Relatedly, all Google apps (e.g. Maps) on iOS try very hard to push Chrome on you (even though iOS Chrome still has to use WebKit). When you click an external link, they present you the options of Chrome, Google (the search app), or Safari. This happens even if you don't have Chrome/Google installed, so they take you to the App Store instead of opening the webpage. If you choose Safari, it still doesn't open Safari, it opens a web view inside Google Maps, from where you have to press yet another button to get it to open as a actual Safari tab. The menu has a "remember my choice for next time" switch, but it seems to reset every few times so it constantly re-nags you.
If the link goes to something that should open in another app (e.g. goes to instagram.com when I have the Instagram app installed), unless I satisfy its demands to install Chrome, it takes like 3 extra clicks to open in that other app.
teekert · 1m ago
If you use DDG browser or FireFox you'll find it dangling even below Safari, in a unattractively colored button "default browser". A slap in the face of course, why do you think I have an alternative default browser?
technimad · 1h ago
As a user I don’t get why Apple allows this user hostile behavior in an app they distribute in their app store.The platform has alternatives. iOS has a sharing sheet. iOS has a default browser setting (in EU).
OptionOfT · 11m ago
Same with Reddit. They have their own share sheet, and then 'other' which goes to the iOS built-in one.
I wish Apple was more strict on this. There is no reason for them to have their own. Same with the photo viewer.
I love the iOS photo viewer, it allows me to select text directly to copy it etc, but Reddit needs to use their own.
On the other hand, it should be possible for me to set up a default photo viewer.
mrkstu · 1h ago
You have to download Google Maps in the first place- my (older teen and adult) kids don’t even have an entry point for Google, they just use Apple’s built in apps + ChatGPT.
jmm5 · 42m ago
Even Google Search relentlessly nags you to download the Google Search app.
vishnugupta · 34m ago
Is it useful anymore? I switched to DDG a few years ago and then OpenAI search. Even when I was on DDG exclusively I didn’t miss Google search at all. And occasionally when I use Google search I get terrible results filled with garbage ads and the likes.
SpaceNoodled · 8m ago
DDG is just Bing
SirMaster · 26m ago
Hmm, mine doesn't seem to do this.
layer8 · 1h ago
Google Chrome and Search offer in-app purchases from which Apple receives a share.
SpikedCola · 11m ago
In the same way, Apple is equally difficult about forcing the use of Apple Maps.
If you receive an address in an iMessage, clicking/long-holding will always open in Apple Maps. There is no way to share to Google Maps (it doesn't appear in the list), and the default setting to use Google Maps doesn't affect iMessage.
You have to copy the address, switch to Google Maps, paste it in, and search. I would much prefer clicking the address to open in the app of my choice.
fkyoureadthedoc · 1h ago
Also extremely annoying that they implement their own share menu that you have to do an extra tap on to get to the native share menu. Amazon does this as well.
I assume it's so they can track what option you choose.
jermaustin1 · 1h ago
Reddit does this, too. It is used to measure sharing something as some sort of analytic/goal on your account for engagement. I tend to just screenshot them now after the annoying middle menu started popping up for me.
I really am not a fan of apps wanting me to engage more with the app when I'm trying to engage with real-life people.
kccqzy · 36m ago
I don't experience this extra Share menu in Google Maps. The share button at a location directly brings up the iOS native share sheet.
fkyoureadthedoc · 31m ago
I don't use Google Maps, YouTube is what I was thinking of.
kccqzy · 16m ago
Ah okay. I never watch enough YouTube to download its app.
aikinai · 1h ago
I despise that phantom Share menu!
kccqzy · 34m ago
I do not experience this at all. I remember having seen the browser choice screen in Google Maps but it consistently remembers my setting and does not nag me each time. My default browser isn't even Safari (it's Quiche Browser) and Google Maps correctly opens Quiche Browser whenever I click on a link.
te_chris · 1m ago
Yeah it's so stupid. I'm this close to ditching them.
davidcbc · 2h ago
I have never experienced this on iOS. I just tested it in Google maps and despite having Chrome installed it opened in Safari (my default) with no prompting or extra steps, it just immediately opened Safari
kalleboo · 1h ago
I just had this happen to me in Gmail last week. The last time it showed the nag screen was probably a year or so ago when I turned it off, so it seems they flipped it back on to boost some quarterly KPIs.
layer8 · 1h ago
Google Maps on iOS has a toggle “Ask me every time” that you can turn off, which maybe you did at some point.
DanielHB · 2h ago
Are you in the EU?
mahmoudhossam · 1h ago
I am in the EU and I still get the nag screen sometimes, it's awful.
davidcbc · 1h ago
No
empath75 · 1h ago
This just started with me with youtube links last week. Super obnoxious.
giingyui · 1h ago
In gmail you can long press a link to get it to open in external safari. But, it’s undoubtedly painful and annoying.
wodenokoto · 2h ago
The most infuriating of those are when you do a web search from safari and google give you an overlay on the result asking if you want to “continue” and if you do want to “continue” it tries to install the google app and breaks any way of getting back to your search. Because continue doesn’t mean “continue what you are doing”
I can’t believe that their search deal with apple allows that.
simondotau · 1h ago
I get that all the time. It's such an overtly dark pattern. Sad and disgusting.
stockresearcher · 3h ago
Even if you get past the roadblocks Apple has put in place, it’s not beer and skittles for browser makers in the EU.
The CRA, which is now in effect, lists browsers as class I important products. Technical documentation, design documentation, user documentation, security conformance testing, a declared support period at the time of download, software bill of materials, the legal obligation to respond to and make all your internal documents available to market surveillance organizations, etc.
And if the EU doesn’t publish harmonized development standards by 2027, you will be required to pay a 3rd party to come in and analyze you, your design, and the security of your browser, and make a report to send to the market surveillance organization, who gets to decide if you have the requisite conformance.
Are you sure that anyone but the big boys want to make a browser in the EU?
Here is the law, please point out where I am wrong. Much appreciated :)
We are not used to this in our field - at least if you are not developing traditional safety critical systems - but just think about the amount of paperwork you have to go through in order to construct a bridge or an airplane. Browsers have become a critical component and it seem not really unexpected that there will eventually be legal requirements to help to ensure that browsers are safe given the amount of software that runs on top of browsers.
op00to · 1h ago
Holy cow, they’re serious:
Penalties:
• Up to €15 million or 2.5 % of global turnover for essential requirement failures.
• €10 million or 2 % turnover for other obligations.
• €5 million or 1 % turnover for misleading or incomplete documents
On the one hand, these are important standards. On the other, it seems impossible for small shops to adhere to a lot of this.
poisonborz · 1h ago
Watch them not enforce this at all whenever they need something from the US, like how they delayed (and afaik still do) heavy Google/Meta/Apple fines for DMA. Laws don't matter, only enforcement. See TikTok ban.
FirmwareBurner · 1h ago
Hear me out, I have a tinfoil hat theory. What if, those requirements weren't put to help small shops making a new browser, but to guarantee the big shops who already have a browser are getting fined? *hits bong*
gjsman-1000 · 1h ago
And this is why the EU's GDP versus the US is now only 65% and shrinking. The regulations are about beating US companies into compliance, sometimes with righteous motives; but there's no forethought on how a domestic EU startup might be able to comply, or how a startup would convince investors to take the gamble.
hshdhdhj4444 · 56m ago
Yeah, because EU software companies were totally destroying the American software industry before the last decade…
The EU’s relatively shrinking GDP has much more to do with their populations growing older and their population size stabilizing, and the relatively tiny amount of migration, than EU digital laws, most of which have been replicated throughout the world.
Additionally, the EU has always had weak financial markets, and the only strong financial center, the city of London, quit the EU and both the EU and the city of London have suffered because of that, with a whole bunch of LSE listed companies moving to New York (including possibly Shell, which would be devastating for London as a financial center).
FirmwareBurner · 46m ago
>The EU’s relatively shrinking GDP has much more to do with their populations growing older
I'm not buying this argument. Same how the US's economy isn't stronger because Americans have more kids because we're not talking about agrarian civilizations here where every pair of hands on the farm ads proportional labor output. In service based economies, a smart person with a wealthy VC behind him can generate the GDP growth of tens of thousands of traditional labor jobs so population growth isn't the bottleneck.
EU economy is weak not because of lack of more kids, but because they have not captured any high growth industries (specifically tech) to generate better jobs and new wealth for future generations of youth. Europe is all old wealth and in the hands of old people. Once the economy becomes a fixed pie with no growth, population growth follows suit. EU economy is weak because after 2008 they went the route of austerity while the US printed it's way out dumping cheap money on fueling economic growth.
If Europeans would hypothetically start having way more kids tomorrow, those kids would end up being even poorer having to share the same fixed pie of limited economic resources. Another argument why more kids != wealthier for Europeans, is a news I read today of another local university graduate who moved his start-up to the US, so what's the point in making more kids if they have no funds to increase the GPD here and they leave? More kids with no comparable growth in money = those kids competing with India or Bangladesh.
gjsman-1000 · 51m ago
That's not necessarily true; as the EU had many major players, especially historically: SUSE, Ericsson, Nokia, SAP; all were or are being shredded by US competition despite a domestically entrenched position. Even in 2008, when both economies did badly, the EU and the US had nearly identical GDP figures.
The EU might point to ASML as a point of pride; but that assumes an ASML competitor wouldn't get tens of billions to compete the moment ASML is inconvenient.
RamblingCTO · 22m ago
you mean the US GDP is bigger because the US lacks consumer and environmental protection?
gjsman-1000 · 19m ago
Everything has tradeoffs. You can protect children extremely well, if you mandate that every household have a live-in social worker, subsidized by the government with a 30% caretaker tax on top of standard income tax. If a government were to pass such legislation, do you hate children and love money that much to want to repeal it?
At some point, protections are not feasible - and the EU's "consumer and environmental" protections are apparently unfeasibly expensive in their current form to have a competitive economy. This is also self-defeating, as only in the context of a competitive economy, would these protections have any merit or be enforceable. Beggars can't be choosers.
dns_snek · 50m ago
As usual this is a panicked overreaction. No, startups won't be fined out of existence by the iron fist of regulators who despise innovation.
> (93) In relation to microenterprises and small enterprises, in order to ensure proportionality, it is appropriate to alleviate administrative costs without affecting the level of cybersecurity protection [...] It is therefore appropriate for the Commission to establish a simplified technical documentation form targeted at the needs of microenterprises and small enterprises. [...] In doing so, the form would contribute to alleviating the administrative compliance burden by providing the enterprises concerned with legal certainty about the extent and detail of information to be provided. [...]
> (96) In order to ensure proportionality, conformity assessment bodies, when setting the fees for conformity assessment procedures, should take into account the specific interests and needs of microenterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises, including start-ups. In particular, conformity assessment bodies should apply the relevant examination procedure and tests provided for in this Regulation only where appropriate and following a risk-based approach
> (97) The objectives of regulatory sandboxes should be to foster innovation and competitiveness for businesses by establishing controlled testing environments before the placing on the market of products with digital elements. Regulatory sandboxes should contribute to improve legal certainty for all actors that fall within the scope of this Regulation and facilitate and accelerate access to the Union market for products with digital elements, in particular when provided by microenterprises and small enterprises, including start-ups.
> (118) [...] specify the simplified documentation form targeted at the needs of microenterprises and small enterprises, and decide on corrective or restrictive measures at Union level in exceptional circumstances which justify an immediate intervention [...]
> (120) [...] When deciding on the amount of the administrative fine in each individual case, all relevant circumstances of the specific situation should be taken into account [...], including whether the manufacturer is a microenterprise or a small or medium-sized enterprise, including a start-up [...]. Given that administrative fines do not apply to microenterprises or small enterprises for a failure to meet the 24-hour deadline for the early warning notification of actively exploited vulnerabilities or severe incidents having an impact on the security of the product with digital elements, nor to open-source software stewards for any infringement of this Regulation, and subject to the principle that penalties should be effective, proportionate and dissuasive, Member States should not impose other kinds of penalties with pecuniary character on those entities.
stockresearcher · 17m ago
I have two comments:
First, I believe that you are correct in that small enterprises are not going to be fined out of existence (unless they continually fail to adhere to CRA requirements). The issue is that if you want to make a browser in the EU, you have to be extremely serious about it.
Second, you are quoting from the section of the act that the EU uses to lay out their reasoning, justification, and thought process. This section is not legally binding. The actual text (page ~21 and beyond in the linked document) is what controls. We have seen from DMA enforcement in regard to Apple that the EC does not consider conflicts between the two sections to be important.
p0w3n3d · 1h ago
First of all.
We must not agree that all the market will be taken by one engine (i.e. Chromium)
Sadly there's no incentive for this, of course we have Firefox (still, right?) but it may perish because of underfunding for example. We used to have opera, IE, those engines are lost.
So what I think about the EU directive is that it basically allows one company (Google) take over the whole market. Because what we have to choose between is MS Edge (Chromium), Chrome (Chromium), Vivaldi (Chromium) and other Chromium based forks. And I forgot about Firefox which is the margin atm.
I didn't want to say that Apple should allow other engines. What I wanted to say is that I'm scared that once iOS allows installation of chrome, there will become only one engine in the world and THIS will be THE MONOPOLY we don't want to have.
amiga386 · 29m ago
> Firefox [...] may perish because of underfunding
You could do a lot with 3.8 billion dollars, if you spent it on your core mission and not chasing Bay Area trendy shit. Mitchell Baker is still there, making phat bank, she's just the chair of the Mozilla Foundation instead of being the CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
93po · 49m ago
i think it's unlikely firefox would perish. there are endless open source forks of major browsers, including FF, and even of mozilla themselves fell apart over night, people would continue to maintain.
FF's real threat, as open source software, is either:
1. further capture of mozilla and intentional degradation by google to the point of obscurity
2. organizational implosion followed by google deliberating requiring changes to web standards that break firefox in a way that open source contributions struggle to keep up with
3. a paradigm shift in how we use the internet (i.e. people transition to interacting with AI 98% of the time)
United857 · 4m ago
The article doesn’t mention Apple’s persistent refusal of JIT support for 3rd party JavaScript engines, which is a main barrier to implementing a performant 3rd party browser.
semiquaver · 1h ago
> Safari is the highest margin product Apple has ever made, accounts for 14-16% of Apple’s annual operating profit
Does anyone know what this means? Safari is built in to the OS, how exactly would you measure its margin? Are they just talking about the Google search deal?
benoau · 1h ago
They're referring to the "Google Search Deal", where Google shares 36% of ad revenue with Apple in exchange for being default search provider across their devices, an amount approximately $20b/year for basically just not changing the default. Which was revealed in Google's antitrust trial, where the deal has been deemed illegal.
mort96 · 1h ago
Interesting. So it doesn't have anything to do with the browser engine ban, since Apple presumably doesn't earn money from a Google search from Chrome on iOS regardless of whether it's powered by WebKit or Blink.
hshdhdhj4444 · 1h ago
It does have a lot to do with the browser engine ban.
It means that if someone else comes up with a much better browser engine than Safari’s, iPhone users cannot use it so Safari remains competitive even though it may have a browser engine that’s lacking, since others are forced to use Safari’s browser engine and not their much better engine.
nikanj · 1h ago
Safari has a minuscule team and brings in the Google money
swores · 1h ago
I think it's a bit misleading to call Safari a "high margin product" based on that logic, considering they could make even more profit by not making it at all and just charge Google the exact same money to let them ship Chrome as the default iOS browser... (I mean an actual Chrome browser, not the Chrome skin of a WebKit browser that Google currently has to settle for.)
I'm not saying I'd prefer that scenario, just that it would have been a feasible choice for Apple and as such their Safari costs are actually profit losing not profit generating (other than potentially indirectly, if Apple is correct that limiting devices to their own browser engine improves the product and therefore aids device sales, but I don't think anyone would argue that's significant enough to call it their biggest profit driver).
TheDong · 6h ago
I agree with the point about non-EU web developers.
As long as people in the US can't test their web app on "firefox for iOS" without first buying a plane ticket to the EU and getting an EU sim card, all eu-only browser engines on iOS will be second-class citizens.
I think the next logical extension is that actually limiting general public use across the entire world makes apple less compliant with the DMA. Mozilla will not be able to justify putting significant effort into the iOS port as long as it can only reach a small fraction of users, so in reality the way to get browser-engine competition in the EU is to mandate that apple _not_ impose EU-specific rules about what apps can be installed.
oblio · 5h ago
> As long as people in the US can't test their web app on "firefox for iOS" without first buying a plane ticket to the EU and getting an EU sim card, all eu-only browser engines on iOS will be second-class citizens.
VM is EU. Heck, it can be an ephemeral instance on EC2, so it would only cost money while in use, probably tens of cents or something.
If there's a will, there's a way.
tehbeard · 5h ago
Remote debug on iOS is ass unless you are fully invested into their ecosystem.
And apple has some "nice" licencing nonsense around their software that makes VMs not the "obvious" solution.
oblio · 4h ago
Ah, that was silly from me, I forgot about those shenanigans.
oefrha · 4h ago
I have a bit of experience with cloud mobile simulators (like Appetize). Ignoring the question of whether their simulators have EU builds that allow running alternative browser engines, the experience simply sucks for developing interactive apps.
amadeuspagel · 4h ago
You can't develop an app if you aren't able to test it like a real user would use it on a real device.
agust · 5h ago
Testing mobile interactions such as scrolling and swiping, as well as animations' performance cannot be done through a VM.
Only real devices allow to test these aspects properly.
ThatMedicIsASpy · 6h ago
What a load of BS. How can I test my website on safari without owning Apple hardware? I can't so I don't.
jeroenhd · 5h ago
You can run Gnome Web for free. It's the open source version of WebKit so you won't be able to see all the tweaks Apple adds to their proprietary build, but it's close enough that obvious differences are visible, at least on desktop.
Safari on iOS cannot be tested without paying Apple so I generally don't for my personal stuff either.
All of that said, American developers often can't even be bothered to support characters like ñ or é, so I think it's quite reasonable to expect an EU browser to be a second class citizen for American developers. We can work around that pretty easily by simply not buying products and services that don't work well in the EU.
stavros · 5h ago
Right, but approximately zero people have ever said "this website doesn't work on Firefox, so I won't use this website". They say "this website doesn't work on Firefox, so I won't use Firefox".
kosinus · 4h ago
I think that is true when you initially switch and are still comparing browsers, but I certainly no longer check if something broken happens to work in Chrome. Stuff may equally be broken by my adblocker. Too lazy to debug someone else's work.
Fluorescence · 4h ago
Too often the only sites I find are broken in Firefox are "necessary" things like financial and medical things. I rarely see any issue with hobby and nonsense sites where "laziness" might be excusable.
It's the perverse incentives where companies with a captive audience that can't easily churn will be the ones that ship broken half-arsed sites and not care.
One phenomena I am seeing more that makes me boil with fury is infinite captchas in Firefox. If Firefox increasingly gets excluded "for security" then...
disgruntledphd2 · 2h ago
> One phenomena I am seeing more that makes me boil with fury is infinite captchas in Firefox
This is driven by enhanced tracking prevention. If you turn that off for the respective site, then it goes away.
Fluorescence · 2h ago
Good to know.
Pretty sure I try disabling protections in such situations but maybe not. I returned to the last site that did it to me to try this out (on a different machine) and it didn't captcha me at all with protections on! Ugh.
pessimizer · 2h ago
> One phenomena I am seeing more that makes me boil with fury is infinite captchas in Firefox. If Firefox increasingly gets excluded "for security" then...
I can't figure out if this is true. I certainly get constant captchas, but everybody else I know who uses firefox is also ad-blocking, dropping cookies, resisting fingerprinting, forging referers, downloading embedded videos, etc. etc... A lot of us look like anonymous bot traffic because we are trying to look like anonymous bot traffic. I don't know what the solution would be.
idonotknowwhy · 4h ago
Zero percent maybe. I personally changed banks when they broke Firefox support and said to use chrome.
I welcome the Safari walled garden because if Apple have to allow chrome on ios, that's the end of any cross browser testing (and the end of Firefox)
No comments yet
pmontra · 5h ago
I develop on Firefox and it works on Chrome and Safari with no issues on all OSes (Windows, Mac and Linux). In the extremely rare case when there are some platform specific issues customers tunnel to my dev machine and check the web app (it's Vue) with their iPhones or Macs. I remember only two issues in about 3 years with this customer, all of them with the Apple ecosystem:
1. A form that could not find anymore a picture when they selected it from the Mac Photos app. Apparently Photos creates a temporary file that disappears before the browser submits the form, when probably reads it again from disk. No problems when the picture is loaded from a normal folder. We should read the picture into the memory of the browser and add it to the form from there, of transition to a JSON request. My customer decided that it's a niche case and it's not worth working on it.
2. A slight misalignment of an arrow and a checkbox, but that also happens in a different way with Chrome and Firefox, so there is some structural bug in the DOM/CSS of those UI elements. We're working on that.
Except those issues I can't remember any cross browser or cross OS problems in the last years. If it works in Firefox it works in Chrome and Safari too.
bookofjoe · 1h ago
Go to an Apple store or use a friend's hardware.
TheDong · 5h ago
I mean, ideally you can choose to _not_ do so, tell your users "We only support Firefox and Chrome on iOS, and not Safari, because we do not own apple hardware", and then report bugs to mozilla/chrome if iOS users report differences.
Being able to run cross-platform browsers on iOS does in fact make the very thing you're complaining about better.
I would love it if the EU did in fact force apple to release a cross-platform iOS emulator to allow web developers to properly test iOS browsers, but presumably apple would argue that there are strong technical reasons there (and the DMA differentiates real technical reasons from monopolistic arbitrary roadblocks).
For making browsers available across regions, that's very obviously not driven by strong technical reasons. Making cross-platform code has real technical burden.
jeroenhd · 5h ago
I've worked at a company that did this. We didn't have Apple hardware (except for a very old Mac that took forever to boot). Chrome was promised, Firefox was often tested, Safari was unsupported.
Customers bought Samsung tablets to use our SaaS product. If you're in the right area of business, you can just ignore Safari.
> but presumably apple would argue that there are strong technical reasons there
They already have to make the appropriate iOS simulators and firmware for European developers. Making that available to American developers costs them nothing extra. They just don't want to.
pickledoyster · 5h ago
> tell your users "We only support Firefox and Chrome on iOS, and not Safari, because we do not own apple hardware"
I'd be pissed if someone did that for my browser engine of choice. Also, from what I understand, Apple still leads in accessibility, so this would be an asshole move towards consumers stuck in that ecosystem just because Google and Microsoft can't get their act together.
mcny · 4h ago
> I'd be pissed if someone did that for my browser engine of choice.
I read it differently. I don't think they said somehow block people from using their browser of choice, but that if you report an issue, the first thing tech support will do is ask you to use a different browser. I think it is reasonable.
conradfr · 6h ago
Not the most practical but you can rent a macOS VM.
ThatMedicIsASpy · 6h ago
A hobby dev will not do such thing.
sakjur · 5h ago
I don’t think hobby developers are the cause for concern here. To me, these steps should be taken for professionally developed services where there is a reasonable expectation of accessibility (in my mind this would roughly speaking be those that are either publicly funded or where the revenue is at least a million euros).
For smaller businesses and hobbyists it feels like expecting support for all major browsers would be discouraging in a negative way. I appreciate digital art even if it doesn’t work in my favorite browser and a shitty online menu for a food truck is better than none.
conradfr · 5h ago
It costs 10 cents an hour though.
@javcasas for sure it's not practical if you want to develop with it, I was more thinking of testing on preprod/prod.
But maybe ngrok can be sufficient to test your local dev from the VM?
javcasas · 5h ago
Plus moving stuff into the VM, opening a vnc connection, testing that it doesn't show properly, uploading a tweak to see if it improves, testing again, and so on.
10 cents is the smallest of the associated expenses. You are ignoring all the other expenses.
chrismorgan · 5h ago
You’ll only get rates like that if you’re reserving at least a month’s usage.
For small amounts of usage, the cheapest I’ve ever seen is $1 per hour, with a minimum spend past $30, with various further strings attached. And most are much more than that.
conradfr · 3h ago
Apple has a 24h minimum mandate so I guess I stand corrected.
OK, that does look like it actually is only €2.64 per day. Having looked carefully a few years ago and briefly skimmed now, the absolute cheapest other provider I’ve seen in small quantities was over 8× that price.
wizzwizz4 · 4h ago
Browserling has a usable free trial. They have a finite number of VMs dedicated to the trial, so sometimes it takes a while to get to the front of the queue, but it's been good enough when I've needed it. https://www.browserling.com/
freeAgent · 6h ago
It’s relatively easy to own Apple hardware when one lives outside the EU, but basically impossible to use that hardware to run their own browser engine on iPhones or iPads.
lmm · 5h ago
> How can I test my website on safari without owning Apple hardware?
Download the windows version from their website?
If Apple doesn't want to make their browser available for other hardware that's on them and they'll suffer the consequences. Blocking other entities from making their browser available on Apple's hardware is very different.
homebrewer · 5h ago
What's the point in testing on a browser that hasn't been updated in 15 years, even if you bother to set up a VM specifically for it (since every other browser works on all three OSes)?
I remember Safari for Windows. It had a Mac chrome that was extremely weird to look at on Windows XP. It did work but Apple killed it after a short while, maybe because they decided that after all the iPhone was not going to use web apps Apple could not cash on, but native apps Apple could get their 30% from the store.
mtomweb · 6h ago
And it can’t just be the woefully insufficient TestFlight 10k users because there are possible upwards of a million developers who need to test their websites/web apps in the EU.
fabian2k · 6h ago
The simple fact that they restrict this to the EU, where they are forced to provide the option, shows that Apple is not serious about this. They're barely fulfilling the letter of the law here.
If this would be only about security as Apple claims, there would be no reason to restrict this to the EU and to force Browser vendors to publish other engines as separate apps after they meet the security conditions Apple imposes.
sealeck · 4h ago
> The simple fact that they restrict this to the EU, where they are forced to provide the option, shows that Apple is not serious about this. They're barely fulfilling the letter of the law here.
Apple may or (more likely) may not be complying in terms of allowing third party browser engines, but I don't see how you can argue that not implementing this _outside_ the EU fails to comply with EU law (which applies _inside_ the EU).
That's not to say they shouldn't allow this elsewhere (although it will just cement the Chrome monopoly - actually _decreasing_ competition and solidifying the incumbent's position) but I don't think you can argue that this law requires them to do that.
fabian2k · 4h ago
I'm not saying this is against the law, but it is clear that Apple only moves exactly as far as the EU forces it to, not a bit more. And within the limits the law allows, they're doing everything they can to make it tedious and difficult to actually get alternative apps stores or browser engines on their OS.
sealeck · 4h ago
> it is clear that Apple only moves exactly as far as the EU forces it to
I don't think this is a secret - Apple publicly opposes these kinds of laws.
> And within the limits the law allows, they're doing everything they can to make it tedious and difficult to actually get alternative apps stores or browser engines on their OS.
Sure, it's unclear what the EU can do to oppose this though. If they push too far they risk invoking the wrath of the much more powerful US government.
carlhjerpe · 2h ago
The EU does not risk invoking the "wrath" of the "much more powerful" US government by telling Apple to stop abusing it's customers, market and developers.
You have progressive states passing similar legislation as the EU within the US so I bet they'll be getting the firm hand first if anything.
mrkstu · 57m ago
If states get too onerous the Feds will pass similar, very much less restrictive legislation, which will have the effect of nullifying state legislation due to federal supremacy.
giingyui · 5h ago
It’s actually the opposite, no? If it’s about security it makes sense they choose to compromise the security of their platform only where they are forced to.
MangoToupe · 5h ago
Security for who against what threat? It's hard to make the case this is possibly in the users' interest.
This is about securing the phone in Apple's interest against the desires of the user.
bapak · 5h ago
> Apple is not serious about this. They're barely fulfilling the letter of the law here.
Is that surprising in any way?
They've been asked to not reject third party browser engines in the EU. Check.
Google has plenty of developers in the EU so I'm not even sure what people want exactly.
tonyhart7 · 4h ago
they want apple adhere to EU law for everyone outside the EU lol
how can people think like this
tonyhart7 · 4h ago
"shows that Apple is not serious about this"
noo, that how law works
EU make an law that forces Apple to adhere, apple make changes that suit the new law
if its works in EU only then its working as intended
selckin · 6h ago
This Apple policy is the only thing stopping chrome from having a full monopoly, and we should be careful trying to remove it
throwaway229864 · 3m ago
This is an understandable concern, but it's not actually supported by the data.
On MacOS, where there has long been engine choice, Safari market share is >50%. Defaults are powerful and many users are happy with the real and perceived benefits of the first-party brand.
Safari has >90% market share on iOS today. If engine competition were permitted, they might lose a few percent initially, but would be highly motivated to close any gaps.
There's no world in which WebKit usage among the world's wealthiest consumers drops low enough that web developers can target a chromium monoculture. The purpose of engine choice is to create real competition in order to motivate Apple to do better.
rafaelmn · 4h ago
Google has an incentive to make everything work through the web. Safari has the incentive to gatekeep the app store revenue, which is why PWAs are a joke on iOS.
Google also has bad incentives (Android, ads) but Safari is the IE6 of modern web.
idonotknowwhy · 4h ago
Chrome is the IE6 of the modern Web. Devs are building hacky sites that only work in Chrome.
It's the browser we're FORCED to have installed for the occasional shitty flight or hotel booking that doesn't work in Firefox.
arccy · 3h ago
it's the browser you need when your shitty default browser decided to spend their money elsewhere instead of building a proper browser that can compete against the app store lock in
spicycode · 3h ago
Agreed, that's why we steer people away from Edge.
superkuh · 1h ago
Work? No. Google has an incredible incentive to make everything javascript so they can make money through spying. The web is HTML.
windward · 6h ago
Monopolies are made illegal because they limit consumer choice and the role of competition in the free market, distorting incentives.
The status quo has all of the problems of a monopoly. Doing this or not doing this won't change that. But it will remove another barrier to consumers being able to do what they want.
simondotau · 56m ago
I care about the web remaining a truly open platform based on standards rather than the whims of a singular software project. What matters is browser diversity, even if it's at the expense of browser choice. Because without healthy browser diversity, the web might as well be renamed the Chrome Protocol and you lose browser choice anyway.
Apple, with their iOS browser lock-in, is the greatest gift ever to the open web.
zamadatix · 3h ago
Maybe when all browsing is under one monopoly then we'll finally care to regulate it properly instead of sticking our fingers in our ears and saying we have a different monopoly for iOS users so everything is fine.
elashri · 6h ago
It is shame that this is true. However it should not mean that we need to accept this situation. Hopefully Google anti competitive practices with Chrome can be addressed at the same time.
systemtest · 6h ago
Those popups I get multiple times a day about how this website works better on Chrome , which cover half my screen and which forward me to the App Store, are incredibly misleading. I have misclicked many times and then the App Store opens up. If you go back to the browser and hit the back button, it will again open the App Store. I have to press and hold the back button and skip multiple pages to get back to what I was doing.
RegW · 4h ago
Strange - I don't get this in Firefox. I wonder if its because I'm in the UK or perhaps Privacy Badger is blocking it.
systemtest · 4h ago
This is with the Safari browser on iOS, using Google websites while not being logged in to Google. No content blockers.
elashri · 4h ago
I think we are talking about phones here because on macOS you can use any browser without limitation.
utf_8x · 4h ago
Maybe that wouldn't be the worst thing. Maybe chrome capturing the majority of the iOS market would finally be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back and pushes regulators towards forcing Google to sell Chrome.
idonotknowwhy · 4h ago
100%! Without the Safari walled garden, start ups won't bother considering cross platform testing.
oblio · 5h ago
If Chrome has a full monopoly, guess what's the next logical action...
Might as well get it over with quickly.
In case it's not obvious, these crutches should be removed.
Treat Google paying Apple for the use of Google's search engine and Mozilla for the same thing, as anti-competitive (they're token gestures propping up the monopoly).
And break Google up in multiple companies. Not sure along which lines but I would steer towards platforms (Android + Chrome + Search + Docs + Cloud; banned from entering advertising), Play Store, Ads.
The same thing should be done to Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Nobody has the guts anymore.
bapak · 5h ago
> Nobody has the guts anymore.
I think nobody has the manpower to deal with all the shit. The EU already regularly fines big companies, but for every fine they get away with so much.
oblio · 4h ago
I meant more in the US. I think they had a fairly aggressive head of FTC but she's been removed (Lina Khan?).
eviks · 6h ago
We're very careful, it's not being removed even after blatantly illegal actions, and even then the mandate isn't global, and we've waited for many years.
resource_waste · 2h ago
That is some wild moral coating.
fkyoureadthedoc · 1h ago
It's the unfortunate truth. Nobody gives a shit about Firefox, not even Mozilla. Safari is the only major non chromium browser. You get rid of it and Google basically has full control of web standards and we've come full circle.
bapak · 5h ago
I would not be surprised if Google is lobbying like the whole company depended on it.
amelius · 2h ago
We have to put more power in the hands of one organization that fights for our rights.
This link does not exist right now, but it will allow EFF to take control when necessary. E.g. by nudging people away from Chrome if it becomes too powerful.
alex1138 · 4m ago
Why can't the internet just be fun for once
pmkary · 4h ago
I wonder why they should make iOS specific engines. To be honest only two things come to my mind: Shortcuts Integration and WebExtensions. Currently Orion is trying to bring extensions but I think there is a lot to be done for that to be considered operational and if that proves to work, then only remains Shortcuts which only lets you inject JS, or say get the content of a page from a "Safari" web page (while I think every webview is basically a Safari page).
That brings me to this: Chrome extensions are valuable and we know as early as the rumors of Apple being forced to open up, Google started working on iOS port, but really, is there any justification for bringing a browser engine to iOS? I really don't understand how will it be beneficial when the user probably will notice anything.
Also we only have like four players to enter: Google (which will come), Mozilla (broke and miss-managed as hell), GNOME Web (will never come), Ladybug Browser (they are crazy and will definitely come someday, but it takes a long time for them to be an actual player)
So my question is: Will all this effort even fruit?
agust · 4h ago
Browser engines define the capabilities of web apps and websites. When they don't support APIs or have bugs, they impact negatively web software.
Apple's WebKit is renowned to be lagging behind, refusing to implement crucial features and being rigged with bugs, hence limiting the capabilities and quality of web apps, and effectively preventing them to compete with native apps.
Getting other browser engines on iOS would be beneficial for developers, businesses and end user by making mobile web apps viable.
rgovostes · 2h ago
So these web apps will prompt the user to install and configure a third-party browser engine?
agust · 1h ago
The likely outcome of alternate, capable browser engines coming to iOS will be to push Apple to invest in Safari so it can compete with them and not loose all of its market share.
Otherwise, yes it's likely web apps will prompt their user to use a browser with a capable engine on iOS if they exist. Nothing to configure, install and use.
Users will then be able to use capable web apps that take up a tenth of the storage of native apps, that are cheaper and portable across platforms — among many other benefits.
j45 · 1m ago
It's too bad Apple still doesn't allow different browser engines.
Perhaps there's some scenario where webkit usage collapses and chrome increases here that I'm not seeing, and/or some security management issues.
Increasingly I'm looking at remote streaming browsers to get what's needed for some use cases.
v5v3 · 7h ago
That you for your ongoing work Open Web Advocacy.
Tepix · 6h ago
Yes, Thank you! Someone has to do it, Apple is clearly dragging their feet as much as possible.
v5v3 · 39m ago
Just so you know, my post thanking you has 15 upvotes at present.
So 16 people are thanking you together.
v5v3 · 17m ago
19
simondotau · 50m ago
The open web requires browser diversity in order to remain healthy, far more than it needs individuals to have browser choice. The former is important for the health of open standards; the latter only matters if you believe the web is whatever Google implements in Chrome.
Without healthy browser diversity, the web might as well be renamed the Chrome Protocol and the "browser choice" you care about so much is gone.
wdb · 4h ago
I am not convinced this will help getting more browser engines in general. Currently, it's Chromium that dominates. That's worse than webkit only on iOS in my opinion.
ygritte · 3h ago
Apple's malicious compliance all the way down. They need to get hit with fines that actually hurt.
scarface_74 · 3h ago
Two of the arguments just aren’t true.
If you use another browser today even if it does use Apple’s engine, Apple’s not making search revenue from Google.
The second point is that it came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games and in app purchasing. Those apps are not going to the web.
Third, if the only thing stopping great web apps is Apple, why aren’t their popular web apps for Android and why do companies that produce iOS apps still create Android apps instead of telling Android users to just use the web?
mtomweb · 1h ago
1. If you use either "Safari" or "Chrome" on iOS, then Apple gets paid. That's 97% of the market on iOS.
2. Many of those games could be rewritten in WebGPU/WebGL2.. if it saved them 30% appstore tax, and the install process was decent and they had frictionless payments, they'd move.
3. Because Apple is the primary target market, and if you've already built native for iOS, what's the advantage of doing web for Android if your not making the cost savings of only having to build one app. 70% of Desktop usage is now the web/web apps... that tells you what's possible if browsers can compete.
JustExAWS · 1h ago
That’s not true. Apple only gets paid for search going through Safari to Google.
If the game makers are do interested in saving the 30% tax, then why aren’t they making the games web based for Android? Gabe makers want the easy in app purchases and getting kids who while they don’t have credit cards on their phones, do have access to buy content in apps with parental controls.
How is iOS the primary market when 70% of mobile phones both worldwide and in the EU are on Android?
If they already have a web app for PCs, then why do they need to make an Android app too if web apps are so great on Android?
And if the web makes such a good platform for games, then why aren’t there more great games on the web that would run on PCs and Android unmodified?
lozenge · 2h ago
Yes but there's no reason to use another browser today, because the browsers aren't able to add differentiating features.
I don't think you are correct to assume games can't go to the web. Any feature they need from native APIs can be added to the web. Full screen, gyro, vibration, multi touch, payment APIs, notifications, WASM and GPU support are already on the web!
scarface_74 · 2h ago
Then why aren’t profitable games based on web technology on Android if it is just Apple holding it back?
But it’s not about the technology even then. Games make money via in app purchases by whales. In app purchasing is easy and they are able to tap into kids spending money. Most parents aren’t going to put their credit cards on kids phones. They will let kids do in app purchases with parental controls that are available on the App Store.
jsnell · 2h ago
I think the argument is that as long as 3p browsers are forced to be just thin WebKit wrappers, it's harder for them to compete against. Why even bother switching from the default when it's going to be the same slop with a different brand?
scarface_74 · 2h ago
Most people don’t care about the web engine. The ones who use Chrome now on Android care about bookmarks syncing, Google passwords, etc.
jsnell · 52m ago
How about you let the browser makers decide whether they need to have their own engine to compete?
The fact is that Apple makes tens of billions in pure profit from Safari, and by closing off one of the principal ways of browser differentiation have ensured that they don't even need to invest in Safari. They can just lean back, safe in the knowledge that there is no risk of disruption.
(Like, the main selling point of Firefox on Android is support for browser extensions, and they're only able to do that thanks to having their own browser engine rather than using the platform-provided one.)
You never know where exactly the next steps in browser innovation are going to come from, but it is virtually guaranteed that they won't be just in the UI chrome. If you're e.g. going to make the best agentic AI browser in the world, it's not going to happen by reskinning Safari, and as a corollary Apple doesn't need to worry about competing with such a browser.
JustExAWS · 44m ago
Yes because of all the great browser innovation on Android there are a plethora of great web apps on Android and companies are taking advantage of it so they can make one app that serves computer users over the web and Android users?
And Safari has had real browser extensions for years on iOS.
Where is the browser “innovation” on Android - the platform with 70% market share?
Last I checked, Firefox isn’t doing to well on Android either…
Now basically the situation is: No browser vendor wants to port their engine, because cost > benefit.
I think the discussion should focus more on why benefit is this small for users to switch.
With browser selection dialog, I think vendors have already 0 cost channel for UA. I don't think new binary would make a big difference.
komali2 · 2h ago
> Safari is the highest margin product Apple has ever made, accounts for 14-16% of Apple’s annual operating profit and brings in $20 billion per year in search engine revenue from Google. For each 1% browser market share that Apple loses for Safari, Apple is set to lose $200 million in revenue per year.
Right now in many MRT stations throughout Taipei, there's ads for Safari. I don't think I ever in my life have seen an advertisement for a web browser until now. I guess now I know why.
Jyaif · 5h ago
> Safari is the highest margin product Apple has ever made.
Anybody has the number of committers to webkit from Apple? It would give us a good idea on the margin of the product.
Assuming 100 engineers costing Apple 500k per year, that's 50 millions in investment for 20 billion in revenue.
> For each 1% browser market share that Apple loses for Safari, Apple is set to lose $200 million in revenue per year.
They should be investing like crazy to make Safari the best browser out there instead of just relying on their monopole. And why the fuck is there no Windows version to make their iOS users happy?
Batman8675309 · 5h ago
> They should be investing like crazy to make Safari the best browser out there instead of just relying on their monopole. And why the fuck is there no Windows version to make their iOS users happy?
Simple. Apple doesn't want you to use Windows. They want you to buy an expensive Apple computer instead.
llm_nerd · 2h ago
FWIW, there is a very high probability that Google's $20B yearly payment to Apple is going to vanish, pending a current trial.
Safari is actually a pretty great browser, both technically and from a user perspective, and the complaints often levied on sites like this usually boil down to "Why do alternatives to Chrome exist? So annoying! I'm incredibly lazy and want to just deploy whatever half-baked non-standard ad-benefiting nonsense Google threw into Chrome this month". There was a Safari for Windows for some time but they had a small enough uptake that they abandoned it.
doabell · 4h ago
> They should be investing like crazy to make Safari the best browser out there
So true. It didn’t occur to me that I had naturally assumed Safari to be worse, when it would have been better in a more competitive market. So by relying on monopolistic behavior, Apple is also partly responsible for the Chromium monopoly (that this law will help solidify).
layer8 · 3h ago
They don't want their iOS users to be happy using Windows.
robin_reala · 5h ago
Why would you only count engineers?
Jyaif · 2h ago
Same reason I choose 500k, it's an approximation.
openplatypus · 1h ago
Can we finally start putting dimwit Apple execs in jail?
saagarjha · 6h ago
Unfortunately the problem here is that Apple decides that they are the only entity that knows how to do security and no you can't see how they do it. This means whatever choices they make are clearly the right ones.
ingohelpinger · 2h ago
sell your apple stonks
nntwozz · 4h ago
Another reminder of Rockefeller’s reputed remark, “Competition is a sin.”
Apple is behaving like the Standard Oil Company of the 2020s.
pickledoyster · 5h ago
On top of that, iOS continues to push Safari on users by disregarding their default browser settings.
Steps to reproduce:
0. Select a different default browser, delete the Safari app (just for good measure, even though it's not really possible just like deleting IE in older Win versions)
1. Open the Books app
2. Select text
3. Select Search
4. Press Search the Web
5. Safari search results open as you stare in disbelief
khalic · 4h ago
This is because the safari app is a wrapper for apple’s webview, which is the only way to display web content on iOS, that’s what the article is talking about
pickledoyster · 26m ago
No. This is not webview, this is opening a full Safari browser instance and disregarding the user's default browser setting. It also used to be the case with doing a dictionary look up anywhere in iOS too, where the user selects a word, uses the popup menu to Loop Up, and then selects Search Web. This resulted in the absurd situation where you're using your default browser, looking up a word, selecting Search Web and then having Safari (again, not the default browser) open with a search query. Thankfully, at least that behavior has changed recently
boroboro4 · 5h ago
They do similarly with dates and calendar app. Disgraceful.
FirmwareBurner · 4h ago
Apple knows that what they're doing is against the law, but every day, every month, every year they can get away with it, till the hammer of the law inevitably strikes, is more money in their pocket. So delaying it by every means necessary is what's in their best interest, it's what their lawyers are paid to do because each such decision of conforming to the law boils down to an accounting decision for them: "are the potential fines bigger than the profits".
You know a company has long lost the innovation race when the company is run by the lawyers and bean counters instead of the engineers, trying to milk their product lines form 10+ years ago. I wonder how long until they resort to becoming a patent troll ... oh wait. Their final form will be selling ads to their users.
ezst · 4h ago
Tech giants need to be dismantled.
jjani · 3h ago
Western governments just need to toughen up. If China tells Apple to stop doing something by next Monday, they'll have it changed by then.
"But due process!!". For individuals and SMEs, sure. For mega companies, absolutely not. Getting to rake in billions of profits should come with a loss of privileges, not with a gain. That needs to be the trade-off.
rayiner · 2h ago
I agree, we shouldn’t have due process for corporations.
FirmwareBurner · 3h ago
>But due process!!".
If only they would give the same due process to the users and app devs before they close their accounts.
Companies want and exploit all the perks of the liberal democratic western societies that helped them make what they are today and reciprocate with defying the laws and tax avoidance, while bowing down to foreign dictatorships no problem.
The only way you stop them abusing this is to put an executive to jail. Because that's why they instantly bow down to China. Braking the law in China is a legal problem with personal accountability, breaking the law in the west is just an accounting problem that you can easily pay your way out of.
The moment you put someone in jail, everyone stops breaking the law immediately, because nobody likes the idea of going to jail.
Coffeewine · 2h ago
If Careless People is to be believed, not even then. In that book Facebook was perfectly happy to have employees spend time in jail, as long as it wasn't Zuckerberg or Sandberg.
komali2 · 2h ago
It's not just that people go to jail in the PRC, after all it's not like Tim Cook or other western executives need fear extradition to the PRC or something, it's more like because for better or (mostly) worse the PRC is a single party government, if one aspect of that government says "do this, or we close this 1.3 billion person market to you," it's a threat with actual teeth.
In the USA any given administration can try something like that and one party or the other will work with whatever company is being sanctioned out of pure spite, or will know that divisions in the USA mean that all that a company needs to do is play just enough lip service to appear respectful to the current admin. Worse case scenario, they wait four years. See: nvidia flagrantly selling cards to the PRC through Singapore.
I disagree with the "dictatorship of the proletariat" ideology, but to be fair the remnants of it that survived Deng Xiaoping does seem to somewhat work in resisting the influence of foreign capitalists.
FirmwareBurner · 2h ago
>it's not like Tim Cook or other western executives need fear extradition to the PRC or something
Tim Cook isn't going to jail in China, Apple has local employees of their branch that can go to jail and pretty sure they don't want to so they aren't gonna defy their government.
>I disagree with the "dictatorship of the proletariat" ideology
Sure, but then the masses easily switch their opinions when they see the whole due process is only for the super rich, and when they break the law it's an open and shut case.
komali2 · 1h ago
> Sure, but then the masses easily switch their opinions when they see the whole due process is only for the super rich, and when they break the law it's an open and shut case.
I'm a bit confused by this, can you help me understand what you mean?
msgodel · 1h ago
It's why I think they're such a great short.
WesolyKubeczek · 4h ago
They say that somewhere one Darl McBride makes a sad chuckle reading this.
IshKebab · 4h ago
Google does this too on Android in a few places. Stuff still opens in Chrome even if Firefox is the default.
I have this installed and all links I can choose between Kiwi Browser or Firefox.
kyriakos · 3h ago
Isn't kiwi discontinued?
sexy_seedbox · 3h ago
Yes, last update was April 2025. Their developer recommends users to move to MS Edge, which I have not made the switch just yet.
kyriakos · 2h ago
Just checking if it got updated because I switched to vivaldi after lack of updates (don't feel comfortable with a browser that doesn't get security patches) but kiwi was good and I wished it development continued.
0xTJ · 4h ago
I have Chrome disabled, and every link that I open comes up in the standalone non-full-browser version of Firefox. I don't know if it would behave differently is Chrome was available, but I don't give it the chance.
xnx · 4h ago
Do you know of an example? I use a non-Chrome browser on Android and can't remember encountering this.
seritools · 4h ago
it's the "thin" browsers that are half-embedded in other apps, such as Google News. In the menu you can see "Running in Chrome" and "Open in <yourdefaultbowser>"
tricot · 2h ago
This feature is called Android Custom Tabs and it is supported by most browsers on Android afaik.
I use Firefox for this purpose, but it is possible that certain Google apps always use Chrome for this, not entirely sure.
ffgbbvv66 · 4h ago
Some apps specifically open chrome, e.g. chatgpt was doing that for login. Dunno if still is.
the_third_wave · 4h ago
No Chrome, no problem. Just remove it or - better still - never install it. Use an AOSP-derived distribution like Lineage, use Cromite as system we view and all your browser engines are belong to you.
resource_waste · 2h ago
That literally sounds like Windows 11 with edge.
shusaku · 5h ago
Honestly those barriers they complain about are not so high. I don’t believe any major browser vendor is deterred by this.
If the link goes to something that should open in another app (e.g. goes to instagram.com when I have the Instagram app installed), unless I satisfy its demands to install Chrome, it takes like 3 extra clicks to open in that other app.
I wish Apple was more strict on this. There is no reason for them to have their own. Same with the photo viewer.
I love the iOS photo viewer, it allows me to select text directly to copy it etc, but Reddit needs to use their own.
On the other hand, it should be possible for me to set up a default photo viewer.
If you receive an address in an iMessage, clicking/long-holding will always open in Apple Maps. There is no way to share to Google Maps (it doesn't appear in the list), and the default setting to use Google Maps doesn't affect iMessage.
You have to copy the address, switch to Google Maps, paste it in, and search. I would much prefer clicking the address to open in the app of my choice.
I assume it's so they can track what option you choose.
I really am not a fan of apps wanting me to engage more with the app when I'm trying to engage with real-life people.
I can’t believe that their search deal with apple allows that.
The CRA, which is now in effect, lists browsers as class I important products. Technical documentation, design documentation, user documentation, security conformance testing, a declared support period at the time of download, software bill of materials, the legal obligation to respond to and make all your internal documents available to market surveillance organizations, etc.
And if the EU doesn’t publish harmonized development standards by 2027, you will be required to pay a 3rd party to come in and analyze you, your design, and the security of your browser, and make a report to send to the market surveillance organization, who gets to decide if you have the requisite conformance.
Are you sure that anyone but the big boys want to make a browser in the EU?
Here is the law, please point out where I am wrong. Much appreciated :)
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L...
Penalties:
• Up to €15 million or 2.5 % of global turnover for essential requirement failures.
• €10 million or 2 % turnover for other obligations.
• €5 million or 1 % turnover for misleading or incomplete documents
On the one hand, these are important standards. On the other, it seems impossible for small shops to adhere to a lot of this.
The EU’s relatively shrinking GDP has much more to do with their populations growing older and their population size stabilizing, and the relatively tiny amount of migration, than EU digital laws, most of which have been replicated throughout the world.
Additionally, the EU has always had weak financial markets, and the only strong financial center, the city of London, quit the EU and both the EU and the city of London have suffered because of that, with a whole bunch of LSE listed companies moving to New York (including possibly Shell, which would be devastating for London as a financial center).
I'm not buying this argument. Same how the US's economy isn't stronger because Americans have more kids because we're not talking about agrarian civilizations here where every pair of hands on the farm ads proportional labor output. In service based economies, a smart person with a wealthy VC behind him can generate the GDP growth of tens of thousands of traditional labor jobs so population growth isn't the bottleneck.
EU economy is weak not because of lack of more kids, but because they have not captured any high growth industries (specifically tech) to generate better jobs and new wealth for future generations of youth. Europe is all old wealth and in the hands of old people. Once the economy becomes a fixed pie with no growth, population growth follows suit. EU economy is weak because after 2008 they went the route of austerity while the US printed it's way out dumping cheap money on fueling economic growth.
If Europeans would hypothetically start having way more kids tomorrow, those kids would end up being even poorer having to share the same fixed pie of limited economic resources. Another argument why more kids != wealthier for Europeans, is a news I read today of another local university graduate who moved his start-up to the US, so what's the point in making more kids if they have no funds to increase the GPD here and they leave? More kids with no comparable growth in money = those kids competing with India or Bangladesh.
The EU might point to ASML as a point of pride; but that assumes an ASML competitor wouldn't get tens of billions to compete the moment ASML is inconvenient.
At some point, protections are not feasible - and the EU's "consumer and environmental" protections are apparently unfeasibly expensive in their current form to have a competitive economy. This is also self-defeating, as only in the context of a competitive economy, would these protections have any merit or be enforceable. Beggars can't be choosers.
> (93) In relation to microenterprises and small enterprises, in order to ensure proportionality, it is appropriate to alleviate administrative costs without affecting the level of cybersecurity protection [...] It is therefore appropriate for the Commission to establish a simplified technical documentation form targeted at the needs of microenterprises and small enterprises. [...] In doing so, the form would contribute to alleviating the administrative compliance burden by providing the enterprises concerned with legal certainty about the extent and detail of information to be provided. [...]
> (96) In order to ensure proportionality, conformity assessment bodies, when setting the fees for conformity assessment procedures, should take into account the specific interests and needs of microenterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises, including start-ups. In particular, conformity assessment bodies should apply the relevant examination procedure and tests provided for in this Regulation only where appropriate and following a risk-based approach
> (97) The objectives of regulatory sandboxes should be to foster innovation and competitiveness for businesses by establishing controlled testing environments before the placing on the market of products with digital elements. Regulatory sandboxes should contribute to improve legal certainty for all actors that fall within the scope of this Regulation and facilitate and accelerate access to the Union market for products with digital elements, in particular when provided by microenterprises and small enterprises, including start-ups.
> (118) [...] specify the simplified documentation form targeted at the needs of microenterprises and small enterprises, and decide on corrective or restrictive measures at Union level in exceptional circumstances which justify an immediate intervention [...]
> (120) [...] When deciding on the amount of the administrative fine in each individual case, all relevant circumstances of the specific situation should be taken into account [...], including whether the manufacturer is a microenterprise or a small or medium-sized enterprise, including a start-up [...]. Given that administrative fines do not apply to microenterprises or small enterprises for a failure to meet the 24-hour deadline for the early warning notification of actively exploited vulnerabilities or severe incidents having an impact on the security of the product with digital elements, nor to open-source software stewards for any infringement of this Regulation, and subject to the principle that penalties should be effective, proportionate and dissuasive, Member States should not impose other kinds of penalties with pecuniary character on those entities.
First, I believe that you are correct in that small enterprises are not going to be fined out of existence (unless they continually fail to adhere to CRA requirements). The issue is that if you want to make a browser in the EU, you have to be extremely serious about it.
Second, you are quoting from the section of the act that the EU uses to lay out their reasoning, justification, and thought process. This section is not legally binding. The actual text (page ~21 and beyond in the linked document) is what controls. We have seen from DMA enforcement in regard to Apple that the EC does not consider conflicts between the two sections to be important.
So what I think about the EU directive is that it basically allows one company (Google) take over the whole market. Because what we have to choose between is MS Edge (Chromium), Chrome (Chromium), Vivaldi (Chromium) and other Chromium based forks. And I forgot about Firefox which is the margin atm.
I didn't want to say that Apple should allow other engines. What I wanted to say is that I'm scared that once iOS allows installation of chrome, there will become only one engine in the world and THIS will be THE MONOPOLY we don't want to have.
Hindsight is 20/20, but remember that Google has paid Mozilla 3.8 BILLION DOLLARS in the past 10 years alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
You could do a lot with 3.8 billion dollars, if you spent it on your core mission and not chasing Bay Area trendy shit. Mitchell Baker is still there, making phat bank, she's just the chair of the Mozilla Foundation instead of being the CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
FF's real threat, as open source software, is either:
1. further capture of mozilla and intentional degradation by google to the point of obscurity
2. organizational implosion followed by google deliberating requiring changes to web standards that break firefox in a way that open source contributions struggle to keep up with
3. a paradigm shift in how we use the internet (i.e. people transition to interacting with AI 98% of the time)
It means that if someone else comes up with a much better browser engine than Safari’s, iPhone users cannot use it so Safari remains competitive even though it may have a browser engine that’s lacking, since others are forced to use Safari’s browser engine and not their much better engine.
I'm not saying I'd prefer that scenario, just that it would have been a feasible choice for Apple and as such their Safari costs are actually profit losing not profit generating (other than potentially indirectly, if Apple is correct that limiting devices to their own browser engine improves the product and therefore aids device sales, but I don't think anyone would argue that's significant enough to call it their biggest profit driver).
As long as people in the US can't test their web app on "firefox for iOS" without first buying a plane ticket to the EU and getting an EU sim card, all eu-only browser engines on iOS will be second-class citizens.
I think the next logical extension is that actually limiting general public use across the entire world makes apple less compliant with the DMA. Mozilla will not be able to justify putting significant effort into the iOS port as long as it can only reach a small fraction of users, so in reality the way to get browser-engine competition in the EU is to mandate that apple _not_ impose EU-specific rules about what apps can be installed.
VM is EU. Heck, it can be an ephemeral instance on EC2, so it would only cost money while in use, probably tens of cents or something.
If there's a will, there's a way.
And apple has some "nice" licencing nonsense around their software that makes VMs not the "obvious" solution.
Only real devices allow to test these aspects properly.
Safari on iOS cannot be tested without paying Apple so I generally don't for my personal stuff either.
All of that said, American developers often can't even be bothered to support characters like ñ or é, so I think it's quite reasonable to expect an EU browser to be a second class citizen for American developers. We can work around that pretty easily by simply not buying products and services that don't work well in the EU.
It's the perverse incentives where companies with a captive audience that can't easily churn will be the ones that ship broken half-arsed sites and not care.
One phenomena I am seeing more that makes me boil with fury is infinite captchas in Firefox. If Firefox increasingly gets excluded "for security" then...
This is driven by enhanced tracking prevention. If you turn that off for the respective site, then it goes away.
Pretty sure I try disabling protections in such situations but maybe not. I returned to the last site that did it to me to try this out (on a different machine) and it didn't captcha me at all with protections on! Ugh.
I can't figure out if this is true. I certainly get constant captchas, but everybody else I know who uses firefox is also ad-blocking, dropping cookies, resisting fingerprinting, forging referers, downloading embedded videos, etc. etc... A lot of us look like anonymous bot traffic because we are trying to look like anonymous bot traffic. I don't know what the solution would be.
I welcome the Safari walled garden because if Apple have to allow chrome on ios, that's the end of any cross browser testing (and the end of Firefox)
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1. A form that could not find anymore a picture when they selected it from the Mac Photos app. Apparently Photos creates a temporary file that disappears before the browser submits the form, when probably reads it again from disk. No problems when the picture is loaded from a normal folder. We should read the picture into the memory of the browser and add it to the form from there, of transition to a JSON request. My customer decided that it's a niche case and it's not worth working on it.
2. A slight misalignment of an arrow and a checkbox, but that also happens in a different way with Chrome and Firefox, so there is some structural bug in the DOM/CSS of those UI elements. We're working on that.
Except those issues I can't remember any cross browser or cross OS problems in the last years. If it works in Firefox it works in Chrome and Safari too.
Being able to run cross-platform browsers on iOS does in fact make the very thing you're complaining about better.
I would love it if the EU did in fact force apple to release a cross-platform iOS emulator to allow web developers to properly test iOS browsers, but presumably apple would argue that there are strong technical reasons there (and the DMA differentiates real technical reasons from monopolistic arbitrary roadblocks).
For making browsers available across regions, that's very obviously not driven by strong technical reasons. Making cross-platform code has real technical burden.
Customers bought Samsung tablets to use our SaaS product. If you're in the right area of business, you can just ignore Safari.
> but presumably apple would argue that there are strong technical reasons there
They already have to make the appropriate iOS simulators and firmware for European developers. Making that available to American developers costs them nothing extra. They just don't want to.
I'd be pissed if someone did that for my browser engine of choice. Also, from what I understand, Apple still leads in accessibility, so this would be an asshole move towards consumers stuck in that ecosystem just because Google and Microsoft can't get their act together.
I read it differently. I don't think they said somehow block people from using their browser of choice, but that if you report an issue, the first thing tech support will do is ask you to use a different browser. I think it is reasonable.
For smaller businesses and hobbyists it feels like expecting support for all major browsers would be discouraging in a negative way. I appreciate digital art even if it doesn’t work in my favorite browser and a shitty online menu for a food truck is better than none.
@javcasas for sure it's not practical if you want to develop with it, I was more thinking of testing on preprod/prod.
But maybe ngrok can be sufficient to test your local dev from the VM?
10 cents is the smallest of the associated expenses. You are ignoring all the other expenses.
For small amounts of usage, the cheapest I’ve ever seen is $1 per hour, with a minimum spend past $30, with various further strings attached. And most are much more than that.
But it's not $1 per hour.
https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/apple-silicon/
Download the windows version from their website?
If Apple doesn't want to make their browser available for other hardware that's on them and they'll suffer the consequences. Blocking other entities from making their browser available on Apple's hardware is very different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)#Windows
If this would be only about security as Apple claims, there would be no reason to restrict this to the EU and to force Browser vendors to publish other engines as separate apps after they meet the security conditions Apple imposes.
Apple may or (more likely) may not be complying in terms of allowing third party browser engines, but I don't see how you can argue that not implementing this _outside_ the EU fails to comply with EU law (which applies _inside_ the EU).
That's not to say they shouldn't allow this elsewhere (although it will just cement the Chrome monopoly - actually _decreasing_ competition and solidifying the incumbent's position) but I don't think you can argue that this law requires them to do that.
I don't think this is a secret - Apple publicly opposes these kinds of laws.
> And within the limits the law allows, they're doing everything they can to make it tedious and difficult to actually get alternative apps stores or browser engines on their OS.
Sure, it's unclear what the EU can do to oppose this though. If they push too far they risk invoking the wrath of the much more powerful US government.
You have progressive states passing similar legislation as the EU within the US so I bet they'll be getting the firm hand first if anything.
This is about securing the phone in Apple's interest against the desires of the user.
Is that surprising in any way?
They've been asked to not reject third party browser engines in the EU. Check.
Google has plenty of developers in the EU so I'm not even sure what people want exactly.
how can people think like this
noo, that how law works
EU make an law that forces Apple to adhere, apple make changes that suit the new law
if its works in EU only then its working as intended
On MacOS, where there has long been engine choice, Safari market share is >50%. Defaults are powerful and many users are happy with the real and perceived benefits of the first-party brand.
Safari has >90% market share on iOS today. If engine competition were permitted, they might lose a few percent initially, but would be highly motivated to close any gaps.
There's no world in which WebKit usage among the world's wealthiest consumers drops low enough that web developers can target a chromium monoculture. The purpose of engine choice is to create real competition in order to motivate Apple to do better.
Google also has bad incentives (Android, ads) but Safari is the IE6 of modern web.
It's the browser we're FORCED to have installed for the occasional shitty flight or hotel booking that doesn't work in Firefox.
The status quo has all of the problems of a monopoly. Doing this or not doing this won't change that. But it will remove another barrier to consumers being able to do what they want.
Apple, with their iOS browser lock-in, is the greatest gift ever to the open web.
Might as well get it over with quickly.
In case it's not obvious, these crutches should be removed.
Treat Google paying Apple for the use of Google's search engine and Mozilla for the same thing, as anti-competitive (they're token gestures propping up the monopoly).
And break Google up in multiple companies. Not sure along which lines but I would steer towards platforms (Android + Chrome + Search + Docs + Cloud; banned from entering advertising), Play Store, Ads.
The same thing should be done to Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Nobody has the guts anymore.
I think nobody has the manpower to deal with all the shit. The EU already regularly fines big companies, but for every fine they get away with so much.
Consider adding this to your website:
This link does not exist right now, but it will allow EFF to take control when necessary. E.g. by nudging people away from Chrome if it becomes too powerful.That brings me to this: Chrome extensions are valuable and we know as early as the rumors of Apple being forced to open up, Google started working on iOS port, but really, is there any justification for bringing a browser engine to iOS? I really don't understand how will it be beneficial when the user probably will notice anything.
Also we only have like four players to enter: Google (which will come), Mozilla (broke and miss-managed as hell), GNOME Web (will never come), Ladybug Browser (they are crazy and will definitely come someday, but it takes a long time for them to be an actual player)
So my question is: Will all this effort even fruit?
Apple's WebKit is renowned to be lagging behind, refusing to implement crucial features and being rigged with bugs, hence limiting the capabilities and quality of web apps, and effectively preventing them to compete with native apps.
Getting other browser engines on iOS would be beneficial for developers, businesses and end user by making mobile web apps viable.
Otherwise, yes it's likely web apps will prompt their user to use a browser with a capable engine on iOS if they exist. Nothing to configure, install and use.
Users will then be able to use capable web apps that take up a tenth of the storage of native apps, that are cheaper and portable across platforms — among many other benefits.
Perhaps there's some scenario where webkit usage collapses and chrome increases here that I'm not seeing, and/or some security management issues.
Increasingly I'm looking at remote streaming browsers to get what's needed for some use cases.
So 16 people are thanking you together.
Without healthy browser diversity, the web might as well be renamed the Chrome Protocol and the "browser choice" you care about so much is gone.
If you use another browser today even if it does use Apple’s engine, Apple’s not making search revenue from Google.
The second point is that it came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games and in app purchasing. Those apps are not going to the web.
Third, if the only thing stopping great web apps is Apple, why aren’t their popular web apps for Android and why do companies that produce iOS apps still create Android apps instead of telling Android users to just use the web?
2. Many of those games could be rewritten in WebGPU/WebGL2.. if it saved them 30% appstore tax, and the install process was decent and they had frictionless payments, they'd move.
3. Because Apple is the primary target market, and if you've already built native for iOS, what's the advantage of doing web for Android if your not making the cost savings of only having to build one app. 70% of Desktop usage is now the web/web apps... that tells you what's possible if browsers can compete.
If the game makers are do interested in saving the 30% tax, then why aren’t they making the games web based for Android? Gabe makers want the easy in app purchases and getting kids who while they don’t have credit cards on their phones, do have access to buy content in apps with parental controls.
How is iOS the primary market when 70% of mobile phones both worldwide and in the EU are on Android?
If they already have a web app for PCs, then why do they need to make an Android app too if web apps are so great on Android?
And if the web makes such a good platform for games, then why aren’t there more great games on the web that would run on PCs and Android unmodified?
I don't think you are correct to assume games can't go to the web. Any feature they need from native APIs can be added to the web. Full screen, gyro, vibration, multi touch, payment APIs, notifications, WASM and GPU support are already on the web!
But it’s not about the technology even then. Games make money via in app purchases by whales. In app purchasing is easy and they are able to tap into kids spending money. Most parents aren’t going to put their credit cards on kids phones. They will let kids do in app purchases with parental controls that are available on the App Store.
The fact is that Apple makes tens of billions in pure profit from Safari, and by closing off one of the principal ways of browser differentiation have ensured that they don't even need to invest in Safari. They can just lean back, safe in the knowledge that there is no risk of disruption.
(Like, the main selling point of Firefox on Android is support for browser extensions, and they're only able to do that thanks to having their own browser engine rather than using the platform-provided one.)
You never know where exactly the next steps in browser innovation are going to come from, but it is virtually guaranteed that they won't be just in the UI chrome. If you're e.g. going to make the best agentic AI browser in the world, it's not going to happen by reskinning Safari, and as a corollary Apple doesn't need to worry about competing with such a browser.
And Safari has had real browser extensions for years on iOS.
Where is the browser “innovation” on Android - the platform with 70% market share?
Last I checked, Firefox isn’t doing to well on Android either…
Firefox’s market share on mobile is 0.53%.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...
I think the discussion should focus more on why benefit is this small for users to switch.
With browser selection dialog, I think vendors have already 0 cost channel for UA. I don't think new binary would make a big difference.
Right now in many MRT stations throughout Taipei, there's ads for Safari. I don't think I ever in my life have seen an advertisement for a web browser until now. I guess now I know why.
Anybody has the number of committers to webkit from Apple? It would give us a good idea on the margin of the product.
Assuming 100 engineers costing Apple 500k per year, that's 50 millions in investment for 20 billion in revenue.
> For each 1% browser market share that Apple loses for Safari, Apple is set to lose $200 million in revenue per year.
They should be investing like crazy to make Safari the best browser out there instead of just relying on their monopole. And why the fuck is there no Windows version to make their iOS users happy?
Simple. Apple doesn't want you to use Windows. They want you to buy an expensive Apple computer instead.
Safari is actually a pretty great browser, both technically and from a user perspective, and the complaints often levied on sites like this usually boil down to "Why do alternatives to Chrome exist? So annoying! I'm incredibly lazy and want to just deploy whatever half-baked non-standard ad-benefiting nonsense Google threw into Chrome this month". There was a Safari for Windows for some time but they had a small enough uptake that they abandoned it.
So true. It didn’t occur to me that I had naturally assumed Safari to be worse, when it would have been better in a more competitive market. So by relying on monopolistic behavior, Apple is also partly responsible for the Chromium monopoly (that this law will help solidify).
Apple is behaving like the Standard Oil Company of the 2020s.
Steps to reproduce: 0. Select a different default browser, delete the Safari app (just for good measure, even though it's not really possible just like deleting IE in older Win versions) 1. Open the Books app 2. Select text 3. Select Search 4. Press Search the Web 5. Safari search results open as you stare in disbelief
You know a company has long lost the innovation race when the company is run by the lawyers and bean counters instead of the engineers, trying to milk their product lines form 10+ years ago. I wonder how long until they resort to becoming a patent troll ... oh wait. Their final form will be selling ads to their users.
"But due process!!". For individuals and SMEs, sure. For mega companies, absolutely not. Getting to rake in billions of profits should come with a loss of privileges, not with a gain. That needs to be the trade-off.
If only they would give the same due process to the users and app devs before they close their accounts.
Companies want and exploit all the perks of the liberal democratic western societies that helped them make what they are today and reciprocate with defying the laws and tax avoidance, while bowing down to foreign dictatorships no problem.
The only way you stop them abusing this is to put an executive to jail. Because that's why they instantly bow down to China. Braking the law in China is a legal problem with personal accountability, breaking the law in the west is just an accounting problem that you can easily pay your way out of.
The moment you put someone in jail, everyone stops breaking the law immediately, because nobody likes the idea of going to jail.
In the USA any given administration can try something like that and one party or the other will work with whatever company is being sanctioned out of pure spite, or will know that divisions in the USA mean that all that a company needs to do is play just enough lip service to appear respectful to the current admin. Worse case scenario, they wait four years. See: nvidia flagrantly selling cards to the PRC through Singapore.
I disagree with the "dictatorship of the proletariat" ideology, but to be fair the remnants of it that survived Deng Xiaoping does seem to somewhat work in resisting the influence of foreign capitalists.
Tim Cook isn't going to jail in China, Apple has local employees of their branch that can go to jail and pretty sure they don't want to so they aren't gonna defy their government.
>I disagree with the "dictatorship of the proletariat" ideology
Sure, but then the masses easily switch their opinions when they see the whole due process is only for the super rich, and when they break the law it's an open and shut case.
I'm a bit confused by this, can you help me understand what you mean?
I have this installed and all links I can choose between Kiwi Browser or Firefox.