Apple doesn’t disrespect set user preferences in the same way that Microsoft does. This sort of oversimplified drive-by whataboutism isn’t great for conversation.
Oh, they do. On my iPhone, I've:
-changed the 'default browser'
-'uninstalled' Safari
Yet, whenever I want to search for a highlighted word, it opens Safari. This is such an absurd situation where I am browsing a site and want to do a search for something I just read and, instead of just opening a new tab or replacing the active tab with a web search, it opens a different browser app I do not want to use.
This is just not the way any reasonable user would expect a system app to behave once all browser selection settings are configured to use a different browser.
> Yet, whenever I want to search for a highlighted word, it opens Safari.
I cannot replicate, it opens Firefox for me BUT it completely disregards my search engine choice, so it opens Google even though Kagi is my default search engine.
Highlight a word or phrase in Firefox, in the popup there's a "Search" option. It will always search in Safari. Firefox had to add their own "Search in Firefox" option, that appears at the end of the popup (and sometimes not at all).
I can verify this. Setting Firefox to my default browser doesn’t change the behavior of “Search on internet” word lookup on long press: it still opens in Safari.
Firefox on iPhone is Firefox on iPhone, but it uses WebKit instead of Gecko.
Chrome on iPhone is Chrome on iPhone, but it uses WebKit instead of Blink.
The reason this is important for you to keep in mind is because Firefox is whatever Mozilla says Firefox is, and Chrome is whatever Google says Chrome is. There's no reason to suppose the iPhone version of some product should share any code with the Android version of the same product.
And yet the experience of Safari on iOS is overall pretty good. I think I would not hate the Edge experience quite so much if it did not shove MSN content in my face, display a garish bing search page, and aghressively promote their browser. Also it does not help that I have 25 years of experience avoiding MS browsers for various other reasons. I’m not saying it’s great that Apple does this, but I do think Microsoft could make fewer technically minded people (and legislators) complain about it if they were less aggressive with their tactics.
Only in part - and it would certainly not be “just fine”. Edge is pretty nice nowadays. It’s the tactics to promote it as the default - now and in the past - that have drawn so much scrutiny. And IE did used to be objectively inferior to the competition.
I’m saying the people at MS promoting this in this particular way are, well, dumb.
As a developer targeting Edge is fine, there's not really any significant difference between building a page that supports it versus any other Chrome derivatives.
But as a user wow is it the most trashy and abusive program I routinely encounter. Start it for the first time and you're confronted with tabloid news and advertising. Sponsored links are mixed into your frequently visited sites by default. It injects itself into your online shopping and sends all your images and browser behavior to their servers for various weak justifications. You can turn it into a passable experience by scrolling through and configuring something in nearly every single settings tab, but then they just ignore you and inject new advertising sidebars or icons in a random update. Keeping it restricted to "just a browser" requires constant vigilance. It's clearly first and foremost just an advertising revenue funnel for Microsoft, which is completely pathetic of them. At least IE was mostly just a browser even if it did that pretty badly most years.
The hard and fast rule is: you're not permitted to have a source code interpreter.
That's the "rules of engagement", same way you can't run Flash or Linux binaries; the same way you can't touch windows kernel space without a code-signing certificate from a eye-gouging authority.
Exceptions to apples rule are rarely given, even for educational purposes; such as pythonista.
When taken though that lens; if we hadn't turned everything into a fucking web-app: alternative interpreters of HTML/CSS could exist.
Unrelated, but: Ironically the original vision for the iPhone was web-apps not native ones (as there was only an app store created after community backlash over Apple pushing people to the web).
> if we hadn't turned everything into a fucking web-app
It's rich to hear this used as a defense of any corporation. Everything is a web app now because nobody got their act together to ship a true "write once, ship anywhere" platform. Microsoft smugly profited off this in the short term with Windows, and Apple used it as an excuse to double-down on their proprietary SDKs. It's obvious why everything is a webapp; what's the realistic alternative? Developing native apps for every platform on one device isn't even feasible nowadays. Then you'd need the developer subscriptions, a cross-platform app architecture and the willingness to write n number of UI mockups, where n is the number of target platforms you intend to hit. It's a veritable waste of time to do anything else.
It's not better anywhere. That's the problem, everything is a game of compromise and when you try to fix things for yourself a big company gives you the stink-eye. The web is the last place left where developers feel they have freedom, which should make us all feel very sad considering they run a whole-ass computer that they effectively ignore because of arbitrary restrictions.
> The web is the last place left where developers feel they have freedom
Come on, we have excellent open computing platforms; it's just not where the money is right now.
Nobody can see passed their nose for profits though so we end up with lowest common denominator everything: which forces you to run a whole code interpreter on everything.
Apple said "no, you can't" and that's where the money is, so you had (and continue to have) a choice and your business chooses to use it.
So, you have to play by those rules.
I mean, I'm not taking a stand here; despite people believing that I'm defending apple. You don't get the sit around though and reap the benefits of the system they built (and developers helped build) while simultaneously trying to tear it down.
They set the rules, you all agreed to play by them; so why are we complaining?
If you actually care you would make programs on one of the many open standards platforms which in turn would turn them into more attractive platforms as the ecosystem improved.
But nobody does, everyone just wants the money now.
Largely, I don't disagree with you. Apple's stance is entirely business-oriented. My original point isn't taking a stand here either; this is just why native apps suck and why people disregard them to make Electron apps. We both seem to agree that business is the core concern.
Apple is at least complicit in the status-quo as a vendor of native app SDKs, and it's something they could probably fix with the right initiative. At the business layer, they have no motivation to fix this issue. On an individual level, it's a black hole of annoyance, confusion and hand-wavey abstraction as to why certain things are off-limits or why certain apps aren't on iPhone. Treating your userbase as a hostage situation is an obvious ploy, and one I can't encourage even to fix another problem. If we rely on the altruism of businesses to fix our market problems, then we are subject to their whims when they want to change things for themselves.
If we can both agree that Apple can and does make decisions that harm their users, then we're basically on the same page. I want to scrutinize that harm, and hopefully spread enough awareness to codify a change. You're free to feel however you want on the topic, but I would object to this behavior from any company.
> They set the rules, you all agreed to play by them
The internet did not agree to "Apple's rules". That's like saying Sony made their "rules" with the Playstation 3 browser, and now everyone has to play by that. They released a client, and their customers agreed to their Terms of Service. The internet will do whatever it wants, including whittle itself down to the lowest common denominator of 'document rendering' to hit Apple's platforms. If that's an undesired outcome for them or their users, maybe they should change their approach.
Thin clients with 2007-era javascript interpreters as the only code execution framework (vs local MACH-O binaries) does seem to be a bit of a weird choice if "slow" was the problem and you intended to have thin clients.
There's also a backend. Back in 2007 a web app was mostly backend code that would send you HTML to display, and at worst it would have some AJAX for a chatbox/autoreload.
Not really. I mean, iPhones were slower than laptops back then but that’s not saying much as all phones were in the same ballpark at best. The actual reasons are well documented: it was a ressource hog (on all platforms, not only phones; there were still netbooks around), sucked batteries dry (including on both Windows and Mac laptops with much better batteries than phones), and was unstable (being the leading cause of crashes on Macs at the time). Jobs even wrote an open letter about it.
It was not practical on Android either, mostly a stunt, and faded quietly into obscurity over the course of a couple of years.
Eh. Jobs was disingenuous at the best of times, I had Flash Lite running fine on Symbian a year or so before the iPhone hit the market.
I'm not saying it was great, but performance/efficiency was massively better than similar code in JS at the time. (And several years later, I rewrote a Flash app for ancient Tivo boxes in HTML/JS - same functionality, half the performance even after a lot of fine tuning.)
He was on firmer ground complaining about the bugs & security issues admittedly!
>> if we hadn't turned everything into a fucking web-app
> Could you elaborate?
I run a web browser with JS turned off and the web is mostly unusable for me, even things that should be plain documents like news reports try to choke down a dozen or so megabytes of obfuscated garbage that it insists must run on my CPU doing goodness knows what to render a document in common markdown.
So, despite being "free" you just run any old garbage you happen to come across on the internet and hope the "Fantastically optimised awesomely sandboxed" runtime that is definitely not too complicated to have issues (despite being one of the most complicated interpreters in history), definitely has no security bugs and will protect you.
I'm not pro apple here. I'm anti the enshittification of everything because some arsehat decided it was necessary for me to run whatever arbitrary shite they managed to vomit onto a web-server.
That Apple makes it hard for you? Fine. Enemy of my enemy.
> I'm not pro apple here. I'm anti the enshittification of everything
That's a highly contradictory stance. Accepting one brand of enshittification to solve another, less-significant problem is an indefensible position. You can't ignore Apple's arbitrary shite while complaining about the prevalence of other arbitrary decisions, it's a go-nowhere fallacy. There is no point; you are just promoting something that you think can help you, and then refusing to rationalize it in the greater context beyond browsers.
There's no reason to paint this as an "enemy of my enemy" situation, either. You either think browser clients are a powerful tool that deserves better scrutiny, or you think the status quo is fine. Nobody is putting on armor and picking up a sword to go to war for their favorite corporate-sponsored browser. If anyone has you believe that, they're probably manipulating you.
Apple doing shitty things is irrelevant because ultimately that applies to people who buy apple products and people who want to sell products that work on apple devices.
What Web Developers are doing affects me daily.
Apple pisses off web developers who want to turn a browser into an OS with crap like WebUSB? Not seeing a problem.
Apple actively prevents the monopoly position of v8/blink/Chrome? Not seeing a problem.
Apple has my support in-so-far as its the only company that seems to tell web developers "no".
Enemy of my enemy applies; No other company, especially one with any actual leverage, is preventing the lurch of web crap.
> Apple pisses off web developers who want to turn a browser into an OS with crap like WebUSB? Not seeing a problem.
See, this is the problem. If Apple is going to charge you 30% to use a serialized data cable, they're going to get annihilated legislatively. That's not a choice the market gets to make, it's one market regulators decide on. As we've seen in multiple European countries, Apple doing shitty things is not irrelevant because they get fined for participating in said markets.
Thank god for the Digital Markets Act. Apple can take their performance art and sell it somewhere with proper authoritarianism, like China. Oh wait...
Apple had a pretty clear definition of interpreted code which boiled down to: "Does your interpreted download allow the user to write infinite loops or recursion?"
WebKit is probably the only thing holding the web open at this point. Imagine if this last bastion of non-Chromium went away, and Googles stranglehold on the web was finally total.
Opening up iOS to other browser engines doesn't mean that suddenly Safari stops working. If anything it would force Safari to become competitive with Chrome.
> If anything it would force Safari to become competitive with Chrome.
It would take more than just being competitive, the WebKit team would need to start perfectly reproducing Blink behaviors and quirks. Devs are already more than happy to never test their work against anything that’s not Chrome and that’s only going to intensify when they don’t need to care about WebKit any more — any deviance from Chrome even if it’s technically within spec will be considered an error.
That’s where users feel forced to change browsers, because if they don’t they’ll frequently be running into pages that are broken in browsers that aren’t Blink-based.
Regardless it will mean that Safari will lose a significant proportion its market share.
There will be less incentive for developers to make sure their stuff works on anything but Chrome forcing safari devs to just play catch up all the time.
The web isn't made open by forcing people to run specific client software. It's a bit like arguing that Explorer was the only thing keeping Netscape in line. With Apple shipping private attestation in their browsers and dragging their feet on open standards, it's hard to consider them a friend of the weak.
At the very least they do not allow keychain to interact with browsers other than safari. This means that your autofill does not synchronize easily with your mobile devices.
That's a choice that is not based on technical conditions and is pure disrespect of user preferences.
Well it’s not at all obvious how consumers would benefit from that.
If the deep integration between hardware, software and services is the main reason why people buy Apple’s products the harm from breaking the up might outweigh any of the benefits.
Oh yes they do. Have you ever tried to assign the .mp4 extension to open with something other than QuickTime? It just doesn't work, and it hasn't worked for a looooong time.
What are you talking about? That is complete nonsense.
I've never seen any video open in anything other than my default video player IINA, it's almost like quicktime isn't installed, i've never seen it pop up.
