[cowtools]

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.

[nemothekid]

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.

[lamontcg]

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.

[lenkite]

"Get FF or some other browser a healthy market share first"

Why ? Open up the platform first.

[Jcowell]

One would say it would be disastrous to open a platform first and then take on Chrome because

1) Firefox cannot compete against Google endless resources m. Google will win, not a matter of it but will.

2) The time it takes to decouple chrome from google will be too long. It may just kill Firefox before any action can really be done.

[lamontcg]

Yeah I don't see why this math is so hard.

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.

[depressedpanda]

Why are you so certain that Apple will have to kill Safari if Chrome and other browsers are allowed on iOS?

[lamontcg]

Because Chrome will instantly start to out compete it. And once Safari is pushed down below 25% share on iOS then sites will feel more and more free to avoid testing on Safari and push users towards just using Chrome. Not having two different engines to have to test against means that even more the web becomes something that works on Chromium by default and is totally broken on Gecko. That makes FF even worse, and Google will totally control Chromium and the engine that browsers like Edge and Brave work on top of and will be able to dictate (in the "dictator" sense of that word) what the engine does (and while they might be somewhat responsive to Microsoft, they won't be to Brave). And we already won the battle to keep Windows from tying the browser to the O/S on windows and watched while we lost the war and Google completely took the engine over. Cracking open iOS is going to let Google take over that platform as well, it isn't going to make life any better for Gecko or any other alternative engine.

[lenkite]

Let Apple permit the use of OSS browsers with their native rendering engines - problem solved. Will they do this ? I guess not because it means their native app development is threatened.

[nneonneo]

As far as youtube-dl goes, you can run that on iOS via a Python interpreter such as Pythonista: https://gist.github.com/nneonneo/f6b2d659ba76542e7d27e13598a...

[popcube]

he just pragmatic, if the results are worse than now, someone will not do the "right thing" on moral