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0 pointspfooti10y ago0 comments

That covers everybody on an iDevice - the only browser on iOS is Mobile Safari. Chrome, Firefox, Opera are all skins on top of the Safari Webkit renderer.

Interestingly / Ironically / Whateverally, it doesn't cover a ton of other, non-iOS users. This may be a push to Desktop Safari usage, but I am really uninterested in supporting proprietary browser tech, especially when there are competing open standards, doubly-especially when (as the OP mentioned) Safari in particular doesn't seem interested in supporting other open, interesting APIs.

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nothis10y ago· 2 in thread

Since I never quite figured this out: Why are there no real other browsers on iOS? Is it policy or simply not feasible?

0x010y ago

App Store policy requires any app rendering HTML/JS to use the safari/webkit-backed UI components.

See 2.5.6 here https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

"2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript."

As for why this is, one can only speculate. There used to be an extremely strict "no interpreted code allowed", which was relaxed to "no interpreted downloaded code", which I think (with the addition of the JavaScriptCore framework and the lack of bans on bundling a LUA interpreter as many games do) has turned into a "no major functionality changes or additions in downloadable code". I guess their main concern was developers publishing app updates outside of the app store review team's oversight.

kitsunesoba10y ago

Allowing other browser engines would also mean there'd be a lot more room for vulnerabilities that Apple has no control over. That's not to say that Blink or Gecko or whatever aren't secure, but if either of these engines introduced any kind of severe holes the consequences could be disastrous (and worse, unpatchable for that segment of folks who disable auto update).

Besides that, both Firefox and Chrome on OS X are notorious for power usage issues. There's a very good likelyhood that'd be true under iOS as well and the last thing Apple wants is a bunch of users blaming their iDevices for poor battery performance when the issue is actually web engines that are bad at rationing energy.

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