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Comment by tjoff

9 months ago

Neat, question is if any of the browsers actually have had time to make use of it though?

It's not as simple as that, you're basically asking browsers to target a completely different platform, just for the EU users, where iPhones are nowhere near as popular to begin with.

Google might at some point maintain two completely different Chromes targeting iOS, but I doubt anyone else will (including Firefox). Even with Chrome, I wouldn't bet on it. It's a very difficult technical problem with no clear, easily-marketable benefit to most people.

Apple knew what they were doing, they've "complied", but in a way where nobody would bother.

  • As far as I know a native Chromium port to iOS is well under way. Whether Google will release Chrome is a different question, but I think it's likely. I think Google would love to bring Blink Chrome on iOS everywhere and there is a decent amount of momentum with developers and regulators to pressure Apple into allowing third party browser engines even outside the EU, but that completely goes away, if no actual engine get's ported to iOS. Blink Chrome on iOS probably gets a lot of enterprise web apps to drop WebKit support. That would probably that Chrome gets way more market share on iOS and with it lot's of telemetry for Google and also less money to Apple for default search engine placement. It's not great for the web as a standardized platform, but it will probably happen anyways.

  • The EU is pretty big. For a population of about 450 million people with decent spending power maybe it is worthwhile.

  • No I agree, that was exactly my point.

    It's not like iOS users care anyway, or they wouldn't use iOS in the first place.