I assume a Chinese company would laugh at a National Security Letter? Since I'm an American, I don't worry about China having my data.
That's an anecdote, but the point is that one can't rely on Norwegian courts for enforcing privacy.
The only thing that sucks about browsers on iOS is that extensions are not supported by the platform. I'd love to have Firefox extensions work on it, but that seems as unlikely as having another browser/JS engine on the platform.
- extract URL and download youtube video to camera roll
- move a running video out of browser into picture-in-picture mode for multitasking
Content (ad) blocking extensions are supported in Safari.
I ask this out of genuine curiosity.
I'd be more afraid of the American government than the Chinese one.
No matter how careful you are, eventually some app somewhere will open an URL, causing Safari to open, but now that it’s not your default browser, all your login state, your favorites and, heck, even just the familiar UI will be missing.
No. Until iOS allows setting a default browser, there is no point to accept this kind of friction and at least I myself feel much better off just using Safari and getting a consistent browser experience even if an app opens an URL.
And I use apps that behave well. For example I use an email reader that can open links in Firefox.
That apps open links in Safary is not true. From this point of view the iOS ecosystem is a clusterfuck as most apps, most notably Facebook, Twitter and Gmail, open links in their own shitty webview.
Gmail on iOS is even disingenuous about it. It has a configuration option allowing you to choose Chrome as an alternative (no Firefox of course), but what they call "Safari" is their own webview, not actual Safari and this matters because it doesn't share session data of course.
My ad blocking app uses a VPN configuration so it works in every single app on my iPhone.
I found it’s actually quite easy to use alternate browsers on iPhone.
I would never trust an ad blocking app with all my traffic data and who the hell knows what else besides the VPN configuration it's installing in that profile.
Installing an iOS configuration profile is more or less equivalent to handing out physical unlocked access to whoever made that profile you've just installed.
I'm not saying your VPN-based Ad-Blocker is doing this. I'm saying they could. And just them having that capability is enough for me to never hand them that capability in the first place.
Ad blocking is fine. But not at this price.
SFSafariViewController now has its own cookie store too unless you use a specific API for authentication purposes, but that will also open a modal dialog the user has to confirm.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Can anyone improve on the horse's mouth: https://www.opera.com/mobile/touch , which also says practically nothing.
Opera seem to be great at adding features, and yet very poor at promoting them.
I use Firefox Focus more than any other app, including for browsing and reading through HN comments. It's got a good ad blocker (though not the fastest [1]), but no options to control ad blocking on a per site basis.
The browser has been improving over time. It also includes an extra layer of passcode/biometric protection that can help prevent others from seeing what you've opened in it. The only issue I've noticed is that it sometimes forgets the page you've loaded after sometime (may be because it doesn't save them to the disk, and when iOS removes it from memory, it starts out again as a blank slate).
[1]: https://brooksreview.net/2018/09/safari-content-blocker-eval...
Focus is perfect for bite-sized browsing. Read and then throw the session away.
The one thing I miss is tabs, which FFF doesn't seem to have.
All the browsers on iOS suffer from one fatal flaw, they crash, often. As I have been told this may have something to do with the OS’s health & safety precautions by killing apps that run away with CPU or RAM use. I don’t know that for certain and I haven’t tried to dig into it further.
Here’s a simple test, find a site that grinds safari to a near standstill, then try that site in Chrome/Edge/Brave on iOS. Chances are it will crash them.
I’d really love to see a healthy ecosystem of browser rendering engines on iOS as well. I understand and have benefited from the walled garden that is iOS but I’d really like Apple to figure this out. Isn’t it ironic how Microsoft got in trouble for anti-competitive practices against Netscape but Apple can block other rendering engines?
For what platforms?
I tried it on Windows, but I have decent adblockers there, and need JS enabled for too many things to bother fiddling with whitelisting sites.
Is there any merrit to this argument?
Just visit
and see what happens when browsing that site.
is this a common problem nowadays?
