← Back to context

Comment by troupo

8 months ago

> 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.

  • > If the company dominating their hardware did any better

    Apple doesn't dominate all of hardware. Google, however, dominates major access points to the internet, and used it to aggressively promote its browser.

    > No, at this point I really do just mean "feature-filled".

    I doubt it

    > 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.

    Ah. So you are talking about Google-only non-standards

    > I wouldn't be surprised if next-gen iPhone apps were just PWAs that hook into WebGPU

    Android has been the dominant OS for over a decade now. It has no real or perceived limitations of iOS. We've yet to see a single amazing PWA future we hear so much about.

    • > We've yet to see a single amazing PWA future we hear so much about.

      Then maybe it's time you gave Android another try. Chrome runs on mobile just as well as it does on desktop, so any of the web apps you use on your computer work fine on phone too. It makes modern Safari look like a tofu browser substitute by comparison.

      1 reply →