[vedantroy]

I think its good to force Apple to allow non-WebKit web engines on iOS. Right now Apple can forcefully cripple technologies like progressive web apps by not supporting the latest web technologies. This allows Apple to force companies to develop native applications.

Similarly, Apple has been slacking off on improving Webkit and making it as good as V8. By getting rid of Apple's monopoly on web engines, developers will be able to push websites to new levels that are currently hard to attain.

[throwaway34241]

As long as Safari remains the default or very popular, sites will probably have to support it anyway regardless of if other browser engines are available.

There's also some conflict of interest if say Chrome were to come to be the dominant browser on iOS since they also control Android. Would battery life, performance etc be prioritized as highly on iOS as their own platform?

I think it would be nice to be able to load apps from outside the app store especially on devices like the iPad Pro, but I think that's a separate issue from web standards. I think the only practical way to advance web standards is for the major browser vendors to agree and implement them, even if that sometimes takes a while.

[43920]

> As long as Safari remains the default or very popular, sites will probably have to support it anyway regardless of if other browser engines are available.

But if another engine supports additional features that Safari doesn't, you could still offer those features to users of other browsers, i.e. you could do something like "install Chrome/Firefox to use our PWA".

> Would battery life, performance etc be prioritized as highly on iOS as their own platform?

Maybe not, but in that case people could switch back to Safari or another competitor like Firefox.

[ash_gti]

WebKit does support service workers now and they're working on support for Web App Manifests. Some web apps, like Kindle Web Reader work fine in offline mode on my iPhone, granted that site is using the older (deprecated) App Cache manifest.

[koolba]

I’d be more than happy for a WebKit browser with a fully customizable noscript and cookie policy.