No; my problem is when people are using the "open web" as a bludgeon to get Apple to allow Chrome on iOS. If you want Chrome on iOS, just say that. To pretend that there is open future of browser diversity once Chrome is allowed on iOS is underhanded.
I want Firefox on iOS, and I want Tor Browser on iOS, and I want Lynx on iOS, and I want wget on iOS, and I want youtube-dl on iOS, and I want to run whatever the hell I damn well please on iOS.
Underhanded? It's pretty clear that your stated goals don't align with your real goals here.
Edit: I have a hard time putting into words why your arguments seem so deceptive to me. It is like whataboutism: the arguments you are making are technically functional but they just completely fall apart with any reasonable weighing of the pros/cons because it betrays the "intrinsic" goals (choice, browser competition, functionality, security) for "extrinsic" goals (browser diversity, but mostly the success of safari). This makes me think that you're secretly misaligned and that you actually hold those "extrinsic" goals as your intrinsic goals.
I can be clear and transparent here. My position is that if you actually care about browser choice the biggest elephant in the room is Chromium. The reality is Google has shown that it will leverage it's properties like Gmail and YouTube to get users to install Chrome; from nagware to just outright breaking sites on other browsers.
If you want to force Apple to allow different browsers without addressing this problem, then you are trading one company's monopoly on a single platform for another company's monopoly globally. And there is no reason to believe that Google will behave any better than Apple has. It's not like Google hasn't tried to skip the standards process before.
So when people argue that "it's for browser diversity" I have to consider them as 1.) naive, 2.) actually working for Google. 3.) just developers who are tired of being forced to target multiple platforms.
Do I think it's ethical that this is how this stalemate is handled? No; taking away user choice is limiting the freedoms of users.
Do I think Safari is amazing? No; I think Chrome on Android, today, is better than Safari on iOS. I may be harming users today by forcing them on Safari.
Would I fold if Apple only allowed Firefox/Lynx/Netscape? Yes; My problem is with Chrome, not with other browsers. But I think the number of people who genuinely want to Firefox is tiny in comparison to the number of people who would just install Chrome.
My worst fear is that once Chrome is allowed on iOS, then there is no reason for Google, or anyone else, to target anything other than Chrome; and that would ultimately be harder to fix. A year of Chrome dominance, where developers only target Chrome would fully entrench Chrome and make it difficult for anyone to build a browser that wasn't just a Chrome fork that emulated all of Chrome's bugs and unspecified behaviors. The alternate solution, where the Chrome problem is addressed first, then the fix is "just" passing legislation that opens up iOS. One fix involves just changing the behavior of one company. The other fix involves changing the behavior of thousands of companies.
Get FF or some other browser a healthy market share first and then talk about cracking open iOS.
Instead what happens is this internecine warfare where everyone shits all over FF for political reasons (most of which have no relevance to their day to day use of a web browser) and uptake of Tor/Brave is miniscule and most everyone sticks with Chrome.
If you force Apple to open up iOS then Chrome just takes it over and Safari will take such a hit that Apple will probably have to kill it. Then Google will own 99% of the portal to the web.
I think I'm arguing with a bunch of Libertarians though who think that an unregulated market is some kind of magic sauce that will conjure up a Chrome competitor out of thin air, and not a recipe for monopolization.
We started OWA with a group of primarily Safari first developers, in that iOS Safari is our primary target platform. We've had over a decade of major issues from rendering bugs, to lack of functionality to our apps breaking for months at a time waiting for a patch. The severe underfunding of Safari/webkit coupled with a ban on competition meant that it was never going to be viable to ship Web Apps to iOS. So the question is, how do you convince the worlds richest company to invest a extra few hundred million/year into their own browser?
The answer is competition. Competition provides Apple a deep incentive to produce a capable, feature risk browser at risk of losing users to the other vendors. Each 1% of Safari users is worth 150m/year in google search revenue, a number so large it would make even Apple take notice.
As web developers we see the value in having browser engine competition, many of us lived through the IE6 era and know the risks of the monopolistic competitive behavior like we're seeing from Apple (Side-point: At no point did Microsoft ever ban the competition).
The status-quo where Safari/Webkit was both stifling the Web and Web Apps and providing no competitive pressure on Chrome/Edge/Firefox + the severe underinvestment from Apple meant that a regulatory solution was needed.
> This is what I was talking about. There will only be one result to opening iOS and it scares me.
Why? Does Apple not have the resources to build a competitive browser? Do they not have the motivation? Do they not have the engineering skills? Do they not have a large and extremely desirable user-base who prefer to stay as much as possible in Apple's ecosystem?
Given all the advantages Apple has, how could it possibly be true that they can only get users by literally banning all competition on their main platform?
Replace Apple with Microsoft and you get your answer. Since when did having a trillion dollars guarantee success? Replace Apple with any company; do you think Google lacked the motivation and engineering skills to build a social network?
Ignoring much of the fact how Google would leverage it's existing properties to make sure you couldn't open a single web page without being nagged about installing Chrome; it would take a large amount of effort for anyone to compete to where Chrome is today and the result is that people would just Chrome.
And fine, I understand that as developers you don't want the burden of testing multiple platforms or being beholden to one platform that doesn't move as fast as Chrome. But to pretend this is about the "browser diversity" is where I have the problem. Just say you want Chrome and don't buy Google's framing that this about "open standards" when Google doesn't even hold Chrome to that standard.
> Since when did having a trillion dollars guarantee success?
So then your answer is that Apple's browser is significantly worse than competitors, and that users wouldn't use this much worse product if it were not for Apples anti-competitive behavior?
> But to pretend this is about the "browser diversity
> Just say you want Chrome
I think most open web supporters would be a lot happier if Apple even simply allowed Firefox.
That would still be massively better than the status quo.
Are you saying that all someone would have to do is argue for allowing just Firefox, and you would no longer do this thing where you attack some alleged secret motivations?
> Does Apple not have the resources to build a competitive browser?…
They do. They did. It’s called Safari. That’s how we got here.
What they DON’T have is any care about Windows/Linux/Android users. Apple makes their browser to make their platform the way they like.
If you want Apple to provide the competitive alternate browser on other platforms you’re asking the wrong company.
> Given all the advantages Apple has, how could it possibly be true that they can only get users by literally banning all competition on their main platform?
Google pushes Chrome with the #1 OS in the world (Android). With the #1 site, google.com. And the #2, YouTube.com. And gmail. And Google Maps. Maybe Waze. Chrome OS. GSuite.
They have an INSANE amount of power to push people to Chrome and off other browsers.
I’m not arguing pro-Apple. I’m arguing anti-Google.
Chrome is competition, and no, it's not alone: on the desktop market, where competition is not rigged as much as on mobile, Edge has 10% market share, and Firefox 7.5%. It's not insignificant.
> I want one of these “just open iOS” calls to include the consequences of what they’re calling for and how they plan to deal with it.
OWA has taken into account anti-competitive practices used by Google to gain browser market share, and made recommendation to mitigate or prevent them. In there submission to the japanese regulator [1], they include:
- 3.1.7: No Chrome Preferencing:
> Google should not use their control over the operating system to provide unfair preference to their own browser, Chrome, either through the operating system or agreements with partners.
- 3.1.8: Website Transparency Obligations:
> OWA suggests that where a Gatekeeper’s website does not support a browser which has above a 2% market share, they be compelled to publish a document containing detailed reasoning that prevents support of certain engines.
Yes it does, that's a totally different situation. Edge chose to use Chromium as its engine, Microsoft takes part in its development, they are free to remove or add any component from it, and if ever they wanted to they would be free to fork it and drop it for another engine at any time. None of that is true for WebKit skins on iOS.
Those recommendations are weak sauce. Websites are going to say stuff like “works best in Chrome!” and Google is going to encourage that. Nothing in those recommendations, assuming they’re even adopted, will solve that.
It’s disheartening - you have good intentions but almost everything you say is backwards.
Regulation on Apple only is the opposite of encouraging competition, it’s literally calling shots against the only fighter that’s pushing back on Chrome in a significant way - on market share, and maybe more importantly, on privacy and avoiding bloating web standards to further avoid total lock-in on V8.
Second, Apple has been accelerating greatly Safari development for years now and I worry your entire organization can’t admit it’s actually a great browser and has rapidly caught up in terms of correctness and features, and is now in fact leading in many ways. That it rejects some proposals isn’t inherently wrong, by the way, and the reasoning for many is just. I’m afraid if you admitted that, it’d pop a bubble in one of your core tenets, and given you made this mission driven thing with a single purpose, you’re sort of now forced into an intellectually dishonest place.
Because as a long time web develop myself who went from IE to Firefox to Chrome to Safari as my main browsers over the years, there’s simply *no doubt* that Safari as of a year or two ago started whooping Chromes ass. Like not even close, it feels like a different type of thing. It’s insanely fast, across so many dimensions, lighter, and I don’t get incompatibility almost ever anymore.
Your mission would achieve the opposite of what it wants - Apples platform isn’t a monopoly, Google's are. Google has a monopoly on Search, Browsers, and influence on the web. This would only strengthen the worse/stronger fighter. And it's all premised on a fundamentally unsound critique of Safari.
Why do I care if developing in Safari is hard for developers? If iOS opens up to chrome, it's game over for any kind of competition in the mobile browser war. Google will take over web standards and the death of the old republic will be complete. Android is your answer if you don't want Safari.
Lots of people want to explain why the government should force Apple to let native Chrome onto iOS.
I don't see anyone explaining what will force Google to continue supporting Safari once they have Chrome on iOS.
The reality is that they probably won't. Safari will break for Google services and pixels, and the only answer will be "switch to Chrome, things don't break there." Bye bye competition.
While I admire your stance on the internet being open I disagree.
Yes, opening browser engines would be good for the competition. But you missed one point: You assume all players will play fair in the competition. If all browser engines would be allowed over night, what would happen: Google will probably play really unfair. E.g. sadly the layout of Google will be messed up in Safari, youtube videos stutter/have lower resolution, everything is a lot slower, the performance will be sabotaged, but on Chrome everything will be working fine. There was even a precedent for something similar: [1]
This will probably come alongside with "Try it in Google Chrome", a lot of users would probably switch, thus the monopoly of Chromium would be unstoppable by pure market forces.
Yes, having only one browser engine is bad for the choice of the user, but it does have significant downsides.
As parent stated, Google can simply neglect to make their apps work well in Safari. They’ve done so in the past; GMail on Firefox was nigh-unusable due to a raft of dumb bugs for a long time, and it still uses substantially more CPU and memory than literally any other tab I have open on my browser. Right now they have to make an effort to support WebKit (Safari); as soon as they can push Blink (Chrome) to users, that motivation will go away.
> There was even a precedent for something similar: [1]
No there wasn't, unless you mean killing a 10 year old version of Internet explorer with a banner to a newer version of Internet explorer is somehow playing unfair.
Maybe precedent was an unfair word - I apologize - but it shows, how Google can/could use the power of having one of the most used websites in order to influence the choice of the browser.
Open Web Advocacy has been very clear that they want competition on iOS, not Chrome specifically. The reason being that the absence of competition is currently allowing Apple to deteriorate the web experience on iOS, preventing the web and web apps from competing with native apps. Their objective is to lift these artificial limitations imposed by Apple and free the web.
OWA members have actually been actively reporting WebKit bugs and interacting with the Safari team to help prioritise features and bug fixes on Twitter and elsewhere, showing the goal is to improve the overall web experience on iOS, not allow Chrome to become dominant. Here is one of their detailed bug report: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84.
> Open Web Advocacy has been very clear that they want competition on iOS
And it is being pointed out, repeatedly, that the only actual real competition is Chrome. When Chrome becomes an option then websites will abandon any pretense of adhering to standards and just code to Chrome. You can't pretend the mobile browser landscape won't just end up mirroring that of the desktop.
The total browser share of iOS shifting to Chrome, even if Chrome only got 50% of iOS users, would put the total browser share of Chrome over 90%. There would be no impetus for any website to write for anything but Chrome.
This whole chrome fetish thing you've got is actually the issue. Everyone thinks "there is only Chrome" so in a sense we all deceive ourselves. I don't know a single person anymore who uses Chrome. Maybe you do but that's not really the point. If you don't want a Chrome hegemony then don't fool yourself into thinking there is one and don't proliferate that ideology. Tell your product people that NO, you're not going to just ship the Chrome version and support Safari and Firefox later. Put in the work to make software work on other browsers. That's how you break the status quo. The amount of times I've seen some software company tell users "our product only works on Chrome" is disgusting. No wonder it's popular... people don't have a choice because of shitty software.
Actually, yes. With Apple not having user choice, those of use who want a choice can choose Android. Lack of diversity in one ecosystem supports diversity in a broader context.
It's like prohibitions against importing some aggressive plant or animal species. It's a way of protecting local diversity.
This leaves the user who want actual choice crying in the corner.
Android is only the bare OS, and actual devices come either with Google bindings everywhere (mostly from direct contract with each phone maker in exchange to let them have the Play Store), or no Play Store at all (which usually means no commercial license for stuff like Felica as well, same situation as when wiping clean a phone basically).
To me it feels a lot like in the 90s when 'viable' alternatives to Windows were either overpriced and obsoleting Macs, or "every year is year of linux on the desktop" linux boxes. And getting shouted from every camp when complaining the situation really sucks.
Yes, I am happy with the Apple ecosystem in this regard. If I wanted to run a different browser engine, I could do so by buying an Android phone. I purchased an iOS phone specifically because I think the overall phone experience is better when certain aspects do not have a choice.
If android did not exist and Apple controlled the market it would be a different story, but that is far from the case.