[rimunroe]

Maybe I missed something but your arguments seem be about how Apple’s locking down of iOS/iPadOS and Safari are harmful to user freedom. That’s a very different argument from the one the person you’re replying to was making. They were saying that the popularity of Apple’s mobile devices coupled with their only running Safari holds back a Chrome monopoly in the browser space. If people don’t support Safari they lose out on a large portion of users.

[talldayo]

> If people don’t support Safari they lose out on a large portion of users.

If people don't support Safari, it's because the free market has spoken and overwhelmingly chooses alternative options: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

The story would be different, if Apple wasn't miserly with their native APIs and App distribution. But this is indeed a harmful and competition-restricting decision, even in Mozilla's opinion: https://mozilla.github.io/platform-tilt/

So I think we can safely assume that Apple's policy harms browser diversity by forcing their users to support a single minority option. If their users preferred a more feature-filled browser, we would never know; they aren't sincerely presented an alternative choice. If Apple wants their users to defend Safari, maybe they should invest in it until their browser (or Operating System, for that matter) competes with Chrome. Until then, they're promoting a megalomaniac solution and being a sore loser about it at the same time.

[troupo]

> because the free market has spoken

You mean the company dominating the internet heavily promoted and pushed users towards its own browser.

> If their users preferred a more feature-filled browser

Where by "feature-filled" you mean "all the Chrome-only non-standards because free market or something"

[talldayo]

> You mean the company dominating the internet heavily promoted and pushed users towards its own browser.

If the company dominating their hardware did any better, maybe the majority of them wouldn't leave Safari. If Apple doesn't want to build a competitive browser, then they need some (non-anticompetitive) strategy to retain their users. Otherwise we're doing the Microsoft Shuffle again.

> Where by "feature-filled" you mean "all the Chrome-only non-standards because free market or something"

No, at this point I really do just mean "feature-filled". iOS has notoriously restrictive APIs and it makes full sense that those users would want a browser do do the things Apple prevents their iPhone from doing natively. At the rate Apple's heading, I wouldn't be surprised if next-gen iPhone apps were just PWAs that hook into WebGPU. Big-business has no reason to keep living under Apple's thumb, and market regulators can't justify it in Europe, Japan or even the United States.

[troupo]

> If the company dominating their hardware did any better

Apple doesn't dominate all of hardware. Google, however, dominates major access points to the internet, and used it to aggressively promote its browser.

> No, at this point I really do just mean "feature-filled".

I doubt it

> iOS has notoriously restrictive APIs and it makes full sense that those users would want a browser do do the things Apple prevents their iPhone from doing natively.

Ah. So you are talking about Google-only non-standards

> I wouldn't be surprised if next-gen iPhone apps were just PWAs that hook into WebGPU

Android has been the dominant OS for over a decade now. It has no real or perceived limitations of iOS. We've yet to see a single amazing PWA future we hear so much about.

[talldayo]

> We've yet to see a single amazing PWA future we hear so much about.

Then maybe it's time you gave Android another try. Chrome runs on mobile just as well as it does on desktop, so any of the web apps you use on your computer work fine on phone too. It makes modern Safari look like a tofu browser substitute by comparison.

[troupo]

> Then maybe it's time you gave Android another try. Chrome runs on mobile just as well as it does on desktop

So?

> so any of the web apps you use on your computer work fine on phone too.

So where's the amazing PWA future we hear so much about. All the "amazing web apps" we hear about are shitty slow bad monstrosities that can barely display a few lines of text without jank.

The very few actual great apps which are made ad great engineering effort and expense (like Figma) don't run in full mode on mobile for obvious reasons.

So, my question remains and you haven't answered it.

Edit: There are some web apps here and there which are surprisingly good. E.g. I'm quite impressed by Foodora's app. And it runs well on iOS, too. However, 99.9999999% of the "great PWA future" is just garbage despite the "Chrome runs just as well on Android".