I spent years hoping for Apple to see the light, allow other browser engines, AT LEAST give us proper WebM and Opus support. Yet, today, it is no sooner to happening. I finally got fed up and switched back to Android where I grabbed Fennec F-Droid, installed uBlock Origin and finally had a decent mobile browser.
as soon as apple tried to remove flash, they've shown their hand tbh. While it was generally considered good, the ideology behind removal of flash is the same ideology for their policy to not allow other browser engines.
Apple’s dictatorial control over browser engines on iOS represents, somewhat ironically, the last significant defense in the cause of browser engine diversity. While Apple’s motives might be less pure here, the outcomes are no less of a win for the open web.
Of course Safari on iOS supports Opus, but it just doesn't support it in any standard container... which is one of the most pointless things I can think of.
Wikimedia doesn't care. They just load a polyfill with WebAssembly-compiled codecs for VP8/9/AV1/Opus/etc. and do it on CPU. The net effect is that iPhone users get a worse Wikipedia experience for basically no reason.
Those who depended on it got benefits while messing up the lives for everyone else.
To be fair to IE and its modern replacement Chrome, if you develop and test mostly on IE and Chrome you can make things cross browser if you put effort into it, something you couldn't with Flash.
Getting rid of Flash - whatever the reasons was - was a huge gift to the web and by extension people like me who develop on and for an open web.
That thought experiment will help extrapolate the far-out future for both companies and the version of the future they are building towards.
Today with Pixel phones, you can secure boot third party OSes without even voiding your warranty. You can unlock the bootloader. Even if this ever were to go away, Android still has multiple ecosystems and you can sideload apps as long as your OEM doesn't disable this, and Google doesn't.
Apple isn't getting more consumer friendly. iOS is less private than ever, not more, and Apple seems intent on making it worse; they dropped the needless CSAM debacle, but that doesn't mean it should be ignored. Apple has made their position clear: an iPhone is not your phone. It's Apple's phone. You may borrow it on their terms. The law may say otherwise, but Apple thwarts your attempts to work around it.
Android is imperfect; it's definitely not good for privacy if you use stock ROMs, it's behind on security in many fronts, and Play Store lock-in has definitely put a damper on innovation. That having been said, though, at the end of the day, Google gives you options that lets you take control over the device. The future of being able to control your own devices is unclear with remote attestation once again on the horizon, but being able to control what software runs on your device to a decent degree is absolutely an important feature for me, especially after hoping and praying that Apple would eventually fix the problems I had with iOS. But they were not bugs to Apple, they were features, and Apple knows if people could run their own code, those features wouldn't work very well.
That left a bad taste in my mouth. Until it's fixed, I don't think I can consider phones that Apple sells today as serious options as they are a different class of device to Android phones the way that a game console is a different class of device to a typical laptop.
If you don’t want yet another computer to maintain consuming hours of your time, buy an iPhone.
I do use Android for my streaming set top boxes, because of that flexibility. Devices like the Fire TV are flexible, like having an energy efficient and much more affordable version of a PC. But for my phone, for such an essential device that just has to work, it’s too much to ask out of me.
Just to note, There's a full-desktop Firefox available with mobile layout in PostmarketOS for Linux Phones. Here's the device I drive daily[1].
[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Xiaomi_Poco_F1_(xiaomi-be...
Full-fat Firefox felt surprisingly usable on Pinephone under Phosh though.
Even then: Fennec F-Droid is a compelling choice. It has a pretty good mobile experience.
Firefox/Fennec F-Droid is indeed great (Especially since UBO is supported), But unfortunately in Android almost every enthusiast project involves privilege escalation and in this case F-Droid auto update apps requires one too.
Most of these apps (now) also include a JavaScript extension to block the harder ads (eg youtube). This a recent development that apple seems to encourage.
Some apps also offer network-level adblocking by using a local VPN server, which allows for blocking in apps.
It’s worth noting that from Safari 14.1 on macOS 11.3 and from Safari 16 on all macOS they do support WebM fully. (Source: https://caniuse.com/webm.) Still not on iOS, and still no Opus outside of CAF packaging, but one can continue to hope.
