the problem isn't abstract. Safari lacks a ton of very useful API implementations. Like, try programming a QMK keyboard on an iPhone: it's literally the only platform in the whole world unable to run the Via web app.
I use that to test our website at work in Safari, though without a GPU (there is no virto-gpu driver for macOS and my PC's GPU doesn't support vGPU) the performance isn't great.
simondotau 19 hours ago [-]
Chrome is the new IE.
The difference is that Microsoft wanted to stall the web, while Google wants to accelerate it faster so that nobody else can keep up.
The commonality is the de-facto monoculture being sold to web developers. "Works best in Internet Explorer" was the problem twenty years ago. Now we've got lazy web developers who bemoan the absence of Chrome on their customer's phones. Right now Apple is the last thing standing between them and slapping a "Works best in Chrome" banner everywhere and abandoning support for Safari.
nticompass 6 hours ago [-]
I've seen plenty of websites with a "Works best in Chrome" banner, usually because they use some non-standard web API. Though, I've seen plenty that clearly just didn't care to test outside of Chrome, so they just assume you're using that.
My gripe about "Safari being the new IE" was more about how broken some websites can be in Safari and having no good way of knowing or testing that. At work, my boss said out website didn't look quite right on his iPhone and it took more work than I'd thought to track down the piece of CSS that Safari rendered differently for some reason.
Personally, I don't use macOS or iOS and I also use Firefox. Generally, things seem to work the same between Firefox Chrome and Safari, with Safari needing the most amount of "tweaks".
simondotau 4 hours ago [-]
When websites are broken in Safari it is, almost invariably, because the web developer was lazy and only ever attempted to make things work in Chrome. This has many risks, including an unintended (but still pathological) reliance on Chrome implementation quirks and undefined behaviours.
Chrome is the new IE because it is fostering the return of the lazy developer who thinks the web can be reduced to a single web browser.
Safari is not the new IE. It is highly standards compliant, it’s actively maintained, and it’s not making web developers lazy.
hi41 30 minutes ago [-]
I remember watching the presentation on V8 by the Google Swedish team I think. Everyone found it magical at that time. Chrome was very secure by introducing sandboxes for process separation. It introduced tabs when Microsoft said their customers didn’t need tabs.
How did Chrome go from being magical and aw inspiring to being viewed unfavorably by the HN community?
jacquesm 1 days ago [-]
You should ditch Chrome. And switch to FireFox.
alt227 23 hours ago [-]
Ive used Firefox as my daily driver for around 12 years. I switched to Chrome a couple weeks ago to see what the fuss is about and I am shocked how glitchy it is in comparison. Firefox is a much more stable experience.
jacquesm 20 hours ago [-]
I routinely have 100's of tabs open on a 32G 10+ year old box (an ancient W540), it's rock solid.
robinhood 6 hours ago [-]
Came to say this. No way that I will use Safari. As a regular user, why not (even though UX choices are really weird). As a developer, never ever ever. Firefox dev tools are simply on another level entirely. As someone who has escaped two years ago the Apple ecosystem, Firefox too.
crazybonkersai 12 hours ago [-]
I switched to Brave and could not be happier. Chrome user experience without creepy panopticon.
barelysapient 1 days ago [-]
I've been very happy with FireFox.
pupppet 23 hours ago [-]
Firefox should just have a 'Chrome' mode where it just shamelessly looks exactly like Chrome. Apart from Chrome removing the flag to hide the close buttons on tabs, I think the UI is damn near perfect.
rocketvole 22 hours ago [-]
we're getting closer with the nova redesign
esskay 10 hours ago [-]
Nah I switched to Brave. Firefox is still slower than any chromium based browser.
yipinwong 23 hours ago [-]
Nope. I watch a lotta youtube on a PC, FF runs vids like crap because Google changes something, and FF struggls to play well unlike Chrome or Edge.
That's the only reason I am not switching to FF 100%. I do use it though but not as a main driver.
nicce 22 hours ago [-]
They do that on purpose. To keep you using Chrome.
ty. This... yes, you know why I don't use FF for Youtube...
jojobas 20 hours ago [-]
This is why you should only use firefox, with a proper adblocker, for youtube.
accrual 23 hours ago [-]
Interesting, YouTube runs fairly well on my system with Firefox. I do get the "Experiencing interruptions? Find out why" pop-up often. It's funny though, the only interruption I actually experience is the pop-up. If the pop-up went away, so would all interruptions.
asimovDev 11 hours ago [-]
I have the same in Safari when I have uBlock on, initial video load takes forever and i get an occasional interruptions pop up in the bottom left of the screen
yipinwong 21 hours ago [-]
I have a paid sub, and runs youtube without any ad blockers on chrome and FF.
The issue happens only on FF
accrual 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I would not be surprised at all if there's "if not Chrome UA, show popup" code somewhere.
jasode 23 hours ago [-]
Many replies about Firefox having no problems on Youtube but I will confirm your complaint that it's an ongoing issue for some of us.
I keep retrying Firefox over multiple years and it's still not quite equal to Chrome for Youtube 4k playback ...
4k? That might have something to do with it. Though given a big enough box that too shouldn't be an issue. But I'm using a decade+ old thinkpad driving a fairly high res dell and it works well enough.
tcfhgj 15 hours ago [-]
I use 4k without issues
yipinwong 21 hours ago [-]
"Works on My Machine" reply.
simondotau 18 hours ago [-]
I sometimes have difficulty with YouTube 4K on Firefox on my Mac Studio (M2 Max with 64GB). I don't really care though, because 1440p is always well and truly good enough. (And really 1080p is more than good enough except that the default bitrate is absolute dogshit. Most of the time I'm choosing 1440p is because it's bitrate is not dogshit.)
vasachi 23 hours ago [-]
I've had zero problems with Youtube on FF for I don't remember how many years. I'm on Mac though.
driverdan 15 hours ago [-]
I've been using FF across Linux, MacOS, and Windows for years. I can't remember the last time I had an issue playing YT videos in it.
lelanthran 22 hours ago [-]
I've used FF for the past 20 years (Linux and Windows). I have seen thousands of youtube videos in that time without a glitch. So have many hundreds of other FF users.
If FF is not working on youtube for, it's not working for you and you alone.
floydnoel 22 hours ago [-]
I just use Brave for YT. Adblock built in!
yipinwong 21 hours ago [-]
I used to use Brave and it had no issues on YT.
I stopped using Brave for no reason i don't remember. (no, not to do with the CEO)
throw0101c 23 hours ago [-]
> Nope. I watch a lotta youtube on a PC, FF runs vids like crap because Google changes something, and FF struggls to play well unlike Chrome or Edge.
I generally use Safari on my Apple devices (and YT works) and Firefox on any Linux machines. If something does not work on Safari I try Firefox on my Mac. In the past I've also sometimes used Chrome when no other option works.
So one option could be to use Firefox as a 'general use' browser, and switch to something else on an as-needed basis.
A bit of a hassle, but it may be the best compromise currently.
jacquesm 23 hours ago [-]
Never had a problem with that.
lightedman 23 hours ago [-]
"Nope. I watch a lotta youtube on a PC, FF runs vids like crap because Google changes something, and FF struggls to play well unlike Chrome or Edge."
You must have a hardware problem, as I'm playing 4K videos on a 1st-gen Ryzen and GTX 1080 using Firefox and I've never had a single issue since I got the machine, around the 4th week the processor was available to purchase.
cwel 18 hours ago [-]
r7 1700 and GTX 1080 was my setup for a long time. still is, just relegated to an htpc (albeit not a very power friendly one). the 1080 in particular was (and remains) such a reliable card.
jacquesm 18 hours ago [-]
The 1080 was quite amazing when it came out. I still have one here that I use as a test card. Of course it can't do anything useful for the amount of power that it consumes but still, the amount of horsepower in there was very impressive.
lightedman 2 hours ago [-]
"Of course it can't do anything useful for the amount of power that it consumes"
Until about the top-end of the 3000 RTX series released, the GTX 1080 was still king of raster performance.
I'm playing modern games like Marvel Rivals at 1440p no problem. Risk of Rain 2 4k no problem. STALKER 2 1080p no problem. It even runs most of my VR games perfectly fine, with me only needing to switch to my RTX 5060 machine for Into the Radius 2.
Even today, it is a very capable card, despite the power draw.
t1234s 23 hours ago [-]
Agreed!
baal80spam 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
1 days ago [-]
ur-whale 1 days ago [-]
> Nope
Really well argued, congrats.
bigstrat2003 16 hours ago [-]
It's not like the parent post was any better. Saying "you should do X" is not an actual argument to do it.
veber-alex 23 hours ago [-]
No thanks.
I am perfectly happy with Chrome.
freetime2 20 hours ago [-]
Maybe a bit of an edge use case, but I use the translate page feature a lot in browsers. In Chrome you can switch back and forth between languages seamlessly, but in Safari translating a page requires reloading the page - which can cause issues on forms that use POST. Even worse, I've found that switching back to the original language just doesn't work on pages loaded with POST - the page gets stuck on the translated version (which can sometimes cause issues with some poorly designed javascript components like calendar widgets) even after reloading the page. This causes issues frequently enough to prevent me switching to Safari.
On the plus side, though, Safari will also translate text in images.
LoganDark 11 hours ago [-]
Safari also tries to guess whether a page needs translation, and won't even offer you the option if it doesn't think you need it. (The menu bar item to translate the page will be disabled.) Which means you can't translate pages that are only partially in a different language, or which have enough of your preferred language for Safari to decide that translation shouldn't be offered. Sure, you can right click -> translate, but you have to do that for every piece of text, and it only displays the translation in a popover that closes once you do anything else.
Gareth321 11 hours ago [-]
Agree on both points. Translation is a very second class citizen in Safari. The selection of languages is also incredibly limited compared to Chrome. This is one of the reasons I stick with Chrome.
jillesvangurp 24 hours ago [-]
Chrome is the new internet explorer. Lots of people coming up with all sorts of arguments why they have to use it and can't switch. Internet Explorer used to be like that. MS really abused users and they still wouldn't switch. It's a form of Stockholm syndrome.
The history of Chrome is that it first displaced Firefox as a reasonable alternative (while funding that via a nice ad deal). And then they just steam rolled Internet Explorer to the point where MS gave up and rebuilt their browser around Chromium. It was that good. Fifteen years ago.
But these days you have to put up with a lot of crap from Google. Ad blocking works better on other browsers. Even some Chromium browsers (like Brave). But the thing with Chromium is that all Chromium derived browsers outsource most of the browser internals to Google. Google decides what features to implement, what PRs to merge, what features not to implement, etc. They set the standards. Safari, Firefox, and hopefully soon Ladybird are the only alternative browser engines keeping them somewhat honest on that front.
cosmic_cheese 22 hours ago [-]
Google has always aggressively promoted Chrome, too. The promotion is just invisible to most people since most people run Chrome.
If you visit a Google property using a Gecko or WebKit-based browser you'll get hit with banners nudging you to switch to Chrome and Google's iOS apps ignore the long-available default browser setting when linked are tapped, prompting you to choose between your default browser and Chrome even if you don't have Chrome installed.
And then there's the whole thing with how Chrome for Android conveniently never gained the ability to run even pared-back MV3 blocker extensions. Massive conflict of interest there.
I wish Google were called out for this stuff way more, but more often than not they're given a free pass.
bitpush 20 hours ago [-]
> Chrome is the new internet explorer.
Most people who say this didnt go through the pain of why IE was such a PITA. IE held back web development by years because either they refused to add features or they added features that only worked with Microsoft approved.
Chrome came along and accelerated web platform development since their products relied on a thriving web ecosystem. They did it using open source software, and built out consensus using web platforms.
Chrome is the new IE will only be true if other browsers are out innovating Chrome (not true), or Chrome has abandoned web platform (not true).
There's only one browser that drags their feat adding features, and that's ironically Safari. Firefox too to an extend, but that's mostly mismanagement and lack of resources. Apple has no excuses.
cosmic_cheese 19 hours ago [-]
Chrome is the new IE in that it has become an engine/frontend monoculture. Remember those little "Best viewed in IE" badges that used to litter the web because devs stopped testing their sites in Netscape? That's where we're headed now with Chromium/Blink and it's just as bad of a thing now as it was then.
Also worth noting that some of the discrepancies in capability are in features that Google decided to push despite opposition from other members of the consortium (like WebUSB).
Washuu 18 hours ago [-]
I remember the "Best view in Chrome" notices that I get today browsing Japanese web sites. It is already a problem and I have to spoof the browser agent for some web sites to get around Javascript blocks that only allow Chrome through.
bitpush 19 hours ago [-]
> Chrome is the new IE in that it has become an engine/frontend monoculture
That's a strange argument. I dont see HN saying this year all of us are going to buy Android, because iOS has become too popular. That sentiment is only valid is iOS is dragging their feat and if they stop innovating, effectively holding the market back.
I still havent seen an example where Chrome is holding everyone back. If anything, the complaint is the other way - they are doing way too much and we want them to stop.
And for HN crowd to be against that is very silly.
cosmic_cheese 16 hours ago [-]
The web is an open standard (nominally, at least), but ceases to be so if a single company controls it. At that point the company’s vision is instead the standard in which nobody else gets meaningful say.
It’s not just Apple. Mozilla has pushed back against Google’s proposals plenty of times too. Google doesn’t always know best and often acts more in their self-interest than in that of the web.
So the issue isn’t that Google is moving too fast or doing too much, but that they’re unilaterally deciding the future of the web, which is not something any single party should be capable of.
bitpush 15 hours ago [-]
> but ceases to be so if a single company controls it.
How does Google or any company control the web? I can launch a website fuckgoogle.com today and Google can do nothing with it. However, I cannot publish fuckapple on Mac Store or App Store.
cosmic_cheese 15 hours ago [-]
It's the direction of the web they control, with the various specs involved becoming ever more complex and more difficult to implement in new web engines (complexity as a moat) and with many of the APIs getting added being better suited for surveillance capitalism or as a project for somebody's promotion within Google than for building high quality software.
hk1337 18 hours ago [-]
> Most people who say this didn't go through the pain of why IE was such a PITA.
I did and "Chrome is the new internet explorer" is more accurate than what has been uttered since Chrome split from WebKit, "Safari is the new internet explorer".
IEs problem wasn't that it was behind in features, it was that it used IE-specific plugins and was heavily integrated with Windows Explorer. Safari is and has not been either of those.
zaphar 23 hours ago [-]
I use safari regularly and it has not really kept up. All kinds of stuff that is partly broken for rendering. Especially on heavily dynamic sites. Chrome at least works for any web standard which IE did not.
jiehong 22 hours ago [-]
It’s more like devs only test on chrome.
cosmic_cheese 22 hours ago [-]
Yes. These days if a site is broken in Safari there's a ~70% chance it's broken or degraded in Firefox too.
zaphar 3 hours ago [-]
For what it's worth Firefox is my daily driver and I've never run into a site that was broken in it. Safari I definitely have.
linguae 22 hours ago [-]
Yup, just like during the bad old days of Internet Explorer's dominance. I remember encountering websites that only worked on the Windows version of Internet Explorer as late as 2006. We had a nice time in the late 2000s and early 2010s when web developers coded against standards instead of against the market-leading web browser. There was competition between Firefox, Opera, Safari, and a revitalized Internet Explorer. I don't remember IE 7 and later being that bad, though by then I had switched to Firefox on Linux/Windows and Safari on Macs.
Then came an upstart web browser from Google named Chrome....and now we're back to the bad old days of web developers coding to the dominant web browser again.
mr_toad 21 hours ago [-]
I have never cursed at a website for a rendering issue.
I have cursed too many websites to count because of their broken form designs (like assuming a particular postcode format) or reliance on cookies from ad vendors for basic functionality. If your website needs to generate “a new google recaptcha cookie” (whatever that means) before I can enter payment info, then sorry, no es bueno.
lobf 23 hours ago [-]
Where do you run in to this? I switched from Chrome to Safari about 5 years ago and can count the number of websites I’ve had issues with on one hand, I think.
Alex_L_Wood 22 hours ago [-]
Mobile Reddit is awful on Safari, but it speaks more about Reddit developers than it speaks about Safari.
watermelon0 22 hours ago [-]
Strava is an example of a website that's dog slow on Safari. Pages take 10+ seconds before they start rendering.
fouc 20 hours ago [-]
Interestingly gmail suddenly started loading dog slow in Safari for me. I'm on an older version of Safari so that could be a factor - so bizarre though. I wouldn't put it past them to be doing that deliberately.
oldsklgdfth 21 hours ago [-]
> Chrome is the new internet explorer.
My take is Safari is the new IE.
It is packaged with the OS. I can't get an older version of Safari without an older version is macOS. From a testing standpoint, this means we have a bunch of hardware or images we never update so we can test against.
That was the IE thing, it was baked into the OS. Also, trash dev tools. Crashes pretty easily with the console open for more than 30s.
curt15 1 days ago [-]
Safari has the same manifest v3 limitations that preclude the full-blooded ublock origin you get with Firefox.
armadyl 1 days ago [-]
I notice no difference using AdGuard (in basic mode, with only the content blocking rules and no page read access) in Safari or uBOL in basic mode on Chrome vs. using UBO on Firefox. And in uBOL’s case you can always increase the filtering level if you’re willing to grant the extension read access to pages to basically match uBO. You can even hide/delete elements or add your own custom rules.
I feel like most people who make MV3 complaints didn’t bother actually trying it, they just repeat the default anti-MV3 talking points.
ctkhn 1 days ago [-]
Google serves ads and videos from the same servers. Adblock can't use DNS to drop the ads without dropping videos too. Ublock in firefox sees the actual content in my browser and can distinguish youtube videos from ads.
Mashimo 10 hours ago [-]
But how does ublock origin lite, the v3 version, blocks adverts on youtube just fine?
AuthAuth 23 hours ago [-]
Google doesnt turn on MV3 and have it break ads day one that would highlight a negative change for users. Google wants people to move to MV3 and notice no difference and then they can start chipping away later.
zaphar 23 hours ago [-]
It's cute that you think they have level of sophistication in their strategy.
AuthAuth 20 hours ago [-]
It doesnt require sophistication. Just implement MV3 and then when the conversation about adblockers comes up make a note that its probably not wise to cut it as extensions have switched to MV3 and its a controversial topic. Its easy to see how different teams would come to this without collaborating, its the MV3 team doing what they do and the ad block team reading the room.
toomim 1 days ago [-]
Does it block ads in youtube videos?
moi2388 23 hours ago [-]
Yes.
jshier 20 hours ago [-]
The MV3 API isn't enough to block YouTube ads on their own, but Safari ad blockers which also include web extension API blocking can see enough traffic to block YT ads. 1Blocker does this, and even StopTheMadness Pro's blocking have enough flexibility to do it.
icantevenhold 1 days ago [-]
I personally notice a lot of difference between AdGuard and UBO.
AdGuard just blocks much less.
s0ulf3re 5 hours ago [-]
Safari never supported the API’s needed for uBlock Origin. That said, Safari also has its own API available for blocking stuff
Why don't they lean into ad blockers and making the web less shitty? Is it because the web staying shitty makes people use apps instead?
cosmic_cheese 20 hours ago [-]
It's because with the way that the most capable adblockers are built, they can't function without injecting code into every page and intercepting traffic. The privacy implications for someone installing an adblocker extension with malicious intent (or more commonly, a formerly legit blocker gets bought and gets turned malicious in an update) are dire.
2OEH8eoCRo0 16 hours ago [-]
I don't buy it. Your browser itself does these things, Apple could bake their own into the browser.
icantevenhold 1 days ago [-]
I’m sure that is a part of the reason.
I hate apps with a passion…
1 days ago [-]
jonhohle 1 days ago [-]
I’ve been using Safari since 2003. I was previously using Konqueror, so the transition was pretty easy. It’s always been fast and reliable and Mac-like.
It’s nice to have a browser that is a browser and not something that’s attempting to be another operating system.
yipinwong 23 hours ago [-]
You deserve the kudos for just mentioning Konqueror and extra +1 for using it.
I liked Konqueror but abandoned in favor of Chrome browsers and variants especially after working on frontend projects and stoped using KDE
yipinwong 23 hours ago [-]
You deserve the kudos for just mentioning Konqueror and extra +1 for using it.
I liked Konqueror but abandoned in favor of Chrome browsers and variants especially after working on frontend projects.
glimshe 1 days ago [-]
If Safari worked in all major OSs like Chrome, Brave and Firefox, I could consider that. I own a Mac but didn't switch to Safari because I use multiple OSs for my work.
SirMaster 1 days ago [-]
It even used to run on Windows...
martheen 21 hours ago [-]
I suspect that was a legacy from when they planned for iOS not supporting any third-party apps. If they want to force devs to target mobile Safari, the least they can do was to provide the desktop version on Windows.
Once apps dominate (which requires devs to have a Mac anyway to compile and debug) and turns out nobody use the Windows port, it's just a money sink.
leptons 13 hours ago [-]
Android provides an emulator so you can debug Android apps on MacOS. Apple should do the same, but they won't.
tkdb 1 days ago [-]
The UX of Safari is just... not as good as chrome. On my phone, on my desktop, I just feel too much friction in the daily cycle of opening a thousand tabs.
The UX of Pages and Keynote are, IMO, far superior to Word/Powerpoint and Google Docs/Slides, but they lag adoption from... ecosystem inertia? I mention this as evidence of my objectivity in reflecting on UX.
DrBazza 1 days ago [-]
'Find in page' is in.... 'Share' (on mobile). But Apple has the best UX, so who am I to argue?
hiros-neko 22 hours ago [-]
Or you can just start typing in the address bar and it will list it below the autofilled list
oefrha 16 hours ago [-]
It may list it at the end, sometimes after a random delay, and sometimes fail to find something known to exist. Case in point: I just typed “autofill” into the address bar. Took about 1 second before anything showed up in the dropdown, and lo and behold, “Find ‘autofill’ — no matches”. Deleting “autofill” and typing it in again — “4 matches”, and dropdown entries appeared as I typed. What a shitshow.
Gareth321 10 hours ago [-]
This is very much my experience with Safari in general. Each one of these glitches in isolation isn't enough to push me away, but I had enough of them that it became unpleasant to use. The most annoying one was where I hit enter on the address bar and the page would just do nothing. Sometimes for 5, 10, 30 seconds. It was intermittent but annoying as fuck. If I clicked on the address bar and hit enter again it would work. Turns out it's been a bug for 15 years. Thousands of reports, still not fixed. Such a basic function for a web browser and they can't get that right.
desolate_muffin 3 hours ago [-]
One of the world’s great mysteries is how Apple cannot figure out basic search features working consistently
cpt_sobel 10 hours ago [-]
And 'History' is under 'Bookmarks'!
jorisw 9 hours ago [-]
To each their own I guess. I hate Chrome and love every single thing about Safari.
tkdb 56 minutes ago [-]
Tell me more (I'm in earnest):
What do you love about safari?
idbnstra 1 days ago [-]
yeah, for one, you can't put multiple tabs in a stack/accordion group
CuriousRose 18 hours ago [-]
I like Safari. I certainly trust Apple more than Google with my data. It's faster and doesn't mine my email and web data to train models (yet).
If it gets particularly bad, I'm sure some impartial team will make another browser engine with Opus 5.5 but for now I can tolerate the minor inconveniences in Safari.
jedberg 21 hours ago [-]
I use all three browsers on a daily basis. Chrome for accessing google owned properties and things I click on from Google search, Safari for reddit and hacker news, and Firefox for everything else.
Safari is always the best on my Mac, but my complaint has always been the lack of plugins.
But just now I ported one of my favorite plugins from Chrome to Safari using ChatGPT. I told it I already have it installed in Chrome so it can get the source code there, and then told it to port it and install it.
After 20 minutes and few bucks in tokens (estimated, I actually used my 6% of my $20/mo plan), I have Session Buddy in Safari.
So maybe the plugins aren't a problem anymore...
reaperducer 21 hours ago [-]
I ported one of my favorite plugins from Chrome to Safari using ChatGPT.
Why use ChatGPT? Safari has a built-in plugin builder now.
jedberg 21 hours ago [-]
1. I didn't know it exists. Now that I do and I looked into it...
2. I have an M1 chip and I'm not sure it's supported.
3. ChatGPT can open both browers, not sure if Safari plugin builder can
But if it does all those things, great. My point was more that plugins won't be a problem anymore because AI can build them.
PrimalPower 1 days ago [-]
I was building an pdf export feature for one of my projects the other day.
And safari still behaves differently than my other browsers.
I usually try to give safari a chance whenever I’m working on Macs. I’m always forced to install chrome for some reason or another.
Until the random compatibility quirks stop I don’t see myself returning to safari.
carlosjobim 21 hours ago [-]
Safari has two types of PDF export: One is through "Export PDF" and should be a faithful copy of how the browser renders the HTML. The other i through the Print menu item and will be the text and images put onto paper sized sheets.
t1234s 23 hours ago [-]
How many people in this thread would dump their Android for an iPhone if they:
- allowed real 3rd party browser engines
- let you uninstall all the apple bloatware apps
alt227 23 hours ago [-]
If you added "Allowing manual sideloading of apps" to that list I would jump to an iPhone in a heartbeat
nticompass 22 hours ago [-]
There's TrollStore, but that's a hack not an official way.
TrollStore isn't supported on iOS versions past 17, so if you want to use an OS released in the past three years (and still receiving security updates) it isn't an option.
t1234s 23 hours ago [-]
yes, having an ADB type of CLI tool is a must.
2OEH8eoCRo0 23 hours ago [-]
Ditto
martheen 22 hours ago [-]
Due to App Store $99 per year compared to PlayStore one-time $25 and iPhone being unaffordable for most people in my country, there's too many niche and/or local apps I'm using in Android where they won't port to iOS.
thraway3837 15 hours ago [-]
The issue is that software vendors, esp the size and scale that produce browsers, have shown repeatedly that they are terrible for the consumer. All of a sudden, you get the largest attack surface, large instability, and giving them access to the same hardware/OS access is just downright dangerous.
It is so tiring to keep hearing of this whole sideloading/let us run other engines nonsense for a decade+ now. It's like watching all the nastiness that tech companies do and then asking for all that trash on iOS. This is tantamount to wanting Adobe Flash on iOS, and quite honestly, that's exactly what allowing 3rd party browser engines is going to do. First it maybe some extension, and then all of a sudden you find that the extension has full access to photos, location, and contacts because you granted 1 website access to those things.
No thanks.
Aozora7 19 hours ago [-]
Absolutely not.
Even if they did all of that and also allowed unrestricted sideloading, iOS is still awful overall, and iPhones themselves are terrible value. Even 16e and 17e start at €600/800. I can get a better android phone for €300, and I can't imagine spending more than €500 on a phone, let alone €1000 to get a basic feature like 120Hz refresh rate.
charlesabarnes 18 hours ago [-]
I would. I wish I had true choice in phone manufacturers. With the EU ruling and the Epic games court cases, I had hope that apple would be forced to open up in the US as well. I was planning my next device purchase decision around this.
I am not interested in jailbreaking or rooting my device to run my apps. I am not interested in the testflight process. I am an adult and can pick and choose what apps I want. And I would like to exercise the whole "voting with my wallet" thing when a company makes an anti-consumer decision.
KerrAvon 17 hours ago [-]
Judging by outcomes, the EU legislation -- the DMA -- is intended to make life harder for successful US companies rather than to make life better for consumers. They need to scrap it and start over. It can't be used as a model elsewhere -- it just gets in the way.
kaelwd 19 hours ago [-]
Nope, you'll have to pry my headphone jack and IR blaster out of my cold dead hands.
HelloUsername 21 hours ago [-]
> let you uninstall all the apple bloatware apps
Which apps can't be uninstalled on the latest iOS?
microflash 19 hours ago [-]
Siri
ssttoo 22 hours ago [-]
I’ll dump my iPhone for an Android as soon as:
- iMessage works so I can participate in the family group chat
KerrAvon 17 hours ago [-]
Awesome, welcome to iPhone. You literally can do that today because the current versions of iOS have added support for RCS.
ssttoo 16 hours ago [-]
I looked up RCS, thanks! Correct me if I’m wrong but does it mean that if my kid turns it on, her texts will appear green, not blue, to her iMessage’d friends?
tantalor 22 hours ago [-]
RCS exists
reaperducer 21 hours ago [-]
let you uninstall all the apple bloatware apps
Which Apple apps can't be removed?
lightedman 23 hours ago [-]
Not me, because Apple still disallows direct competition with their other 'apps/features' like Compass.
slashdave 19 hours ago [-]
Very few
jeroenhd 9 hours ago [-]
This reeks of Microsoft Edge levels of desperation to be honest. I don't use Safari because it doesn't work on most of the devices I interact with. Why on earth would you switch to a browser from a company that uses ecosystem lock-in as a primary business strategy?
tippa123 11 hours ago [-]
Don’t know why I never thought about it but apparently using your competitor’s trademark. Chrome in this case, is okay for comparative advertising.
I only noticed now because recently I have been wanting to incorporate the logos of tech publications on my website that have genuinely reviewed my product but apparently doing so isn’t without risk.
wereHamster 21 hours ago [-]
If they fix the devtools. Because Safari devtools are worse than junk.
tikotus 11 hours ago [-]
Devtools capturing the key combo for switching between windows (cmd+< on my keyboard) is driving me crazy! In my workflow I often have to switch between browser windows while having devtools open, and this annoyance has forced me to install Chrome.
oldsklgdfth 21 hours ago [-]
Hot garbage bro.
Also trash video playback.
SirMaster 1 days ago [-]
Could they please make Safari for Windows again?
accrual 23 hours ago [-]
I quite liked the old Safari for Windows. It felt like bringing over a slice of the Apple ecosystem to the common Windows XP or Vista desktop. You could run Safari and iTunes and have decent parity with (then) Mac OS X for the most common use cases.
asimovDev 11 hours ago [-]
I was probably the only household within the 200 km radius back in 2009 that was using Safari to browse the web and iTunes to listen to web radio from around the world, all on a Windows Vista machine
malloci 1 days ago [-]
They likely discontinued because there was barely any interest. Likely the only reason Safari has any use is that it's the default on MacOS and monopolized on i*OS.
SirMaster 2 hours ago [-]
With what Google has been doing to Chrome, and given that I use iOS, I would definitely use Safari on Windows cause I trust Apple more with Privacy, plus the session/tabs/auth/bookmark/applepay etc integration between my phone and Windows laptop/desktop would be great!
mkirsten 1 days ago [-]
Funnily, it's not a "Switch to Safari" campaign, but a "Stay on Safari" if you look at Apple's material.
pantulis 10 hours ago [-]
I think there are many reasons to use Safari (in fact, it's my de facto personal browser) but I feel that being faster is not one of them.
jorisw 9 hours ago [-]
How so? AFAIK performance is one of the main focuses of Safari and one of the main distinguishing factors that Apple strives for.
There's a whole chapter on it in Creative Selection (by Ken Kocienda who started the project) on how they were only allowed to release versions as fast or faster than the one before.
maidaman 1 days ago [-]
I’m not going to use different browsers on different devices. I can’t use Safari on my gaming windows desktop.
reenorap 22 hours ago [-]
If you work at Apple/Safari then my free suggestion is to have a "Chrome mode" where all the buttons and doohickeys that Chrome has are all in the same location for Safari. If I'm far to used to where the buttons are for things like "reload" so trying to switch to Safari is enough friction to make me stay with Chrome.
Maybe have an Edge mode as well to convince the Edge users to come over.
KolmogorovComp 9 hours ago [-]
You don’t use keyboard shortcut for reloading??
jorisw 9 hours ago [-]
I'll ditch Safari the day it starts to look or behave like Chrome
And to suggest a Mode tells me you're not a software maker
bob1029 1 days ago [-]
Safari is the ultimate way to browse HN.
For everything else, I use some chromium derivative that can traverse pirate streaming sites and ChatGPT without disintegrating under their weird JS workloads.
esskay 10 hours ago [-]
Why would i switch to a browser that only gets one update a year, and a minor one at that? They've lost the plot.
Last I looked at it Safari on iOS couldn't even do element.requestFullscreen(), so no, thanks.
Rohansi 19 hours ago [-]
Lots of stuff like this because they don't want web apps eating into their App Store money.
knollimar 4 hours ago [-]
It’s crazy they act like this but then make a campaign to use their deliberately inferior thing
hollowonepl 1 days ago [-]
I ditched both to favor Firefox many many years ago.
Pesthuf 8 hours ago [-]
It would certainly help other browsers keep up in performance and battery life if Apple didn’t make all the APIs that allow Safari to stay so far ahead private and undocumented.
I would consider Safari, if Apple open sourced it and it ran on Linux.
ur-whale 1 days ago [-]
> I would consider Safari, if Apple open sourced it and it ran on Linux.
Yes, absolutely. But then they wouldn't be able to lock the flock in the barn, which is so contrary to Apple's DNA that you can't event talk about it in a 1 mile radius of 1, Infinite loop.
tgsovlerkhgsel 11 hours ago [-]
The distraction hiding feature is interesting. Does it work automatically or is it essentially just a way to create a custom adblock list?
jorisw 9 hours ago [-]
It lets you point out a DOM element and it will display:none it for you
fluidcruft 1 days ago [-]
There's always Edge (increasingly favored by IT here). Our machines used to ship and favor Chrome, but Edge has been the new IT-gods blessed browser ever since we bumped to Windows 11. Apple seems to be the only tech-titan that is not interested in extending their browser onto other platforms. So be it.
Grimeton 23 hours ago [-]
They stopped that years ago. Safari for windows was a thing.
koinedad 18 hours ago [-]
Anecdotally I see significant out of memory issues with chrome on a regular basis. I use chrome for work but safari for personal and rarely see the same issue with safari if almost never.
mintflow 17 hours ago [-]
On iOS platform, it's only limited to apple's browser engine, with chrome I get long time of various bookmarks saved/synced and send page to various devices(not limited to apple ecosystem), those benefits still not give strong reason to let me switch to safari
One thing I do not like is no native dark mode on chrome, but that's okay, I just do not use phone when I preparing to sleep
For the adblock/tracker issue, recently just added builtin DNS-based adblock (backed by several public block list) to my VPN app, it seems works well, given same engine and same network filtered by the same VPN, i guess they are same to me
bobmarleybiceps 19 hours ago [-]
at least IME, chrome was unusable on Mac because it would regularly use an absurd amount of memory and freeze everything up.
t1234s 23 hours ago [-]
Its like when M$ was advertising IE11 on TV back in 2012~13
mococa 23 hours ago [-]
Wipr2 for adblocking in Safari - the best adblocker.
theplumber 1 days ago [-]
Apple forgot to mention Safari not being open source but rather tied to a proprietary platform not to mention Safari on mobile kept in a short leash to protect the AppStore.
codehorses 20 hours ago [-]
The browser engine is WebKit[1] which is open source, so not any different than Chrome.
How does one add a custom search engine to Safari? Even Google’s Chrome allows you to in Settings.
asimovDev 11 hours ago [-]
There's a "Search" tab in the settings. Although it doesn't seem like you can add Startpage for example or whatever else search engine. it only has Google, Bing, Yahoo and DDG.
iAMkenough 4 hours ago [-]
I would like to add SearXNG or Kagi without installing an extension, like I can with any Chrome-based browser.
jjjegly 9 hours ago [-]
interesting, i recently built a browser that is privacy and security orientated
www.github.com/jegly/iris
potatoproduct 12 hours ago [-]
Firefox provides a much better experience than Safari.
caycep 18 hours ago [-]
so this means they're putting more resources into the Webkit/Safari team...right?
wastedpotencial 9 hours ago [-]
I want to use Safari on Mac Apple, I really do: no need to install spyware, fast, good bench for webdev but for the wrong reasons (if it works on Safari it works everywhere else). It's not the best looking browser, but I can get used to it.
But, every time I open it and my back and forward mouse buttons don't work, I get so infuriated that only thinking about Apple engineers being forced to use the Magic Mouse relieves the pain. Seriously, WTF? Just fix that and bake uBlock Origin in and I'm sold. Meanwhile, Firefox.
InfiniteQwert 1 days ago [-]
give me Split Tabs outside of Fullscreen you cowards. That's what is holding me back (and Safari occasionally losing all my tabs when I restart it)
jorisw 9 hours ago [-]
Menubar -> History -> Reopen Last Closed Tabs
tailrecursion 19 hours ago [-]
I've always liked and preferred Safari. The only reason I moved away was that as a Mac gets older, there comes a point where you can't update the OS, and that means Safari falls behind. Even that's not a problem for me, but web standards were always changing and after a while certain things won't work.
nitin7 1 days ago [-]
They should increase extension support and improve dev tools! And for UI, they can really take a leaf out of BCNY - Arc browser was good.
I setup two of them for my Google account but I made them both in Safari. Only one of them worked. What if both of them failed? I would have been fucked.
I re-made them on Chrome and they both worked.
rf15 10 hours ago [-]
> Safari is a more powerful and private browser than Chrome.
Sorry what was that about your compliance with web standards?
> Chrome slurps
Nintendon't level of advertising is never a serious contender.
> Can I use Safari on Windows or Android?
I guess here's your problem, Apple: You are clearly marketing to Apple-Users to stop using Chrome on your MacBooks. Whatever is going on here, this campaign makes you look afraid. Especially with a weak hand like that.
...So what you're saying is: we should switch to Firefox?
sent from my Android Emulator inside OpenSuse inside Windows
waynecochran 20 hours ago [-]
I had to quit using desktop Safari because it essentially quit working. The problem had something to do with icloud. Apple assumes everyone is using icloud I imagine and does not handle corner cases for folks with full icloud disks or improper setups. I have an paid icloud subscription now, but I haven't looked back.
jorisw 9 hours ago [-]
Vague.
I use Safari, and iCloud (or lack thereof) has never been a problem for me.
2muchcoffeeman 16 hours ago [-]
They should have brought back Hodgeman for the ad campagin
pcdoodle1 1 days ago [-]
Adding WebSerial even if it's locked in a Developer tools menu would make Safari a more serious tool for me.
mazaltime 17 hours ago [-]
I had never thought about it but why would i support Google?
shevy-java 11 hours ago [-]
We need alternatives, but I fail to see why we should
replace one company with another here.
Instead, we should treat browsers like water in that
everyone needs access to it at all times without any
top-down control or restrictions.
freakynit 1 days ago [-]
No thanks. We have seen multiple times now how it all starts with "good" stuff, then it gets more and more and more locked-down... to the point where you cannot even install apps on your own device, from wherever you want to.
No thanks.. I'd rather switch to Firefox, or even any other shitty browser, but not the one from any other gatekeeping monopoly.
jorisw 9 hours ago [-]
Apples to oranges.
They're promoting their browser as an alternative to Chrome or Firefox.
You're companing about walled gardens.
freakynit 8 hours ago [-]
Apples to apples actually. All the walled gardens of Apple had started with open gardens at first. They walled them gradually as they gained more control over market. This is no different.
We can already see it on IOS where no one is allowed to use any other browser engine than safari's own.. of course, the reasoning is always "security".
oh ty, I legitimately didn't know I usually hide extensions icons in safari
rocketvole 22 hours ago [-]
could also use wblock for custom filter lists
ssijak 1 days ago [-]
adguard
jakequist 19 hours ago [-]
I was hoping for a “I’m a Mac. I’m a PC”-level ad.
stychos 23 hours ago [-]
No problems Apple. How about Safari and keychain for Linux?
pipolo 1 days ago [-]
Safari's performance (both speed and power use) keep me on it vs. Chrome, but I do wish we could have some of the more power-user-friendly features. Chrome's omnibar history and bookmark suggestion algorithm is unparalleled, and I miss it.
microflash 19 hours ago [-]
Talk to me when I can set custom search engines, when developer tools become sane enough and when ‘localhost’ starts resolving.
emehex 1 days ago [-]
I would... if it <proper> had vertical tabs
nitin7 1 days ago [-]
Yeah. I'm typing this on my safari which shows both vertical tabs and the horizontal tabs - looks so weird. And I always end up clicking a tab and then typing away, and Safari starts switching me to tabs starting with whatever letter I type - very annoying.
estetlinus 1 days ago [-]
This is the only thing that matters, why does nobody get it right?
bearjaws 23 hours ago [-]
I am like one more Microsoft / Chrome update away from switching entire company to Firefox.
The absurdity of every week another AI feature, another way for data to leak to their services, another crash report.
They are exhausting and abusing their positions of power.
latexr 22 hours ago [-]
> switching entire company to Firefox.
They just announced something which might be relevant to you.
Here are some reasons I don't use Safari in place of Chrome for certain things:
- it doesn't like to serialize the state of tabs. Chrome is pretty good at somehow snapshotting the entire state of tabs to the point where it can be reconstructed after relaunch, even offline.
- webpage loading is sort of janky. Chrome will show the webpage streaming in live, but Safari will simply freeze in place until it's done. Maybe this is due to an Apple philosophy decision, but I don't prefer it.
- similarly to how Safari doesn't seem to serialize tab states, navigating forward or back usually needs to load the page from scratch, including resubmitting forms or whatever.
- speaking of forward and back navigation, I'm kinda annoyed that each time I use the trackpad to navigate history, I have to wait for the swipe animation to finish before I can interact with the webpage. I try to always use cmd+brackets instead now, because it's much faster.
- IIRC, it seems the newer macOS 27 betas caused Safari to develop an issue where after it's been open for long enough, certain types of videos will stop being able to play at all until the browser is quit and restarted. kind of annoying, combined with the lack of tab snapshotting, because I have to manually visit each tab to load it on each launch.
I still daily drive Safari and use it as my main browser. But I keep an instance of Chrome open for tabs that I never really close. And then I have an instance of Orion for spreadsheets. (I use spreadsheets to keep track of medication usage, sleep times and finances)
advisedwang 21 hours ago [-]
Why don't they just say "c'mon, get us even more than $20B per year please". That's really whats going on here.
Put Safari on my Android and Linux devices and I'll consider it
amelius 20 hours ago [-]
Fight back, e.g.:
Add a 1000ms delay to your website when the user agent is Safari.
Show popup to install Firefox.
Etc.
freetime2 20 hours ago [-]
Fight back by punishing your users?
amelius 20 hours ago [-]
Nudging them ... like companies do too. Except you're nudging them towards a better place.
codehorses 20 hours ago [-]
Brilliant way to not have any users. There has to be a better method. Maybe a little note explaining that your website really works best in Firefox.
waterTanuki 17 hours ago [-]
> Apple is kicking off a new campaign today to promote Safari’s benefits over Chrome. With a new “Switch to Safari” page on its website and a pair of new YouTube videos.
The irony of using a Google platform to promote ditching another Google platform lol.
verdverm 17 hours ago [-]
I switched to Vivaldi for privacy, but the amount of control and customization was an unexpected surprise! Long has it been since such user choice has been made so easy
secretsatan 22 hours ago [-]
I recently downgraded one of my macs so i could use some 32 bit audio peripherals. You can’t update safari separately from the os i found out, and most websites now just won’t render with that os and if they do, barely work. I installed firefox and that was fine.
OTH, i use safari on my other mac, it’s fine most of the time, but i also have have chrome installed as some websites are so buggy otherwise, linkedin is a particular culprit, it barely works on chrome too.
latexr 22 hours ago [-]
> You can’t update safari separately from the os i found out
I was on Sequoia all throughout Tahoe and still updated Safari to the 26.x versions. There might be a limit to how far back they let you do that, though.
secretsatan 22 hours ago [-]
It was to Mojave, and downgrading was a whole task in itself, apple really did not want me to do it.
FireBeyond 20 hours ago [-]
Oh yes. Start of this year...
I had an M1 MBP that I needed to re-pave with Monterey. Yes, it's end-of-support, but it's also only 4 years old. And runs on that Mac.
So, first step, I make a USB installer, and run it. Great. Reboots, and says "FYI, this is an unsupported OS. You can install a newer OS instead, or run Monterey in "Reduced Security" mode." That was fine for me.
"Installation of Reduced Security mode failed." Nothing else. Eventually my understanding of this was because the machine had been upgraded previously all the way to Tahoe, that somewhere along the line some firmware or something in the EFI had been upgraded and was too new for Monterey. No thanks to Apple. No info, debug logs, anything, just "Installation failed. Reboot?"
So what then?
Hmm, more research. "Do an IPSW image restore via DFU", i.e. pave it with a largely installed image. Could work, might have the same issue, but since I'm stuck right now, with a Mac I can't install anything on, a four year old $3,000 brick, why not?
Alright, I have a Mac Studio. I get the IPSW image, and Apple Configurator. Connect the two as per Apple's instructions and the MBP does indeed show up in Configurator as being "not booted, DFU mode".
Apple's instructions, "Drag the IPSW image onto the DFU 'box' for the target Mac". No. It doesn't light up like it's accepting a drag and drop, and indeed it doesn't. Nor does it accept a "restore..." or similar from the Configurator menu options. There's nothing in Configurator that seems to allow you to image the MBP. Again: no error, no instructions, just the error "bonk" noise.
So... off to ChatGPT, Reddit, etc., I go.
Much repeating of the same. However, ChatGPT pokes a little button. Near the very end of its answer, it says "Newer versions of macOS may have limitations on the age of the image they might restore. You may need a slightly older macOS to do this. Even an Intel MBP running Ventura could work."
As fortune has it, my fiance happens to still have her old i5 MBP with touchbar, and the latest version of Ventura... let's plug it in, let it catch a little charge and boot...
Alright, I need Configurator on this laptop.
No soup for you, says the App Store, "You need macOS Sequoia to install Configurator".
Back off to Reddit, where I find someone who has helpfully zipped up an older version of Configurator that runs on Ventura, and in the end, I'm able to re-pave via IPSW.
But Apple's docs absolutely are incorrect/incomplete about Configurator, and DFU restores.
"You can use Restore... in the Configurator menu to select the software image". No, you can't, even leaving aside the "old/unsupported". It actually means restoring from a "backup" (presumably Time Machine, though it doesn't specify) and you can't select any file or image.
"Drag the image onto DFU". Doesn't work in that situation, no error, no "hey, you're doing the right thing but I can't do this", just acting like a fool trying to drag the image onto DFU only to have it bounce off.
Like I said, I didn't have DFU port issues, but Apple's docs on how to make this happen were either non-existent, or incorrect about the process, or flat out told me I couldn't do it. But mostly non-existent and overly simplistic covering the most basic scenarios only - which I get for general support, but by the time you are "connect to a second mac in DFU mode and run Configurator" in their own words, we're way beyond simplistic "you can just install a newer macOS" type "instructions".
unified101 1 days ago [-]
Bullshit.
First stop blocking iOS pwas from simply installing to the home screen, and don't clear out data in 7 days. Then we'll talk about your browser being better.
bensyverson 1 days ago [-]
This is a bit of a chicken and egg, but the number of iOS users who have saved a web app or PWA to their home screen is probably in the single-digits worldwide. Half-joking.
People are just not aware that this is a thing, and when they learn it's a thing, they don't want to do it.
FireBeyond 18 hours ago [-]
Funnily enough, I just found one and the experience is ... "not good". Sessionize, which the Linux Foundation is using for conferences like AGNTcon.
brazukadev 21 hours ago [-]
Of course they are not aware it is a thing, it doesn't work. Every dev that tried to support it got burnt.
sdellis 3 hours ago [-]
It doesn't work because Apple prevented it from working because it threatened to shrink revenue from their app store. And that's why there are so few PWA apps and users -- who wants to develop something that they know will be broken? Yes, a lot of devs got burnt and now resent Apple for what they pulled.
sdellis 1 days ago [-]
100% this. And in case you missed the Scooby Doo episode... Chrome on mobile iOS is just Safari in a ski mask!
bensyverson 1 days ago [-]
Nearly every browser on the market and most desktop application are just Chrome in a ski mask. Safari and Firefox are the tiny holdouts that prevent web technology from being 100% controlled by Google.
mmmlinux 1 days ago [-]
Most other browsers on the market are just chrome in a ski mask. So what's your point?
offline_micro 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bibimsz 17 hours ago [-]
it's just not as good as Chrome
mikelitoris 14 hours ago [-]
They forgot to mention they vibecoded too much in their latest release and it is of dogshit quality (frezes constantly, hide the top bar doesn’t work properly etc)
gigatexal 20 hours ago [-]
too much stuff works better in chrome than in safari ... it's just ie6 but far, far better. is it great? am i being tracked on every keystroke? probably, but i want the stuff i do on teh web to work idc really.
ur-whale 1 days ago [-]
List of reasons to ditch chrome is very, very, very long, first among which it is becoming the prime enshitification tool for the internet.
But Safari is not the solution until they make it fully (FULLY) open-source, because all Apple trying to do is replace the king of enshitification hill by their own.
firefox ftw
j45 1 days ago [-]
On iPhone, for the longest time, every browser has been forced to be Safari's engine underneath. Firefox, Chrome, etc are all forced to run Safari underneath.
This has caused many issues because Apple controls what can run in a web browser and that web browser (safari) is in no way up to date, or worse, selectively implements standards. I'm writing this in the hopes that it will publicly improve.
Since Safari is forced at an OS level on all Apple's iOS and iPadOS users, that's a place to start when it comes to choice.
On MacOS, Safari is actually pretty interesting - it can be much more efficient with battery usage than other browsers and unsurprisingly well integrated. It's nice to use on MacOS because there is choice.
I understand there maybe concerns about security, but also will come out is likely that safari enjoys some OS level integrations that other browsers probably won't be welcome to, similar to the Internet Explorer/Edge days.
The switch to safari is likely tied to something else, given Apple's growing advertising revenue. Meaning, move away from one advertisement engine (Chrome), and move to another (Safari).
bossyTeacher 1 days ago [-]
Given the state of affairs, anything and anyone pulling people away from Chrome is a good as long as they not more invasive than Chrome. 1 big bad actor is worse than multiple smaller bad actors imo.
crossroadsguy 16 hours ago [-]
These kind of campaigns are just – find suckers who are willing to be our suckers. That too after they shtudown Safari for Windows and were never on Linux to begin with. And no, it's not fucking snappiest on the Mac either – even with all the special treatment it gets from the macOS (on iOS – there's literally no other option anyway, every browser essentially have to be Safari with none of the privileges Safari has). I think this company has become most the pathetic it can be. Utilised its full potential.
Though what stuck with me from that page is why the fuck they would have default browser setting inside something like "Desktop & Dock" (that combo!). That is just intellectually challenged UX/UI design.
And it seems they have fired everyone from their propaganda (or marketing?) dept.
tl;dr: Is Safari better than Chrome? Yes. How? Because this webpage is live.
keyle 14 hours ago [-]
Apple screwed the pooch too, they were the first one to prevent blocking content before downloading it if I recall. Then Chrome did the same thing. I'm not sure what their reasoning was publicly, but it was surely lying.
A browser should allow you to not download content by URL masks, and not silently load it and hide it. This is advertising/tracker shenanigans and frankly horrid tech.
TingPing 14 hours ago [-]
There is some fundamental misunderstanding here because content blockers can block requests by url.
keyle 11 hours ago [-]
Interesting. Tell me what's the difference with content blockers before and now? Maybe I am. But the content blockers in the past had more control on what to block.
TingPing 4 hours ago [-]
I think what you are discussing is the move to only supporting declarative block lists. Long ago in Safari, and until very recently in Chrome, you could have JavaScript run to check and modify/block requests. The modern block lists still function the same (preventing a Request from ever being sent) just without dynamic code in the loop.
piro0919 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
angvp 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
surgical_fire 1 days ago [-]
I may hate Chrome in particular and Google in general with every atom of my being, but I would rather be forced to use IE6 than open fucking Safari.
tamimio 1 days ago [-]
Seriously, if you use anything besides firefox and ubo, I don’t even know what to say.
bensyverson 1 days ago [-]
Safari is faster, uses less RAM and is more power-efficient. But people love leaving 2000 tabs open, and I guess Chrome's UX is better for that. I don't think people realize that you can go back to a website after you've visited. It's not strictly necessary to leave the tab open for the rest of your life.
hanlec 23 hours ago [-]
> Safari is faster, uses less RAM and is more power-efficient.
I am really curious about data proving these.
I am not aware of any benchmarks proving or disproving.
bensyverson 20 hours ago [-]
People benchmark it from time to time [0]. It makes sense though—Apple has poured resources into making the Safari engine battery efficient on their phones, and the macOS version is a beneficiary.
> I don't think people realize that you can go back to a website after you've visited.
This is about as wrong as you can possibly get.
This would be true in a stateless world (assuming you can remember the site you want to visit).
Which the web hasn't been since a very long time.
bensyverson 1 days ago [-]
Can you give me a concrete example? I close windows and tabs with ruthless abandon.
Unless you have a web app which is entirely local and doesn't save its state to local storage, what could you possibly be doing that requires a tab to remain in residence?
aristofun 18 hours ago [-]
Native Macos apps (mail, safari) are awesome… by the standards of 90s (when they were probably first designed).
I doubt people developing safari and mail app are actually using them outside of work.
Apple keeps holding a “hardware company” flag, despite some occasional wins.
Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking. Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution.
Now these days the only thing keeping me tied to chrome is finger muscle memory. The death of manifest v2 is the 2nd to last nail.
Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.
The problem is I use safari on iOS. Generally not a bad browser. Equivalent and superior to Chrome is certain aspects. I don't really need to run Chrome on my phone. Safari is good enough. However... for a local build only I use maybe it's possible.
As one would expect of a browser made by the world's largest advertising corporation.
Currently I am feeling this too but only for one site, GitHub. Which is where is spend most time during the day...
Quite sad, I don't know if it's GitHub's fault or not but Firefox needs to figure out what's going wrong here soon or people like me may be literally forced to Chromium.
But Chrome won the vast bulk of its market share not because it was technically better in every way, but because they spent much more on marketing at the exact time IE entered terminal decline.
That's some revisionist lies. Slow, crashy, a memory pig with a big leak problem, stuck on a single process architecture. It was none of fast or modern. Whether it was extremely nice to use is debatable, but lots of people rapidly voted by switching.
It very regularly crashed and took down the entire process.
It's fine to lament the Chrome monoculture, but we misdiagnosis it if we don't remember the seeds were sown via Mozilla's incompetence. They made it crystal clear they couldn't and wouldn't do better, and the next 5 or more years made that inarguable.
Also had safari 5(?) on windows because I liked seeing a progress bar for page load. Which opera 12 also had.
Maybe I just like progress bars.
steady on, youngster
Why hadn't you moved on to Firefox?
I remember developing web pages with the purpose of ensuring they would work in both, so Phoenix was my main driver, but whenever anything was “done” the real work started of also getting it to work in IE, it was always a monumental effort. Sites with buttons for “go here for pheonix/go here for ie” where common. My friends who worked in the windows ecosystem mostly saw Phoenix as some “crazy hipster trend” and didn’t have a care as to if anything they made worked in it or not.
It's not like Firefox wasn't a "viable" browser at the time. It was quite mainstream.
due to IE not being a standards compliant browser.
As others noted, Firefox was around for a long time before Chrome and was not called Phoenix all that time, so it sort of seems like you looked at a piece of technology a month after launch, didn't like it, and refused to took at it again for 10 years? I mean that right there is at the level of moral complaints, not just performance or rendering.
Also being “technically most standard compliant” doesn’t mean anything to the average user who’s just angry that their browser isn’t showing their MySpace page correctly.
Calm down. Not every bit of real perspective on software short of “Firefox is perfect” is an existential criticism of it existing.
Yes, but unless you wanted to exclude >90% of users, you could still not ignore it...
Never fell for the Chrome trap.
This is eerily similar to how I feel about using Firefox today. Not that I am sticking it to the man - I just want there to be diversity in the market and not have every viable option be a way for a megacorp to have presence on my computers.
In any case, nobody got to quit dealing with the misery of IE6 until some YouTube engineers did a little caper[1] that gave everyone else an excuse that their big brain business bosses would finally listen to.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#/media/File:Brows...
[1] https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
And things went downhill from there...
Rust compile times are an issue for agent throughput.
C# can approach Rust speeds with some effort, but generally has faster compile times and is less verbose.
Also good context for why the launch of Chrome was such a big deal.
A good context for why the market dominance of Chrome is such a big deal.
So basically not very old. Also Firefox existed long before and had pretty significant marketshare. In some countries it was well above 50%.
You wouldn't be worried about vulnerabilities that the vibe coded browser could produce? I use plenty of LLM generated code, but a browser wouldn't be something I'd try on the Web.
It's pretty much the exact opposite of security through obscurity.
Mi was a web dev then too, forced to develop for ie6.
At the time I remember asking why is google making a browser? How do they make money, and in the long term will their browser work for my best interests, or theirs?
So that’s why I’ve always used Firefox.
I think you're misremembering or you didn't try Safari at the time. The first version of Chrome was not very different from Safari which it was just a shell of anyway.
V8 kept getting even faster, including adding faster RegExps, which pushed the other browsers to speed up their JS too. Firefox is now using that RegExp implementation too, even if they're not using V8.
WebKit was itself a fork of the KHTML browser engine. And just like WebKit diverged from KHTML, Chrome diverged from WebKit.
The main reason I stuck with Chrome was the tab isolation. WebKit was super crashy back then, with Safari crashing several times a day just browsing the web. In Chrome only one tab would crash instead of the whole browser. This was one of the original selling points in addition to performance.
I switched back to Safari when I got my first Retina MacBook Pro, since Chrome had terrible performance in HiDPI for the first two years of retina Macs.
I mean, helium exists. https://github.com/imputnet/helium
Yeah. I think Google underestimated how many people they pissed off here. There is a reason I and many other think that Google has to be disbanded.
Either way welcome to the resistance!
I do get it. Chrome has the majority of users, so it’s easier to just develop and test on Chrome and know you’ve covered most of your users.
But isn’t that just pushing us towards a Chrome monopoly? Safari holding back some web features is annoying, sure, but having Chrome decide what the web should support and everyone else having to follow doesn’t sound much better to me.
As soon as Apple is forced to allow Chrome on iOS, I won’t even have that opt-out available to me. If you want to use Google, they have a whole mobile OS you can use. Why take away my choice as a consumer that prefers Safari? And Apple's on the device they build and sell? Not to mention all the security flaws that would entail...
i think as developers it's easy to forget that, and just think about our own difficulties having to maintain IE compatibility. but that was the post-IE transition era, not really having to do with the "IE problem" of being forced to use IE for certain sites as with Chrome today. At least IE back then wasn't spyware like Chrome is today.
Those are quite the mental gymnastics you're doing here. You know, you could just choose not to install Chrome, right?
>If you want to use Google, they have a whole mobile OS you can use.
If someone bought an i-device, they don't get to choose, Safari is forced on them.
>Why take away my choice as a consumer that prefers Safari?
Calm down, nobody is taking away your choice by allowing Chrome to run its own browser engine on iOS. You're totally delusional and making shit up that would never happen.
Apple is the only one that's forcing you to do anything. They are the ones that took away your ability to choose. You seriously sound totally brainwashed.
Maybe Apple shouldn't hold back web standards to force people to install native apps where Apple can extract 30% of all purchases from the apps.
Personally, I don’t care about most of those Chrome specific features. I use Safari because it’s fast and battery efficient. The fact that it’s not made by a company whose main business is advertising is a nice bonus.
Sure, Apple has an advertising business too, but it’s nowhere near the scale of Google’s.
Additional note those are also the same people pushing Electron garbage, Chrome in a box.
However, previously you got an exemption on the 7 day TTL on Web Storage, by being installed as a PWA. This must have been too generous. I guess they figured that if you combine lack of stable local storage, with no support for the Background Synchronization API, nobody should be able to implement anything of value on top of these APIs.
And just in case this isn't enough, let's just hide the install option even deeper than before. On iOS the path is now something along the lines of
1. Tap site's domain name 2. Meatballs menu 3. Share 4. More (Meatballs again) 5. Scroll until you find "Add to Home Screen" 6. Leave "Open as Web App" switched on 7. Add (upper right corner)
There is no obvious install prompt, and no clear browser level affordance. Nothing in the flow even tells you if PWA functionality is supported by the website. You might end up with just a weird shortcut that opens a URL full screen.
Safari has the most obscene monopoly of any browser ever. IE 6 came pre-installed on windows machines, but you could always install Mosaic or such.
Google Chromebooks come with Chrome as the only default browser, but you can still run Firefox on Chromebooks just fine (even in two different ways, the supported android app version, and the semi-supported linux terminal + launching firefox that way).
Heck, iOS's monopolistic behavior is so bad that multiple regions (the EU + Japan) have already ruled against their behavior, though in reality Apple has complied in a way that makes it impossible to actually make a second browser engine for iOS still (going against the spirit of the law, but the courts haven't caught up to them yet).
Safari is also an awful browser in that it requires someone to buy an expensive machine to see if their site works on it.
I can run a windows trial copy in a VM to see if my site works in IE, I can run Chrome or Firefox on linux to verify if my site works in them. I can install a free android emulator on any common OS to see that my site renders right in those.
But Apple doesn't give me a legal way to freely run an iOS simulator nor even a macOS VM on my linux machine, I have to pay money, to buy their hardware to see if my site will work on Safari.
And even worse, Safari is the browser with the largest number of rendering bugs and quirks currently, while also having a huge number of users (since iOS users can't install another browser), so any web developers are basically forced to shell out for apple hardware.
Remember, you are a web developer, not a chrome platform developer. Don’t be complicit in Google’s slow-moving coup.
The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform. Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
Wild how low the bar has gotten. The web would be so much better if there were ~10 browsers, each with around 10% market share. Web sites would have to suck it up and put some effort into browser testing and compatibility. And stop relying on features of a single browser. I remember writing software that had to work on over a dozen platforms. But developers today can’t manage to support more than one browser?
If your website doesn't work on one browser, you probably need to raise a bug report for that browser rather than change your site.
This is a wild statement. For an individual user, what is the point of browser diversity if you are locked into your browser by OS? A weird number of people here are okay with this particular example of anti-consumer behavior simply because it offsets the chrome monopoly. That's not a healthy web, that's competing layers of dysfunction.
If diversity fails to occur naturally, some amount of forced diversity helps to keep the ecosystem healthy.
Though an interesting consequence is that allowing iOS users to install firefox but not chrome would be a strict improvement over the current situation.
There's no reason for Safari to have a sub-par experience except for the laziness of some web developers.
How about a browser with a captive userbase that has less incentive to stay up to date with web standards?
Your argument is that we should expect developers to target/test their app on many different browsers where any random CSS property behaves differently. They will have to buy a device just for this purpose. Because it is obviously developers who should have to pick up the slack here, not Apple.
Safari is a better browser because it doesn’t support them.
> Safari is a better browser because it doesn’t support them.
It has supported them since iOS 16.4. The issue is they made enabling them so high friction for users that you're better off publishing a WebView wrapper to the App Store instead. More work for app devs, worse experience for users, but great for Apple because it's still on the App Store.
However, if Apple allowed different browser engines, eventually no one would be able to choose anything but Chrome regardless of what phone they bought.
To me, chromium is the kernel and the browsers are the distro. We do like that there is a shared kernel in linux, yes?
I acknowledge that this is reductionist, as there exists another lack of diversity for consumer operating systems, in there really only being Windows and Mac / iOS and Android.
And the Linux kernel isn't a good analogy because the web is a standard, not an implementation. In that sense it's more akin to UNIX, or IP-based networking.
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/chromium/contri...
Still, there is a difference between contribution and control, which I hope and dream can and will change.
https://www.learninternetgrow.com/who-controls-chromium/
I will add that I appreciate your response, generally, but especially the missing hyperbole. This civil discourse is very preferable.
Linux is GPLv2, it has many outside contributors, it was built from scratch, and it has Linus as a neutral party as the final decider in terms of the direction of the project and what gets included.
Chromium is a mix of LGPL, BSD, and other licenses depending on the component. Chromium was originally forked from WebKit; it isn’t a from scratch project. Google decides what changes get merged to Chromium.
Lack of browser diversity is bad because it puts too much control in the hands of the only browser vendor.
Lack of browser choice is bad because it puts too much control in the hands of whatever browser vendor they use.
We need both for a healthy web.
There's multiple issues with Safari and people complaining aren't "lazy". To start with it's a much buggier browser than Firefox or Chrome. Sure if you go on caniuse.com, almost everything is marked as supported but with Safari in reality it's always ""supported"" and you will deal with non-sense bugs, most of the features are sort of 95% there and they stopped development claiming it's good enough. They also have very poor QA and regressions happen often.
Next, Safari is the last non-evergreen browser, it's still tied to the OS and thus lags behind in updates.
And to finish with, Safari is also only available on Apple devices (harder to test with) and tied to a specific OS version (how are you officially even supposed to test the bugs on version X without paying a third party company? I don't know).
I'm not against Safari but Apple really needs to put some money to make it more modern if they want to actually compete with Firefox or Chrome without their OS lock-in.
This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding, much like how many think standards groups (e.g. W3C) decide how the browsers works.
(Standards groups can invent the best feature ever for the Web ... and it won't matter in the slightest if browser makers don't adopt it. ALL STANDARDS ARE SET BY BROWSER MAKERS ... the standards bodies are just the mechanism they use to do it.)
Likewise, the browser a web developer user uses is already set for them. EVERY web dev (except those at companies big enough to care about the "long tail" of browsers) uses one browser: the most popular one.
It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"
No, it doesn't. I wasn't talking about web standards bodies. I'm talking about the practical reality of the web as a platform that is resilient against slight differences between browsers. Such resilience can only come from developers who understand that their job is to target the web and not just Chrome.
It is you who misunderstands:
> It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"
You are literally arguing for the web to become the Chrome Platform for the convenience of web developers. Sure we can have other browsers, so long as they're perfectly compatible with Chrome's quirks. This is precisely what it means for the web to be the Chrome Platform, not the open web. We've already reached the point where it's assumed that Chrome is perfect and anything that deviates from Chrome is someone else's bug. It's sad.
A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.
Choice is what the individual (supposedly) has. Diversity is what actually exists across an ecosystem. iOS is the last bastion of browser diversity, because despite all this supposed "choice", it's pretty much all Chrome everywhere else.
https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser
Real Gecko on iOS
This isn't browser diversity, iOS is a browser monoculture, it's all Safari under the hood. How can you not understand this??
The only lie being told in all of this is the one Apple tells when you install Firefox on an iOS device. It's not Firefox you're installing, it's Safari. Every browser on iOS is Safari - you have no choice at all.
>The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.
Then put your money where your mouth is. If Safari can compete then let other browser engines on iOS. If it can't then it deserves to die. Artificially inflating it by forcing on iOS isn't the utopia you think it is.
>A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.
Apple iOS is a monocoulture - every browser is Safari whether you want it or not.
There's no argument you can make to escape the fact that Apple is helping nobody but Apple by forcing Safari on iOS.
Says who? I certainly don't agree with that statement, the "web as an open platform" was unrecognizable when proprietary clients were the norm.
(And before you say it, consumers can choose Android, where 99.9% of people use Chrome, but apparently that's okay because they "chose" it.)
Consumers choosing Android isn't a choice of which browser to use, it's choosing which operating system to use. That doesn't sound like you care that consumers get to choose which browser they use, that's letting Apple choose which browser that Apple consumers use then telling them they can choose a different operating system instead.
WebKit is a second-class citizen on the web, and we can argue about why that is, but nobody can sincerely deny it. Apple's strategy has been dead in the water for over a decade. iOS lost.
Meanwhile we have people bitching and moaning and meanwhile, as a Firefox user, I go to Safari when I encounter a website that doesn't work in Firefox. Because at the end of the day, developers are forced to test in Safari, and that is a Good Thing. No developer is forced to test in Firefox.
The existence of the "Switch to Safari" campaign is a clear rejection that Safari is competing - it's not, it's the laughing stock of web browsers in 2026, it holds the same place that IE6 did in the early 2000s.
>Because at the end of the day, developers are forced to test in Safari,
I'm not forced to test in Safari, because I don't have money for an iOS device. So Apple users can continue to suffer with whatever browser they use on their i-device. I really don't care, and Apple has done this - not me, because they offer no way but purchasing their hardware to test their wonky browser engine.
And yes, you can emulate an android device on MacOS, so don't bother trying that again. You don't need to purchase an android device to test on android.
On macOS, Google plays with a lot of dark patterns to get people to install Chrome. I can't count the number of times I've visited my sister or parents and seen Chrome on their Mac, and their explanation is "because Google told me I needed it."
That's not choice either.
It sounds like your family is using Chrome because it's more convenient. It's 2026, we can't blame anyone given what Safari spent the past decade doing. Apple does not provide convenient Safari sync for Windows and Android devices, which comprise the majority of smart devices sold. They don't support the normie extensions that people use on Firefox and Chrome. Safari lags behind Chrome in features, WebKit lags behind Blink in cross-platform support, and Apple doesn't allow Safari forks to boost their market share. Apple draws very clear and arbitrary lines in the sand, and then redrafts them once they finally change their mind about PWAs or notification support. By the time it reaches Safari, your parents have been using the feature in Chrome for 8 months.
We may have to agree to disagree. Apple's incessant marketing for their own inferior, ad-ridden packin software is part of why I left macOS to begin with. It's infantilizing to be told that I can't be trusted to make a smart decision, when Apple's own suggestion is a half baked, self-serving alternative. I empathize with Mac users that ignore Safari because that's exactly what I did on my Mac, too. I'd have been using Chrome if Firefox wasn't an option. And I still would, because WebKit is a dog's dinner on my OS.
If you think my mother or sister have the faintest idea what a web browser is, or how one might be better than another, then you haven't met my mother or sister. To suggest that they made any kind of informed choice is absurd. They were influenced by marketing, plain and simple.
Personally, I'd be fascinated to see an in-depth study showing what percentage of web users chose their browser based on true/objective criteria, as opposed to marketing, brand preference, herd mentality, or wrong assumptions. Is exposing someone to marketing really what we mean by choice?
It's worth remembering that choice isn't necessarily the pure good we intuitively believe it to be. Western consumers have an extraordinary choice of food, yet that hasn't necessarily translated into healthier diets. This is especially problematic when the choices themselves are shaped by corporations whose interests aren't well aligned with the consumer's.
Apple is a corporation too, and they have their own (quite sizable) financial interest in gimping the web as an alternative to native app distribution. Apple used to recognize this, and prioritized interoperability with OpenGL and OpenCL as a hedge against the web becoming the only cross-platform API that the Mac supported. The Apple of today has abandoned those interests and lost all pretenses of humility. They are equally as mask-off as Google or Microsoft is, pushing Metal and WebKit just as shamelessly as Microsoft crams the corpse of DirectX into things. This isn't a charity project, it is another way for Apple to control iOS software distribution, their primary service cash cow, Tim Cook's pride and joy. Apple is happy to give Google money for their Apple Intelligence integration, this isn't a grudge that they take seriously.
Apple could have supported KHTML upstream, and killed Blink in the cradle. They could have made Safari a billion-dollar cross-platform product, and won. They made this horrible bed, and now they want to users to moralize Google's victory. Why would anyone, knowledgeable or naive, insult themselves by standing with Apple here?
It's obvious Apple isn't doing this to "protect the open web" because if that was true, they wouldn't have stopped developing Safari for Windows.
Maybe you don't understand that I have to spend several hundred dollars for the privilege to debug Safari's shitty bugs. That's FUCKED UP. It isn't "being lazy". I shouldn't have to spend money so I can cater to a shitty browser. And Apple does some weird-ass things with their browser that make it wonky, and you can't debug some things without an apple device. Touch events are one particular iffy thing Apple does differently, because "think different" apparently means "we do whatever the fuck we want so pay us to debug things that shouldn't need debugging".
>Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
Give me $500 to buy an Apple device and I'll fix things so it works for the shitty browser iOS users are forced to use. It has not a single fucking thing to do with "being lazy", and you're a shitty person for suggesting that's how this works.
If the cost really is an issue for you, I'm sure you know that you aren't forced to pay $500 to Apple. You can easily find hand-me-down Apple devices that still runs a current operating system for a pittance -- or free if you have a network of friends or family. No need to pay Apple anything.
And I can't even buy only an iOS device, because the iOS device has to connect to a laptop/desktop version of Safari to use its debugger - so I need to purchase two Apple devices!, just to debug the mobile device.
I wouldn't be complaining if I could install the iOS simulator on any other platform - but even on iOS the iOS simulator sucks badly, and it only works on MacOS. It doesn't "simulate" touch events correctly, as they function differently on a real iOS device.
Nobody says you need to pay Apple anything. Apple devices can be incredibly cheap on the second-hand market -- potentially free if you have friends or family. An older Mac and an iPhone 11 are all you really need. If that is still too much for you, then what can I say? I don't see Microsoft giving you a Windows PC or Google giving you an Android device for free.
I suppose you can quit your job and become a chef, but you'll still have to buy your own set of knives and an apron.
But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.
I can’t make it website owners problem that their site doesn’t work on non-Google browser. Apple can.
Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.
(I still remember when communities like Hacker News were screaming and howling at Apple for daring to rid the web of Adobe Flash, a corporate-owned proprietary monoculture cluster-f**k of security vulnerabilities. The virtue of Apple's influence on the web is painfully obvious in hindsight.)
You absolutely can, and we absolutely have. You believe this because anti-trust action was derided as anti-growth in the latter quarter of the 20th century, by people who knew exactly what they were doing (see also: banking deregulation).
It's one of the major reasons we're stuck with such horrendous corporate and individual wealth inequality today.
Google should never have been allowed to buy DoubleClick, ship a browser, or ship general-purpose client operating systems.
For all the claims about security problems - and there were many and the complaints were valid - people seem a bit too willing to overlook the much greater attack surface of modern browsers that still incorporate similar flexibility and functionality but through other protocols and native Web standards now instead. For better or worse today's "evergreen" browsers roll out new functionality more quickly than before but their most important innovation was introducing frequent automatic security updates to a general non-technical audience at a time when that certainly wasn't the default for most desktop software. Take a look at how many significant security issues get fixed in any of the major browser on each update cycle and you can see that even today this is still far from a solved problem.
No.
People need to stop using Chrome and Chromium based browsers and use browsers based on implementations of the web standards that are out of Google's control.
Firefox on Android supports the full version of uBlock Origin.
Chrome on Android doesn't support it.
Then do that FIRST (or at the same time). Don't give us, yet AGAIN, the tired bs song and dance about how you'll make things worse first and then totally someday address the other part properly, and oops what a surprise that turns out to be too hard nevermind.
>But forcing Safari for every Apple owner is certainly not the solution.
Objectively it is a solution though. Because it's been done, and it's been more effective than nothing, while meanwhile nothing has happened from a legal or political angles. If a better solution can be done down the road great, but a hack dealing with a problem non-optimally can absolutely be better then just having the problem completely unaddressed. And count me skeptical that any government is going to have the will or capability to actually address what a lot of us already hate about not just the Chrome monopoly but that entire approach (I don't in fact want my web browser to be a full lowest common denominator operating system with low level hardware access thanks). I dislike much of what Apple does now but I'm glad their selfish interests have happened not to align that way either. Until monopoly lock-in gets better addressed, one of the main ways to push back is via another monopoly lock-in that has different incentives.
Then maybe Apple should invest a fraction of their fortune on making Safari better. Competition is good. Apple doesn't care about competing because they have a monopoly. If they were forced to actually improve WebKit and Safari, maybe people would choose to use it.
It's my device. I should be able to whatever the hell I want with it.
This argument is terrible, we're lucky the one other competitor, for now, allows installing what you want or people like you would argue everything is fine.
Your argument ... isn't one.
When Chrome was released, Firefox was four years old and had already gained 33% market share with momentum on its side, mostly through word of mouth. Chrome was a bit better in some respects, a bit worse in others, but it had the Google marketing juggernaut allowing its market share to skyrocket.
And giving Apple a monopoly is a better idea?
>Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Forcing users to use the Safari browser engine when they install Firefox or anything else is not the way to protect anyone from anything. It's abusive in its own way. And Apple is not going to save anyone from Google. People are still using Google services through Safari, because they are services Apple either sucks at or doesn't offer.
>Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.
So you're fine giving over all control to Apple. Apple already has way too much control. Being on the W3C board, they use their power to block any browser API that could make web browsers more capable, which would cut into their native app mafia racket where they charge 30% of any purchase done through an app. They don't offer any alternatives, or any changes - they just squash anything they see as competitive to native apps. That's how fucked up they are. They are literally holding back progress for no good reason - not security, not for privacy, it's purely for their own greed.
Safari simply sucks. If WebKit was any good, then Apple wouldn't have to worry about allowing third-party engines onto iOS. The situation on Mac tells us everything we need to know.
Easy. Just legislate that the only browser allowed on iPhones is Firefox. That way, Chrome can't monopolize the web, and iPhone users get to have a decent browser.
I remember a long time ago they used to make a Windows version of Safari you could download and install, but at some point they stopped.
Either way, if someone is still manually testing their website instead of using a standard automated testing system you're probably not really in a league where this matters anyway.. and if they are, you probably have a device farm already.
Not sure where the "my thing is so important, I have to test it on a real device, but I can't pay for it" niche is.
Damn thats pretty evil, I just looked it up. For those curious, Apple forces you to release your EU app with a different browser engine specifically for European users as a completely separate app, meaning you would have Facebook World edition with WebKit, and Facebook EU Edition with whatever new engine they want. Basically not worth the hassle to maintain two separate apps.
And it gets worse. Developers have reported limitations on testing, restrictive contractual terms, and uncertainty surrounding updates when users travel outside the EU.
Not even Google has managed to navigate this gauntlet. Our EU leaders are asleep at the wheel.
Mosaic was a fair bit earlier, but yeah, I ran Netscape 4 until Mozilla M18. Never used IE as my main browser in many years of Windows use.
EDIT: I guess Netscape 4 and Mozilla M18 were both pre-IE6, too, but still Mozilla/Firefox for the IE6 era.
Try GNOME Web (Epiphany). It's webkit based, keeps up with Safari, doesn't disable access to the Safari devtools, and it sends the exact same user agent string. Should be essentially bug-for-bug compatible. It's otherwise an anemic browser, but you don't need much for testing.
- https://github.com/guacforlife/ReynardDefault
- https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser
Primarily, incognito mode is difficult to access. Android allows a shortcut to be dropped to start in this mode.
Cut and paste is also awkward and uncomfortable in Safari compared to Android.
My first move on iOS is to install Firefox Focus, to get Safari's history under control.
Apple's Safari enforcement is the only reason Chrome hasn't completely taken over.
I want to use Screen Studio, but it is a MacOS only app (and I'm on Windows). Is that Apple's fault?
Diversity is not an intrinsic good. It only is good inasmuch as it enables other things which are good. If the browser diversity we have (limited though it is) isn't actually providing choice to consumers, I don't see how it provides any value even if we do preserve it.
Once real Chromium is available on iPhones, there will be a monopoly.
Your Linux download is right there.
Apple is all about control.
... the next time you launch Safari, it will say that the default browser has been changed, "Did you mean to do that?" and of the two options presented ("Keep using Chrome" or "Switch back to Safari") the Safari option will be the default.
Just checked in the App Store, I can install Firefox, Opera, Brave, and many many other browsers on my iPhone.
TLDR
Apple since mid 2024 was forced by EU and Japan to allow other engines.
There are hurdles but the path is open.
Both Chrome / Blink and Firefox / Gecko have made prototypes but haven’t moved past that.
It seems that there is no money or will to see it through.
So it’s not all “Apple bad doesn’t allow it”
No, mate. You need to provide details. The onus is on you to support your claim.
How is the iOS engine requirement considered a monopoly?
Bad choice of term!
https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_24.html
Not how it works. You define a relevant market, and the market of iPhone users (which a stable market, there are barriers to just switching to android tomorrow) can be used for evaluation.
Android’s global marketshare is 70% of mobile so you would have to declare a monopoly as “things I can run on an iPhone” as your position for that to work
There is plenty of competition and choice to iOS, you just won’t find that on Apple hardware for reasons that have held for three decades
Yes, that's pretty much it. A similar concern applies to Google and Android.
https://grapheneos.org/
Also, I'm curious... can you really install an OS besides Android on a Pixel, etc? AFAIK it's just different distros of Android, it's not like you could install BSD or something, right?
Painting Apple and Android devices with the same brush in this particular regard doesn't make a lot of sense.
When Ford sells me an F150 I don’t cry about them having a monopoly on their Sync platform. That’s not now monopolies work
And what about the other mobile platform (singular)? That one’s also making it harder and harder to sideload apps.
Apple has neither a monopoly on phones nor on app marketplaces.
Maybe monopoly is not the right legal category, and maybe what they are doing is perfectly legal and always will be, but I don't think the fundamental point can be argued away with analogies like these.
Still not any kind of monopoly
Are you just being pedantic about the definition of monopoly or did you fail to understand the problem as it was explained.
Do you use ios? If so do you like using broken websites? Do you have no desire for things to function as intended?
Id imagine its very annoying as a developer to have your things broken for no reason other than pure corporate greed.
If you do use ios then you probably enjoy paying more for an inferior product so ig this is more of a feature than a bug.
...test on more than one browser platform? Seriously? Is this how lazy the industry has become? Is this how far we've fallen?
Having websites say "if it doesn't work, install Chrome" is not choice.
For example, there's a monopoly on garbage service where I live, but he company with the monopoly has basically 0% of the world market.
I just don't think the 30% of the global market number is relevant to anything in terms of arguing if somebody has a monopoly. Are there even any countries who use a definition of "monopoly" that uses global marketshare to determine if there's a monopoly? Surely those definitions all look at marketshare within some specific region?
I imagine trying to effectively use (or market) a competing product in a region with 93%+ marketshare is a painful experience, regardless of whether the global marketshare is more balanced.
Using global marketshare hides details like that. Apple could have 100% of the market in China and India, and Android could have 100% of the marketshare in the rest of the world. This would put, worldwide, Apple at about 35% and Android at about 65%. I would argue there are clearly monopolies in that case, though, even if the worldwide numbers are 65 and 35.
Abusing a monopoly is illegal. Alphabet and Apple are both unquestionably monopoly businesses, and make incredible year-over-year revenue through market-damaging services like AdSense and the App Store. If they are allowed to continue, then other Fortune 500 businesses will copy their decisions, thereby destroying genuine market value that they provide in exchange for safer, more exploitative revenue streams.
In the case of AdSense and Apple's App Store both, I think that any fair FTC investigation would conclude they are shakedown services that harm the greater economy.
Fat lot of good that logic would do Microsoft when they were deliberately gimping competitors.
In addition, I think Apple has so far somewhat successfully argued that they have reasons for restricting their ecosystem that aren't just a thinly veiled "because we want to crush competition". They argue that their devices are safer to use, and that allowing arbitrary software full access to the system would compromise that. Similarly, they limit third-party software from tracking you. They certainly aren't saints, and I disagree with a many of their choices (their app store cut could've decreased long ago, for one, and they're now adding ads into their own services) but they often seem like the only large corporation of their kind that even tries to have a set of beliefs and care about their users, and I think intent should matter.
I personally like that there's one popular ecosystem that has a particular perspective, and another competing popular ecosystem that has a totally different perspective. If you think all of the above is bullshit and Apple sucks, you're free to use Android and install exactly what you want on your phone. I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.
Apple is responsible for market damages inflicted onto software distribution by picking-and-choosing who gets to ship, and where their money goes. It is reflected in Apple's astronomical service margins, which unfairly reward them with even higher ROI than the iPhone hardware itself (!!!), somehow. It is seen in Apple's back-room negotiations with Amazon, Netflix, Google, Epic and X, where they use their de-facto power to force unfavorable distribution terms and draw up protection fees. It's present in their entitlement system, which gives Apple the option to artificially hamstring competing services that want to integrate with iOS. It's inherent to Apple's developer program, which has been used to revoke software signing certificates when Apple simply disagrees with a competitor.
Do we really think they deserve that money and power? It's not encouraging them to make smart choices.
In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option. A factory-new iPhone could use all of Apple's offered services with a hardware-attested eFuse that says the device was never jailbroken. If a user wants to do foolish things like play Fallout: New Vegas with Proton, give Dropbox system-level integration a-la iCloud, use an updated RCS client instead of iMessage, install Fortnite or use a third-party app store, then Apple can give them that choice without endangering other people. It isn't impossible, they already do this with macOS, running the same XNU kernel, and with an architecturally indistinct ARM chip.
That would alleviate the market damages that Apple is responsible for, and create a positive pressure on iOS development to improve software-wise. Right now, Apple is being rewarded for extorting their competitors, pettily attacking consumers, blocking software features, stuffing ads[0] into first-party apps, and visually degrading iOS. They are clearly being protected from software alternatives that offer a less-invasive alternative to Apple's disgraceful OEM packins. Which is a shame, since Apple was historically not opposed to taking advantage of free software and making high-quality packin software that legitimately did compete against alternatives, like QuickTime and iTunes.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-to-ditch-unsolicited-f1-ads-n...
But… they do offer their services as an option. One option is to use their devices and services, and another is to use a different, equally popular company’s devices and services. Why should they be forced to make hardware that can be used in ways they don’t think it should be?
I agree that Apple could change or build many of the things you’ve described. You’d like them better if they did. Maybe I would too. I still don’t understand why they should be required to. It feels odd to say that the market would only be fair if they were forced to be more similar to their main competitor in one of the core ways in which they’re different.
It harms the market. There are good indie devs and companies being unfairly punished for trying to ship good software on iOS. Apple's double-standards are the #1, red-alert issue.
The secondary issue, and one that upset me, is that it encourages Apple to make worse products. If Apple has an adjustable taxation knob that users have no control over, they can extort developers in exchange for making the platform worse. Apple knows that alternative App Stores and billing methods will destroy this status quo, which is why they invest millions lobbying against Europe's common-sense DSA/DMA laws. If the United States adopted a similar regulation, then Apple's financials would crater, jeopardizing their company's future simply by making iOS behave like a normal Mac or PC.
Apple should not be gambling their future on an exploitative status-quo, they should be reinvesting in capabilities, security and making products that people want to buy. Just like Google and their AdSense monopoly, I think Apple's terrible choices are informed by a captive revenue stream that they abuse to boost their quarterly reports.
One allows you to install different browsers, the other does not.
Being a monopoly isn't illegal (in the US). It's what they do that matters.
Now, that doesn't mean Apple is a monopoly with iOS, because the Sherman act doens't dictate it only looks at US only markets. It look at what makes sense in the context. Of course, a court could decide that regardless of what the numbers are internationall, what matters in this case is just the US market.
Trying to predict that is useless at the moment though because the US courts are all over the place.
Numbers say otherwise.
The security angle is easy to understand.
Not sure why Apple cares about control.
But it easier just to want to make Apple seem bad, so there's that.
I would bet Google's track record would easily allow them to defend this in court. More an issue with Google though.
And the problem isn't abstract. Safari lacks a ton of very useful API implementations. Like, try programming a QMK keyboard on an iPhone: it's literally the only platform in the whole world unable to run the Via web app.
Also, you /can/ run macOS in a VM on Linux: https://github.com/Coopydood/ultimate-macOS-kvm
I use that to test our website at work in Safari, though without a GPU (there is no virto-gpu driver for macOS and my PC's GPU doesn't support vGPU) the performance isn't great.
The difference is that Microsoft wanted to stall the web, while Google wants to accelerate it faster so that nobody else can keep up.
The commonality is the de-facto monoculture being sold to web developers. "Works best in Internet Explorer" was the problem twenty years ago. Now we've got lazy web developers who bemoan the absence of Chrome on their customer's phones. Right now Apple is the last thing standing between them and slapping a "Works best in Chrome" banner everywhere and abandoning support for Safari.
My gripe about "Safari being the new IE" was more about how broken some websites can be in Safari and having no good way of knowing or testing that. At work, my boss said out website didn't look quite right on his iPhone and it took more work than I'd thought to track down the piece of CSS that Safari rendered differently for some reason.
Personally, I don't use macOS or iOS and I also use Firefox. Generally, things seem to work the same between Firefox Chrome and Safari, with Safari needing the most amount of "tweaks".
Chrome is the new IE because it is fostering the return of the lazy developer who thinks the web can be reduced to a single web browser.
Safari is not the new IE. It is highly standards compliant, it’s actively maintained, and it’s not making web developers lazy.
How did Chrome go from being magical and aw inspiring to being viewed unfavorably by the HN community?
That's the only reason I am not switching to FF 100%. I do use it though but not as a main driver.
Some of the related posts:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/youtube-is-slowing-video-loads...
I keep retrying Firefox over multiple years and it's still not quite equal to Chrome for Youtube 4k playback ...
2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28783904
2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42176450
2026 still talks about the problem: https://go.tabbit.ai/blog/firefox-youtube-4k-stuttering
And a recent Youtube comment (2026-September) notices that Firefox doesn't run as well as Chrome on his modern high-end laptop with 64GB RAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIE_PkuFeng&lc=UgxfGeBL6sopr...
If FF is not working on youtube for, it's not working for you and you alone.
I stopped using Brave for no reason i don't remember. (no, not to do with the CEO)
I generally use Safari on my Apple devices (and YT works) and Firefox on any Linux machines. If something does not work on Safari I try Firefox on my Mac. In the past I've also sometimes used Chrome when no other option works.
So one option could be to use Firefox as a 'general use' browser, and switch to something else on an as-needed basis.
A bit of a hassle, but it may be the best compromise currently.
You must have a hardware problem, as I'm playing 4K videos on a 1st-gen Ryzen and GTX 1080 using Firefox and I've never had a single issue since I got the machine, around the 4th week the processor was available to purchase.
Until about the top-end of the 3000 RTX series released, the GTX 1080 was still king of raster performance.
I'm playing modern games like Marvel Rivals at 1440p no problem. Risk of Rain 2 4k no problem. STALKER 2 1080p no problem. It even runs most of my VR games perfectly fine, with me only needing to switch to my RTX 5060 machine for Into the Radius 2.
Even today, it is a very capable card, despite the power draw.
Really well argued, congrats.
I am perfectly happy with Chrome.
On the plus side, though, Safari will also translate text in images.
The history of Chrome is that it first displaced Firefox as a reasonable alternative (while funding that via a nice ad deal). And then they just steam rolled Internet Explorer to the point where MS gave up and rebuilt their browser around Chromium. It was that good. Fifteen years ago.
But these days you have to put up with a lot of crap from Google. Ad blocking works better on other browsers. Even some Chromium browsers (like Brave). But the thing with Chromium is that all Chromium derived browsers outsource most of the browser internals to Google. Google decides what features to implement, what PRs to merge, what features not to implement, etc. They set the standards. Safari, Firefox, and hopefully soon Ladybird are the only alternative browser engines keeping them somewhat honest on that front.
If you visit a Google property using a Gecko or WebKit-based browser you'll get hit with banners nudging you to switch to Chrome and Google's iOS apps ignore the long-available default browser setting when linked are tapped, prompting you to choose between your default browser and Chrome even if you don't have Chrome installed.
And then there's the whole thing with how Chrome for Android conveniently never gained the ability to run even pared-back MV3 blocker extensions. Massive conflict of interest there.
I wish Google were called out for this stuff way more, but more often than not they're given a free pass.
Most people who say this didnt go through the pain of why IE was such a PITA. IE held back web development by years because either they refused to add features or they added features that only worked with Microsoft approved.
Chrome came along and accelerated web platform development since their products relied on a thriving web ecosystem. They did it using open source software, and built out consensus using web platforms.
Chrome is the new IE will only be true if other browsers are out innovating Chrome (not true), or Chrome has abandoned web platform (not true).
There's only one browser that drags their feat adding features, and that's ironically Safari. Firefox too to an extend, but that's mostly mismanagement and lack of resources. Apple has no excuses.
Also worth noting that some of the discrepancies in capability are in features that Google decided to push despite opposition from other members of the consortium (like WebUSB).
That's a strange argument. I dont see HN saying this year all of us are going to buy Android, because iOS has become too popular. That sentiment is only valid is iOS is dragging their feat and if they stop innovating, effectively holding the market back.
I still havent seen an example where Chrome is holding everyone back. If anything, the complaint is the other way - they are doing way too much and we want them to stop.
And for HN crowd to be against that is very silly.
It’s not just Apple. Mozilla has pushed back against Google’s proposals plenty of times too. Google doesn’t always know best and often acts more in their self-interest than in that of the web.
So the issue isn’t that Google is moving too fast or doing too much, but that they’re unilaterally deciding the future of the web, which is not something any single party should be capable of.
How does Google or any company control the web? I can launch a website fuckgoogle.com today and Google can do nothing with it. However, I cannot publish fuckapple on Mac Store or App Store.
I did and "Chrome is the new internet explorer" is more accurate than what has been uttered since Chrome split from WebKit, "Safari is the new internet explorer".
IEs problem wasn't that it was behind in features, it was that it used IE-specific plugins and was heavily integrated with Windows Explorer. Safari is and has not been either of those.
Then came an upstart web browser from Google named Chrome....and now we're back to the bad old days of web developers coding to the dominant web browser again.
I have cursed too many websites to count because of their broken form designs (like assuming a particular postcode format) or reliance on cookies from ad vendors for basic functionality. If your website needs to generate “a new google recaptcha cookie” (whatever that means) before I can enter payment info, then sorry, no es bueno.
My take is Safari is the new IE.
It is packaged with the OS. I can't get an older version of Safari without an older version is macOS. From a testing standpoint, this means we have a bunch of hardware or images we never update so we can test against.
That was the IE thing, it was baked into the OS. Also, trash dev tools. Crashes pretty easily with the console open for more than 30s.
I feel like most people who make MV3 complaints didn’t bother actually trying it, they just repeat the default anti-MV3 talking points.
AdGuard just blocks much less.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
I liked Konqueror but abandoned in favor of Chrome browsers and variants especially after working on frontend projects and stoped using KDE
I liked Konqueror but abandoned in favor of Chrome browsers and variants especially after working on frontend projects.
Once apps dominate (which requires devs to have a Mac anyway to compile and debug) and turns out nobody use the Windows port, it's just a money sink.
The UX of Pages and Keynote are, IMO, far superior to Word/Powerpoint and Google Docs/Slides, but they lag adoption from... ecosystem inertia? I mention this as evidence of my objectivity in reflecting on UX.
What do you love about safari?
If it gets particularly bad, I'm sure some impartial team will make another browser engine with Opus 5.5 but for now I can tolerate the minor inconveniences in Safari.
Safari is always the best on my Mac, but my complaint has always been the lack of plugins.
But just now I ported one of my favorite plugins from Chrome to Safari using ChatGPT. I told it I already have it installed in Chrome so it can get the source code there, and then told it to port it and install it.
After 20 minutes and few bucks in tokens (estimated, I actually used my 6% of my $20/mo plan), I have Session Buddy in Safari.
So maybe the plugins aren't a problem anymore...
Why use ChatGPT? Safari has a built-in plugin builder now.
2. I have an M1 chip and I'm not sure it's supported.
3. ChatGPT can open both browers, not sure if Safari plugin builder can
But if it does all those things, great. My point was more that plugins won't be a problem anymore because AI can build them.
And safari still behaves differently than my other browsers.
I usually try to give safari a chance whenever I’m working on Macs. I’m always forced to install chrome for some reason or another.
Until the random compatibility quirks stop I don’t see myself returning to safari.
https://ios.cfw.guide/installing-trollstore/
It is so tiring to keep hearing of this whole sideloading/let us run other engines nonsense for a decade+ now. It's like watching all the nastiness that tech companies do and then asking for all that trash on iOS. This is tantamount to wanting Adobe Flash on iOS, and quite honestly, that's exactly what allowing 3rd party browser engines is going to do. First it maybe some extension, and then all of a sudden you find that the extension has full access to photos, location, and contacts because you granted 1 website access to those things.
No thanks.
Even if they did all of that and also allowed unrestricted sideloading, iOS is still awful overall, and iPhones themselves are terrible value. Even 16e and 17e start at €600/800. I can get a better android phone for €300, and I can't imagine spending more than €500 on a phone, let alone €1000 to get a basic feature like 120Hz refresh rate.
I am not interested in jailbreaking or rooting my device to run my apps. I am not interested in the testflight process. I am an adult and can pick and choose what apps I want. And I would like to exercise the whole "voting with my wallet" thing when a company makes an anti-consumer decision.
Which apps can't be uninstalled on the latest iOS?
- iMessage works so I can participate in the family group chat
Which Apple apps can't be removed?
I only noticed now because recently I have been wanting to incorporate the logos of tech publications on my website that have genuinely reviewed my product but apparently doing so isn’t without risk.
Also trash video playback.
There's a whole chapter on it in Creative Selection (by Ken Kocienda who started the project) on how they were only allowed to release versions as fast or faster than the one before.
Maybe have an Edge mode as well to convince the Edge users to come over.
And to suggest a Mode tells me you're not a software maker
For everything else, I use some chromium derivative that can traverse pirate streaming sites and ChatGPT without disintegrating under their weird JS workloads.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...
Yes, absolutely. But then they wouldn't be able to lock the flock in the barn, which is so contrary to Apple's DNA that you can't event talk about it in a 1 mile radius of 1, Infinite loop.
One thing I do not like is no native dark mode on chrome, but that's okay, I just do not use phone when I preparing to sleep
For the adblock/tracker issue, recently just added builtin DNS-based adblock (backed by several public block list) to my VPN app, it seems works well, given same engine and same network filtered by the same VPN, i guess they are same to me
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Apple_Safa...
www.github.com/jegly/iris
But, every time I open it and my back and forward mouse buttons don't work, I get so infuriated that only thinking about Apple engineers being forced to use the Magic Mouse relieves the pain. Seriously, WTF? Just fix that and bake uBlock Origin in and I'm sold. Meanwhile, Firefox.
I setup two of them for my Google account but I made them both in Safari. Only one of them worked. What if both of them failed? I would have been fucked.
I re-made them on Chrome and they both worked.
Sorry what was that about your compliance with web standards?
> Chrome slurps
Nintendon't level of advertising is never a serious contender.
> Can I use Safari on Windows or Android?
I guess here's your problem, Apple: You are clearly marketing to Apple-Users to stop using Chrome on your MacBooks. Whatever is going on here, this campaign makes you look afraid. Especially with a weak hand like that.
...So what you're saying is: we should switch to Firefox?
sent from my Android Emulator inside OpenSuse inside Windows
I use Safari, and iCloud (or lack thereof) has never been a problem for me.
Instead, we should treat browsers like water in that everyone needs access to it at all times without any top-down control or restrictions.
No thanks.. I'd rather switch to Firefox, or even any other shitty browser, but not the one from any other gatekeeping monopoly.
They're promoting their browser as an alternative to Chrome or Firefox.
You're companing about walled gardens.
We can already see it on IOS where no one is allowed to use any other browser engine than safari's own.. of course, the reasoning is always "security".
it's missing the element zapper and has some other limitations, but it works pretty well for the most part
combined with ublacklist and sponsorblock it's fairly good coverage for safari
Support for element zapper was added more than 18 months ago in version 2025.3.23.1241.[1]
---
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/releases/tag/uBOLi...
The absurdity of every week another AI feature, another way for data to leak to their services, another crash report.
They are exhausting and abusing their positions of power.
They just announced something which might be relevant to you.
https://www.firefox.com/enterprise/
Also... not sure all of those ads would still hold up today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYErwT-zRRI
- it doesn't like to serialize the state of tabs. Chrome is pretty good at somehow snapshotting the entire state of tabs to the point where it can be reconstructed after relaunch, even offline.
- webpage loading is sort of janky. Chrome will show the webpage streaming in live, but Safari will simply freeze in place until it's done. Maybe this is due to an Apple philosophy decision, but I don't prefer it.
- similarly to how Safari doesn't seem to serialize tab states, navigating forward or back usually needs to load the page from scratch, including resubmitting forms or whatever.
- speaking of forward and back navigation, I'm kinda annoyed that each time I use the trackpad to navigate history, I have to wait for the swipe animation to finish before I can interact with the webpage. I try to always use cmd+brackets instead now, because it's much faster.
- IIRC, it seems the newer macOS 27 betas caused Safari to develop an issue where after it's been open for long enough, certain types of videos will stop being able to play at all until the browser is quit and restarted. kind of annoying, combined with the lack of tab snapshotting, because I have to manually visit each tab to load it on each launch.
I still daily drive Safari and use it as my main browser. But I keep an instance of Chrome open for tabs that I never really close. And then I have an instance of Orion for spreadsheets. (I use spreadsheets to keep track of medication usage, sleep times and finances)
source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-dodged-a-20-billion-hit...
Add a 1000ms delay to your website when the user agent is Safari.
Show popup to install Firefox.
Etc.
The irony of using a Google platform to promote ditching another Google platform lol.
OTH, i use safari on my other mac, it’s fine most of the time, but i also have have chrome installed as some websites are so buggy otherwise, linkedin is a particular culprit, it barely works on chrome too.
I was on Sequoia all throughout Tahoe and still updated Safari to the 26.x versions. There might be a limit to how far back they let you do that, though.
I had an M1 MBP that I needed to re-pave with Monterey. Yes, it's end-of-support, but it's also only 4 years old. And runs on that Mac.
So, first step, I make a USB installer, and run it. Great. Reboots, and says "FYI, this is an unsupported OS. You can install a newer OS instead, or run Monterey in "Reduced Security" mode." That was fine for me.
"Installation of Reduced Security mode failed." Nothing else. Eventually my understanding of this was because the machine had been upgraded previously all the way to Tahoe, that somewhere along the line some firmware or something in the EFI had been upgraded and was too new for Monterey. No thanks to Apple. No info, debug logs, anything, just "Installation failed. Reboot?"
So what then?
Hmm, more research. "Do an IPSW image restore via DFU", i.e. pave it with a largely installed image. Could work, might have the same issue, but since I'm stuck right now, with a Mac I can't install anything on, a four year old $3,000 brick, why not?
Alright, I have a Mac Studio. I get the IPSW image, and Apple Configurator. Connect the two as per Apple's instructions and the MBP does indeed show up in Configurator as being "not booted, DFU mode".
Apple's instructions, "Drag the IPSW image onto the DFU 'box' for the target Mac". No. It doesn't light up like it's accepting a drag and drop, and indeed it doesn't. Nor does it accept a "restore..." or similar from the Configurator menu options. There's nothing in Configurator that seems to allow you to image the MBP. Again: no error, no instructions, just the error "bonk" noise.
So... off to ChatGPT, Reddit, etc., I go.
Much repeating of the same. However, ChatGPT pokes a little button. Near the very end of its answer, it says "Newer versions of macOS may have limitations on the age of the image they might restore. You may need a slightly older macOS to do this. Even an Intel MBP running Ventura could work."
As fortune has it, my fiance happens to still have her old i5 MBP with touchbar, and the latest version of Ventura... let's plug it in, let it catch a little charge and boot...
Alright, I need Configurator on this laptop.
No soup for you, says the App Store, "You need macOS Sequoia to install Configurator".
Back off to Reddit, where I find someone who has helpfully zipped up an older version of Configurator that runs on Ventura, and in the end, I'm able to re-pave via IPSW.
But Apple's docs absolutely are incorrect/incomplete about Configurator, and DFU restores.
"You can use Restore... in the Configurator menu to select the software image". No, you can't, even leaving aside the "old/unsupported". It actually means restoring from a "backup" (presumably Time Machine, though it doesn't specify) and you can't select any file or image.
"Drag the image onto DFU". Doesn't work in that situation, no error, no "hey, you're doing the right thing but I can't do this", just acting like a fool trying to drag the image onto DFU only to have it bounce off.
Like I said, I didn't have DFU port issues, but Apple's docs on how to make this happen were either non-existent, or incorrect about the process, or flat out told me I couldn't do it. But mostly non-existent and overly simplistic covering the most basic scenarios only - which I get for general support, but by the time you are "connect to a second mac in DFU mode and run Configurator" in their own words, we're way beyond simplistic "you can just install a newer macOS" type "instructions".
First stop blocking iOS pwas from simply installing to the home screen, and don't clear out data in 7 days. Then we'll talk about your browser being better.
People are just not aware that this is a thing, and when they learn it's a thing, they don't want to do it.
But Safari is not the solution until they make it fully (FULLY) open-source, because all Apple trying to do is replace the king of enshitification hill by their own.
firefox ftw
This has caused many issues because Apple controls what can run in a web browser and that web browser (safari) is in no way up to date, or worse, selectively implements standards. I'm writing this in the hopes that it will publicly improve.
Since Safari is forced at an OS level on all Apple's iOS and iPadOS users, that's a place to start when it comes to choice.
On MacOS, Safari is actually pretty interesting - it can be much more efficient with battery usage than other browsers and unsurprisingly well integrated. It's nice to use on MacOS because there is choice.
I understand there maybe concerns about security, but also will come out is likely that safari enjoys some OS level integrations that other browsers probably won't be welcome to, similar to the Internet Explorer/Edge days.
The switch to safari is likely tied to something else, given Apple's growing advertising revenue. Meaning, move away from one advertisement engine (Chrome), and move to another (Safari).
Though what stuck with me from that page is why the fuck they would have default browser setting inside something like "Desktop & Dock" (that combo!). That is just intellectually challenged UX/UI design.
And it seems they have fired everyone from their propaganda (or marketing?) dept.
tl;dr: Is Safari better than Chrome? Yes. How? Because this webpage is live.
A browser should allow you to not download content by URL masks, and not silently load it and hide it. This is advertising/tracker shenanigans and frankly horrid tech.
I am really curious about data proving these.
I am not aware of any benchmarks proving or disproving.
[0]: https://tech-insider.org/safari-vs-chrome-2026/
This is about as wrong as you can possibly get.
This would be true in a stateless world (assuming you can remember the site you want to visit).
Which the web hasn't been since a very long time.
Unless you have a web app which is entirely local and doesn't save its state to local storage, what could you possibly be doing that requires a tab to remain in residence?
I doubt people developing safari and mail app are actually using them outside of work.
Apple keeps holding a “hardware company” flag, despite some occasional wins.