[richtr]

What is difficult to argue against, and I'm surprised isn't mentioned in this article, is that Apple have completely eliminated market competition from happening around web standards on the iOS platform.

It is impossible to ship e.g. Chromium on iOS right now. We just collectively buy the arguments put forward by Apple to support that position without appreciating the ramifications of not allowing market forces to drive healthy, competitive development.

In that process we made Apple the gatekeeper of web standards development. They can ship whatever they want, when they want and there is no way to build or work around it (e.g. 'Download this alternative browser!').

All we can do is wait, hope or complain. Apple knows the power it wields. I figure Google understands that too hence their position wrt Pointer Events.

[josteink]

> It is impossible to ship e.g. Chromium on iOS right now. We just collectively buy the arguments put forward by Apple

No. Some people buy androids too. Quite a few, last time I checked.

Developers limiting themselves to support apple's modern msie are not allowing the market forces to drive healthy competition.

What? When androids browsers were lagging, locking them out from websites en masse was OK. By the same standards we should be locking out apple laggards this time around? Or are we going to be hypocrites about it?

[shmerl]

Why can't Apple be slapped with an antitrust lawsuit for that? MS was targeted for something very similar.

[hyperpape]

Apple has a minority market share.

[shmerl]

Not if they can control Web standards this way. It means they have way too much influence.

[cududa]

That's not how the Sherman Anti-Trust act defines monopolies, and that's the law they'd have to be prosecuted under. A republican congress probably isn't going to pass laws designed to sanction the most valuable country in the world.

[millstone]

To be fair, it's also impossible to ship Firefox on ChromeOS.

[air]

To be really fair, out of the four biggest browser vendors (MS, Apple, Mozilla, Google) only Google makes it possible to use the other browser engines on their mobile platform.

[azakai]

Preventing other browsers for technical reasons is very different than doing so for policy reasons. iOS prevents other browsers in both ways. ChromeOS (and FirefoxOS, and others) might limit you technically, but do not limit you by policy.

When the limitations are just technical, you can try to work around them, but when they are a flat policy, like Apple does, there is nothing you can do.

[magicalist]

Actually, it would take quite some work to port Firefox, but you could run a NaCl-compiled browser just fine.

[pcwalton]

Not realistically. The NaCl APIs to support dynamically-generated code have to revalidate every time, so they're too slow to support the heavily self-modifying nature of compiled JavaScript.

[eridius]

Why is it impossible? If you want JavaScript support you have to use Apple's JavaScriptCore, but I don't recall any rule that prohibits using a custom web rendering engine paired with JavaScriptCore.

So if anyone wants to build a version of Chromium that uses JavaScriptCore instead of V8, you could presumably ship that.

[air]

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

"Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript"

[eridius]

Huh. I haven't actually read through that document in a while. I thought it just had the prohibition against scripting languages other than the iOS JavaScriptCore (i.e. WebKit Javascript). I wonder why it now states that you must use the WebKit framework as well?

[shmerl]

> I thought it just had the prohibition against scripting languages other than the iOS JavaScriptCore (i.e. WebKit Javascript).

Which is already close to prohibiting other browsers (like Firefox for instance).