It is astounding that overzealous Apple employees and fan boys will employ circuitous mental gymnastics to substantiate Apple policies, instead of simply allowing an open-market to thrive on iOS. It's as if open markets where consumers are allowed to choose works against Apple
Consumer choice is a red herring. So for that matter is Firefox, which Google has stomped out on Android. Apple's policy is 100% aimed at preventing Google from controlling the future of iOS.
Yes, giving users choice does mean loosening your control of your platform. I don't believe Apple thinks consumer choice would cause Google to control the future of iOS.
Apple is clearly moving towards a more secure set of operating systems and that starts by reducing the attack surface.
On macOS, Apple is deprecating kernel extensions; the boot partition on macOS Catalina is read-only so that it can’t be modified by malicious software: https://wccftech.com/macos-catalina-runs-on-dedicated-read-o...
Even Safari on iOS doesn’t support browser extensions.
>instead of simply allowing an open-market to thrive on iOS.
The App Store paid developers $34 billion in 2018; I would say the market is thriving: https://fortune.com/2019/01/28/apple-app-store-developer-ear...
>Safari/webkit, with a purposefully depleted feature set
Just checked html5test.com from my iPhone 7 running iOS 13.2.2; Safari scores 463 and Firefox 48 mobile scored 468 out of 555 points. And this is without enabling a bunch of experimental work-in-progress features: https://imgur.com/a/Y5NHwct
So there's no meaningful difference in capability of these browsers when it comes to features.
Of course, Safari is faster, requires less RAM and consumes less power, which should count for something on a mobile device.
You go to lengths to defend Apple, but do not have the guts to let the consumer pick a Google/Mozilla alternative engine. What is Apple so scared of, if not a level playing field.
This is the same company that retroactively modified it's store policies to substantiate booting steam off the app store. Courage in the face of competition, not!!
The illogic here is a little scary: Firefox and Safari on iOS basically have the same level of web standards compliance according to html5test.com, yet one is intentionally not implementing features?
No fanboyism; just the facts.
> The App Store paid developers $34 billion in 2018; I would say the market is thriving: https://fortune.com/2019/01/28/apple-app-store-developer-ear....
They said open market. Apple's closed market is thriving, but the open market doesn't exist on iOS.
As for Safari using less power and ram on mobile there is no evidence that Firefox would uae more of either since Apple doesn't allow it to run. As far as we know if other browsers were allowed to run some might compete on power and ram.
As for security, chrome on desktop has a superior track record. The CVE list proves this, so by denying competition Apple denies users more secure browsers.
Firefox is slower, requires more RAM and uses more power on macOS now; it’s highly unlikely that essentially the same engine running on iOS would run significantly differently.
Of the mainstream browsers on macOS, Firefox has always been the slowest.
The goal is to preserve privacy by default--no extensions required. The vast number of users don't install them or wouldn't know which ones to install.
Brave is secure out of the box and doesn't require extensions to protect your privacy: https://brave.com/features/
Safari also doesn't require extensions to protect your privacy: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy—https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention-policy/
Apple first shipped Intelligent Tracking Prevention in June 2017, long before Firefox or any other browser had anything similar: https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...
