Japan: Apple Must Lift Browser Engine Ban by December (opens in new tab)

Kagi made a safari based w är my browser that can use both FF and chrome addons on iOS. I use full uBO and I still don’t care about cookies.

uBlock Origin for iOS was released yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44795825

If you are on another locale, search “ublock origin lite” with double quotes.

or kdeconnect/gsconnect?

uBo has a filter list for blocking out cookie popups, why not use that instead?

I've been doing this too! You can install it as a PWA and get a nice desktop experience.

What did they change on iOS 26 in the keyboard?

I think it bounces thru your phone since if your phone is off you can't use it on the web.

I can relate to not wanting any of the tech giants near my shit but may I ask what your Google concerns are on GrapheneOS?

I also have an iPhone as well as a GrapheneOS phone. They are different but I'm quite happy with those alternatives to the apps you mentioned:

Etar as a calendar frontend app. DAVx5 for syncing CalDAV and CardDAV (so calendar data, contacts and optionally also tasks). I manage tasks within my notes, so I do not really use a todo/reminder app at all but there are different options. tasks.org plugs into DAVx5, for example.

Depending on your server-side setup and your willingness to compromise on open source, are also other options. For example, if you work with an Exchange server, there is the "Nine - Email & Calendar" app which is a very powerful all-in-one-client similar to traditional Outlook on the desktop.

For photos, there are quite a few solid options, depending on what you want. I use the Fossify Gallery with only my Camera folder visible for day-to-day stuff and also have Aves Libre installed for a more advanced interface to my pictures and videos.

Wouldn't people in Japan riot because they can't buy iPhones and be part of the tribe?

There are few things in life people like more than their iPhones.

You’re thinking like an end user and not like someone who has provide tech support for others. One of the best things I did to make my life easier was getting mom a Chromebook.

>freedom to use your phone however you want would necessarily compromise security and privacy for everyone.

For a large enough definition of "everyone", it would. "Everyone" has a Meta app installed. We've seen them pull evil tricks over and over to suck up data 24/7 - most recently running a local server on Android that their websites could talk to to bypass anonymization - and the moment a crack appears in the walled garden Meta will say "go install the FB/Instagram app from our app store with no privacy policy reviews" and a large enough definition of everybody will be much the worse for it.

> One of the most outlandish one being that freedom to use your phone however you want would necessarily compromise security and privacy for everyone.

I suppose in a round-a-bout way, it could, more specifically around iMessage, which is Apple's baby in the US and a big part of their lock in effect for US users.

Right now, you can reasonably assume that using iMessage with another iPhone user that both ends are reasonably secure and private. Break open the walls of the garden and now you could say that you can't trust that the other end you are communicating with hasn't installed some random crapware or malware that's scraping their messages, or recording the screen during a facetime call, thereby compromising your own privacy by interacting with a bad devices.

In that instance, Apple is correct - but what Apple doesn't tell people is that all other forms of digital communication are open to the same risks so they aren't special.

> ... freedom to use your phone however you want

I want to use my phone locked down hard and apps reviewed by Apple. I sleep better with things as they are. I suspect 99% of normal users are in the same boat.

I remember when HN would literally shadowban you for suggesting they do this.

Now with 'troll farms'/'reputation management' being so ubiquitous, we'd call Apple irresponsible to not be doing this.

The security thing is BS anyway; Apple aren't perfect at security and having only one option can make this worse.

Google's Project Zero uncovered quite a few 0 days in Apple's "perfect" operating system. They're not magical wizard cult gods over there, they're just a buncha developers same as 'em all. And given the quality of what's been coming out of Apple _and_ Google recently sometimes I wonder if someone's dug a pit under their supposedly high bars they held in the 2010s. Even just Youtube is a disgustingly buggy app nowadays.

On iOS, I can trust that pretty much everyone in my family won't download something silly that then creates a security hole in their devices. Not sure how you could guarantee that if you could load code post-review. What would be the point of the review, then? Wouldn't the App Store be littered with trojan horses in waiting?

You know what I got my parents an iPhone? To avoid having to worry about stuff.

Now I have to worry about the inevitable phone call from ‘Apple Technical Support

Freedom to use your phone however you like would make bug tracking on Apple's side more complicated and therefore more expensive and therefore it damages their profit bottom line. They would happily freeze development altogether if it was a feasible option.

Apple doesn't instrument apps when they review them. That burden is already there, they've just convinced you otherwise.

Partly because the EU law's phrasing wasn't as "I'll know it when I see it", and partly because apple seems to not care about the spirit of the law and just want to exploit its users.

The japanese law's phrasing is apparently better, but I kinda expect apple to still ignore it and then drag whatever comes through court as long as possible

It's still a huge amount of work to support two ios builds for such a small audience. Also, the prototype they had no has jit because apple makes targeting ios a moving target (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1904546), and it has never been polished enough for end users.

Not having JIT is a showstopper on the modern web where most sites take more javascript than all of windows 3.1 and word perfect combined.

To be fair a tiny fraction of marketshare can represent a very attractive level of revenue depending on the market

Comparing all "tiny fractions" as if they're identical is nonsense.

"Why wouldn't apple make an iphone mini even though it only targets a tiny fraction of people? They already only target a tiny fraction of the living animals on earth because they don't make iphones for fish"

The reality is that japan is less than 5% of iphones, and mozilla has to focus it's limited resources.

Also, if mozilla's, mostly US based, developers can't run firefox on ios, they can't even build it in the first place

But this would be a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44557348

Weakly might even be overstating it. Their roadmap has all this ambitious stuff like sideloading and competing app stores and allowing apps to link to their own payments, that they are aiming to have categorized into priority-buckets by the middle of next year. This could take the rest of the decade to actually be implemented on Apple's side.

Yeah other reasons I've heard of include the obligation to adopt iOS-specific APIs for features like scrolling and text inputs; developing a separate app for these markets and therefore loosing their existing userbase; and signing a pretty crazy contract, among other things.

But the bigger the market they can reach, the bigger the reward, and so at some point it may justify investing resources to work around those roadblocks and accept the drawbacks.

Don't expect Apple to just open the gates and say anything goes as far as the browser is concerned. Instead, look for an Apple build of Firefox and maybe an Apple build of Chrome that you will be able to install.

is Linux usage significant enough in any country to really make judgements about culture from?

Weird argument. Linux mostly operates in a completely different space (enterprise) from where iOS/Chrome (consumer electronics and technology) lives

It'd probably be easier but not good, diversity in engines is good here. We don't want something like the IE monopoly again.

> to switch to Blink, working together with Google making an alternate browser engine for iOS.

How is switching to Blink, a Google-controlled engine, supposed to help creating an "alternative engine"?

Yeah that's why the bigger the market they can reach with a version using their own engine, the more likely they are to invest into doing it.

Now the question is what's the threshold for this market to be big enough? Maybe Japan's joining in pushes it past that point.

Counterpoint: Safari is by far the best mainstream browser, because it's got the only engine that gives half a shit about battery life, and because they push back on shitty features Google wants to make "standard" so they can trash my UX and the computing ecosystem even more.

What is your argument that Safari is not a good browser?

Using market forces to encourage more consolidation into a single engine is *bad*.

> markets working as they are supposed to.

Where Apple is doing everything they can to make that “market” work in their interests instead of as it is supposed to from a user perspective. And when you don't have a choice, it's not really a market either.

It's funny, I prefer to use Safari on iOS instead of native apps because I have more control over shaping my experience (through user scripts and custom css) and Apple's focus on user privacy which may be all lip service, but at least it's part of their talking points; something I don't see with Chrome.

I'm sure Safari sucks to support for web developers and is missing a lot of cool apis, but I'm willing to take those tradeoffs for the increased privacy I get as a result.

That being said, I do think Apple should allow third party browser engines.

Haven’t you heard? The web is dead. It’s now called the Chrome Platform. The standard is defined as whatever Google implements.

Then attack Chrome. There isn’t a moral conundrum here.

>On the other hand it just leads to Chrome monopoly.

If a browser engine continues to exist not on its merits but because its users are locked in, there is zero value in it. If 100% of people switch to chromium based browsers (an open source project) while they have free choice that's how it is. There's nothing inherently wrong with this.

We don't need browser engine DEI. Even the term monopoly is spurious in the world of open source software. Say if in 30 years we have 100% linux market share because open source won, do we need to protect Microsoft so they can lock people into Windows, like some sort of endangered animal program for proprietary software?

There's an inherent contradiction to apply the competitive logic of proprietary platforms to fundamental OSS infrastructure. They'll tend to be natural "monopolies" just by virtue of how resource intensive they are and the desire to standardize.

You've missed the point. Once the restriction on which browsers can be used is lifted, people won't be switching to Firefox in vast numbers. They will be switching to Chrome. Just because someone is able to use Firefox does not mean they will use Firefox.

Firefox is overall a fine browser. Still has 2% marketshare.

There's also the fact that websites themselves need to be mindful of multiple browser engines existing because of Safari. Once users are able to install Chrome on iPhones, developers will just abandon every other engine wholesale.

The only reason why Safari is "shit" is because web developers are too lazy to develop for the web and instead develop for Chrome. The point of the web is that it's an open standard. Expecting everyone to use the bleeding edge version of the most aggressively feature-laden browser isn't just unreasonable, it's counter to the spirit of the platform.

Microsoft got into trouble for pushing Netscape users over to Internet Explorer, but what they did isn't half as evil as the dark patterns Google is using to get Chrome and other Google apps onto the few devices left which don't have them.

It's IE6 all over again. But worse.

Even if Safari was perfect, people would still switch to Chrome because that's what they think they need.

Android phones don't support it globally so saying that Apple is "forced" to compete where Android doesn't proves the point that they're doing more than needed.

Apple having such a dominant hold of market share in the smartphone space gave a lot of leverage when negotiating royalties with Sony who makes the felica stuff. From what I heard it was basically just gifted to them, because if Apple says no we wont support it, then you lose a huge amount of users. Whereas with other manufacturers they pay on a per device basis tracked by the underlying osaifu-keitai stuff. If you are rooted though it is usually just 1 flag or something you need to change. Been using my US Pixel 6 for years daily on my commutes.

https://github.com/jjyao88/unlock-felica-pixel

Small percent of sites will start breaking down in Safari, making small percent of users switch to Chrome. Process will start slow but will only go in one direction, and accelerate.

Apart from ChromeOS, most desktop operating systems default to other browsers. Yet Chrome is estimated to have ~70% of desktop browser market share. So defaults can't be much of a defense against browser advertising, especially on Google-owned properties.

ublock origin is a necessity for browsing the web. Not having it is more than an annoyance for me.

if chrome ever ends up with a majority browser share on ios/ipados, apple won't have any way to keep up. at this point, google already almost 100% controls web standards, and they can push new features (no matter how privacy-hostile or overreaching) without even allowing apple the chance to keep up. at that point, the incentives for apple to keep developing safari would slowly dwindle away.

(oh, and gecko is a joke, especially on mobile - no need to even bring it up)

ugh... so much pain and time trying to get pages to look nice on that decaying pile of bits. I was overjoyed when those sneaky veternan engineers at YouTube put up their banner: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

It's the only reason you don't see a lot more broken websites on Firefox, which would drive its market share even lower.

Lots and lots of Web development projects target Chrome, then make sure it works on Safari. In that second step, they accidentally fix a lot of bugs that'd show up on Firefox, too.

Not a lot of them are bothering to check Firefox directly these days. Hell, a decade ago it wasn't making the test list in tons of cases.

Apple is the only thing keeping web standards in place. Many vendors we work with only support Chrome, including Chrome... on iOS. Which means because on iOS that's just Safari, the website has to meet web standards. So we know thanks to Apple, it'll work on Firefox!

Soon as this happens, Chrome is the web. The OWA knows this, it's their goal, it's an astroturf outfit.

Normally, I'd agree with you -- defaults are a very, _very_ powerful thing.

But if you're using Google's web tools, they make it (too) easy to download their apps and push you in that direction in a million little ways. For example, GMail's native iOS app will either open a link in a WKWebView or Chrome (if it's not installed, it'll prompt you to install it), but you have to jump through some hoops if you want to open a link in the system's default browser. Similarly, if you're searching for something via google.com, they'll put up a prompt to download their search app, with the default "Continue" option taking you to the store rather than continuing with your current task (and then click-jack the back button).

the default windows browser has somewhere between a 5% and 13% market share. i think you're the one overestimating the power of defaults here.

if you hate privacy, want more ai in your browser asap and don't care about battery life and performance, yeah, sure!

Prideful? Possibly.

But what's for-sure is that Apple is hugely profitable. And that browser control is a relatively important part of that profitability. Plain old greed will give Apple ample motive to keep Safari going.

Personifying corporations of thousands (or nations of millions) as if they had driving emotions such as a single person would have is almost always a grave logical error.

Brave is also contributing to the Chrome monoculture, same as how the Android forks are contributing to the Android culture. The base projects are so large that no team will do a proper job updating it if, or when, the source project stops being open source. They are entirely beholden to the original developers, and they will also merge whatever change the original developers do, as the cost of maintaining a fork is big enough as it is, without breaking changes.

I do appreciate these being open-source. But there must not be an illusion that these large projects being open source means that "just forking" works. A culture is much more than a repository.

The way Google handles the Chromium source (one big Git monorepo that's undergoing near-constant refactoring) means anything that doesn't want to hard fork is limited to bolting on a new UI and features around the core rendering engine -- but anything inside that core rendering engine won't be long-lasting.

So Brave, Arc, Dia, Edge, et al., all add their own sauce on top of Chromium, but none of them can make changes like back-porting Manifest V2 back into their Chromium.

Hope they don't do suspicious stuff again again again then.

good for you. you're still supporting google by using a chromium-based browser