I remember reading an article in .net magazine (now apparently defunct) about IE6 and how it was holding back the web. This sort of thing has been going on for ages the problem isn’t crap browsers the problem is crap browsers being dominant. Equally dominant browsers aren’t a problem unless they’re also bad.
So I’m not really all that bothered about Chrome, it’s fairly feature complete and although there are other reasons to not like it, lack of support for the latest standards isn’t one of them. Safari however has been truly awful for a very very long time now. They’ve been memes about how bad it is for well over a decade.
chrome can use their dominant market position to kill all other competing browsers, then they can use their monopoly to kill addons and extensions they don’t like, slow down or break webpages which go against their interests, and so on.
google having a near-complete monopoly on the web scares me more than most issues in tech
You can’t datamine everyone and sell it off as completely as you can with an app running locally on the device. Browser apps are far less profitable across the board. It’s all about money.
They want you to use “apps” even if said “apps” don’t need to be more than a website
That’s largely because the companies want to grab all of your telemetry data, which they can’t do in a browser. Putting it in an app allows them to gather whatever info they want, instead of being siloed inside of a browser.
Also because most phones have operational system’s that are more secure than Windows, so a app is a easy way to block everybody that don’t fit a profile of optimal users and avoid problems/hacking.
Companies dream of a closed internet accessible only from a controllable environment.
Been happily using Firefox and Firefox focus on Android for years. With unlock Origin on Firefox.
Libre wolf version is underway too!
Ironfox is the hardened FF/mobile librewolf
Recently moved to fennec, is ironfox better?
Yes, fennec is nowhere near as hardened/privacy/security focused
Thanks! I will swit h to ironfox.
Really? The FAQ on their page states otherwise :(
maybe? I read it was being worked on. I’m maybe a bit too optimistic
IDK if Firefox is better or worse to use, I just know I don’t want to use a Google browser. So I use Firefox, like on my desktop.
Firefox, which has most of the desktop extensions also working on mobile.
Except for iOS
That is on Apple, unfortunately. Every browser on the App Store is a safari engine with whatever browsers skin on top, essentially.
I thought they lost the court battle about that and were told that they had to actually allow other engines, but I haven’t heard anything else since then.
I believe that apple restricted other browser makers to using safari mobile as a base. Not sure if that’s true/changed, but I’m too lazy to look it up. So maybe take that with a helping of salt.
This is true in America. In the EU, Apple was recently forced to allow third-party browsers. But even in the EU, developing those third-party browsers will take time and money.
Thanks! I knew about the EU rule, and I’d heard they’re basically maliciously complying?
Also, off topic, funny that you replied to this at probably the exact same time I was reading one of your comments in a different thread. Was a really well thought out comment, and I appreciated your take. 👍
Hah yeah, Lemmy is a much smaller community than Reddit. I have started tagging users, and it’s surprising how often I see the same tags in the comments sections.
It’s kinda nice, we’re big enough to have a fair amount of content, but small enough that it still kinda feels like a community.
They have.
Cool, rare instance of my memory not being completely shot 👍
Orion browser on IOS is compatible with firefox AND chrome extensions
Maybe, maybe not – but I’m discounting anything the UK government says on Internet-related issues, so long as they’re trying to insert encryption backdoors into everything. For all we know, this is just an attempt to blackmail Apple and Google over the encryption thing.
Please learn some facts about how the CMA operates before discounting it.
The CMA is independent from the government - it does not have a minister calling the shots.
The encryption stuff is coming from the Home Office, which is directly government controlled.
The CMA and the Home Office aren’t working together at all - they don’t even share an office.
This is not “the government” saying this. It’s the independent competition and markets regulator known as the CMA which, whilst publicly funded, isn’t run by the government.
Only in that they are both particularly anti-competitive. Mobile Safari is, whatever all others may say, far better than chrome, and it’s a pretty awesome browser.
But it does have some limitations to it that a very vocal minority absolutely hates. And that’s fair, but let’s get real about what is “holding back” other browsers: market share in monopoly.
From a web developer’s standpoint, Safari is basically the modern Internet Explorer, though admittedly less extreme. It’s not rare for it to be the last of the major browsers to implement new standards/features, and it’s definitely the most common one to have an incomplete and/or buggy implementation. This sometimes goes on for years when Apple just doesn’t care about a feature. There are some fairly widely-used standards today that it still has a buggy/incomplete implementation of.
Does it still do that thing where it claims to support a feature but then when you actually try and use it it turns out that it doesn’t work? I remember ut used to have a problem with masonry layouts, where it claimed to support them but if you actually used it, it just ignored you and used floats of all things for everything instead.
Literally, none of this is true. Just because you don’t like Safari doesn’t mean you need to lie about it.
I feel like mobile safari is more locked into mobile functionality, less capable of doing “real” browser stuff. I’ve only had an iPhone for a few months and I never felt this limited on android using chrome and Firefox.
Apple only allowed browsers on ios to use webkit, so they quite literally were holding back browser development.
This has only recently been changed, and it appears you can only use an alternate browser engine in the EU, so they are still holding back mobile web browser development for people in most countries.
That’s not holding back browser development, that’s just holding back browser usage.
That’s definitely not the same thing.
Kind of a strange semantics argument at that point. Saying you can only build with X tools certainly impacts development. Why develop something that would never be allowed to be released?
That’s the exact argument you’re making: that X tools are the only way to develop a browser. Ignoring the entire world of other devices available.
If you are only allowed to use internal combustion engines how do you expect to get an electric car?
If you have no where to sell your product, why develop it?
We got electric cars when all we had was the internal combustion engine. What a silly metaphor.
But it’s nice to hear you admit that I was right, and that the browser could definitely still be developed. The proof, of course, is that there are dozens of web browsers out there in active development.
No you just don’t understand the metaphor.
If electric cars cannot be sold, If for example they were actually illegal, then how do you sell electric cars? If
If you have to use the Safari engine for everything and the Safari engine doesn’t support a particular feature, then there is no way to use that feature on iOS. You can’t develop a workaround because the work around would require you to have access to arbitrary system commands, and that’s not how web development works.
For example, there is absolutely no way to implement notifications on iOS without iOS support for web notifications, without that API there is no way to interface with the operating system. There is no way you can build workaround code for that.
Sorry I wasn’t granular enough for you I figured you’d get the whole thought - if I am not allowed to sell anything but ice cars ( can only use WebKit on the largest group of consumers) what would be the incentive for me to create one unless I can also afford to create a platform or brand to release them on (nobody with the capital to do this is going to make something to the benefit of the users)
It has nothing to do with usage. It’s a restriction that’s imposed on the browser developers.
Mozilla themselves claim that this makes development harder for them.
By forcing developers to have the same limitations as their own browser, apple has made it difficult for competitors to gain an edge over safari.
Safari definitely gets more hate than it deserves. I find it to be perfectly acceptable.
I would prefer more competition though, even though I know today it’ll be a ton of “cram some AI into it” slop.
Personally, I find Safari to be a goddamn amazing browser, especially considering a lot of its features. People here, the free and open source folk, absolutely hate it on the sole purpose that it is owned by a corporation. And, although it does share user data, anonymize’s that data to a great degree, and also prevents fingerprinting. Also, Apple does not sell it data that it collects, they only use it for internal purposes.
I find no problem with that. I think another huge issue is the difficulty in writing Safari extensions – – especially, that you have to pay for access to the developer store (although they may have changed that for Safari ext devs).
I’m a user experience, designer, so whenever gives the best experience to the end user is, obviously, the correct choice. There’s only so much the “experts” get to have a say in how any random individual uses the tools at the disposal.
That said, I absolutely love Safari as a web browser, but I definitely understand how a lot of people do not.
I hate Safari not because it’s owned by Apple, but because it makes my life more difficult when doing web development. It’s basically the modern Internet Explorer, though admittedly less extreme. It’s not rare for it to be the last of the major browsers to implement new standards/features, and it’s definitely the most common one to have an incomplete and/or buggy implementation. This sometimes goes on for years when Apple just doesn’t care about a feature. There are some fairly widely-used standards today that it still has a buggy/incomplete implementation of.
Literally, none of that is true. Your heat has made you unreasonable. I don’t have time for unreasonable people.
Regarding extensions, my understanding is that Apple makes it hard to prevent a bunch of trash extensions showing up that don’t do anything worthwhile.
Orion browser, created by the folks at Kagi, allows both Chrome and Firefox extensions. It’s way better than it was a few years ago, but still has some rough edges. Better than normal safari at least!
I have no idea exactly what that means.
But Apple provides extensions for most functionalities, but, as you mentioned, they’re more limited because Apple used to require that extension developers register a $100 per year account in order to develop extensions.
They don’t do this anymore, but it was a big reason why Safari got held back, especially in the beginning of the browser wars.
I get your point that it’s not specifically Chrome or specifically Safari that are holding other browsers back, but Apple and Google own the vast majority of market share in mobile devices and by extension, browsers used in mobile devices. I think that’s the crux of what the investigation is getting at
Although I may not have been as effective as seeing it, that’s pretty much what I was trying to say. Thank you, I suppose, for putting it into more understandable and relatable terms.
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Oh, I didn’t realize this was posted earlier. Thumbnail gave the wrong impression.
