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Comment by rimunroe

8 months ago

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

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

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

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

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

  • > because the free market has spoken

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

    > If their users preferred a more feature-filled browser

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

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

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

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

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

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