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0 pointsamartya91611y ago0 comments

Yes, Apple is definitely to "blame" as far as handicapping UIWebViews are concerned. That being said, the new WKWebview is supposed to have all the Javascript optimizations (and the Nitro engine) that mobile Safari uses.

Chances are that it might still not be as fast as Safari, but Firefox should bite the bullet and just do it because:

a. Firefox cannot afford to not be on all platforms. With computing devices converging and relying on handshakes (data syncing?), missing out on a major mobile platform is foolish.

b. In a related point, syncing bookmarks/tabs via Firefox sync is severely handicapped by it's absence on iOS.

c. There is a fantastic niche where FF can fit in on iOS. It'd be as privacy centric as Safari and with an iOS launch would be cross-platform like Chrome (without Google peddling their products front and centre). They could also get some inspiration from mobile Opera on iOS that has fantastic data saving features in-built.

0 pointsamartya91611y ago0 comments

Chances are that it might still not be as fast as Safari, but Firefox should bite the bullet and just do it because:

a. Firefox cannot afford to not be on all platforms. With computing devices converging and relying on handshakes (data syncing?), missing out on a major mobile platform is foolish.

b. In a related point, syncing bookmarks/tabs via Firefox sync is severely handicapped by it's absence on iOS.

0 comments

5 comments · 2 top-level

Yoric11y ago· 2 in thread

Well, Apple is also definitely to "blame" for forbidding Gecko on iPhone, a number of years ago. I may be wrong, but I seem to remember that there used to be a prototype build of Firefox Mobile that ran on iOS, but Apple made it clear that it would not be accepted on the Store.

Developing an Apple-compliant Firefox for iOS would mean developing an entirely separate browser, which basically wouldn't share a single line of code with either Firefox Desktop, Firefox for Android, Firefox OS or Firefox for Firefox OS, plus it would be using a (reduced version of) WebKit, so it would not have the same behavior as the other Firefoxen and it would require yet different Firefox Development Tools.

If this platform was a high priority, this might be feasible, but it might take several years, at the expense of some other project and Apple would still be in position to shoot down Firefox for iOS (again).

So I don't think that this is going to happen any time soon.

Excavator11y ago

You're not thinking of Junior¹ are you?

1: 30min in @ https://air.mozilla.org/product-design-at-mozilla/

nnethercote11y ago

No. There was a port of real Firefox to iOS.

apayan11y ago· 1 in thread

For what it's worth, WKWebView is still astonishingly buggy and hangs quite a bit when loading some pages with XHRs. There are some other bugs that trigger these 10+ second hangs, but we couldn't delay shipping anymore so we reverted back to UIWebView.

amartya916OP11y ago

Darn. Thanks for letting me know. I was thinking of starting to experiment with WKWebView for an app that currently uses UIWebViews. So I guess FF using WKWebViews (even if they can get over the philosophical/techinical difference with Apple) is some ways off.

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