For all your criticisms against Safari you still bought the most expensive phone on their lineup. So I guess they got so many other things right so you apparently still believe they ship the best phone out there.

I used to wish for Firefox on my iPhone too. But after a while I got skeptical this would benefit me or other users. Apple was the one to make the hard decision to kill Flash, and Firefox is known to have done their missteps too. So what if they are right in their decision and Safari does have a role in the reason you and so many others consider the iPhone the best phone to buy?

Well, I actually don't consider it the best phone to buy; I consider it among the best hardware. I think a Google Pixel is a much nicer and more comfortable phone, although the iPhone has a far better screen and is a lot prettier, although its shape is uncomfortable to hold, even with a nice Otterbox.

I'm running GrapheneOS on the Pixel. It is perhaps ironic that the best phone to de-Google is actually a Google, and that Google both allows this and explicitly supports it, but it's not possible to de-Apple any iPhone.

Yours is not the only comment I see here that eventually comes down to the OS discussion.

We are supposedly talking about Safari, yet Safari is tied to iOS not to the hardware. People can install Brave or Firefox on Android. But they are not ever satisfied. I don't have the numbers, but I suspect the sum of GrapheneOS and other de-Googled Android distributions might be bigger than the sum of Firefox and Brave on regular Android.

In the end, maybe Apple should just allow you to download some software that voids your warranty and roots the iPhone, while removing iOS. People can then reverse engineer and do whatever they want. But Apple's drivers and some of the chips are proprietary, and that I don't see a way people would convince regulators to enforce them to open-source those.

If you buy a computer from ASUS, you can download whatever browser you want. If you buy a cellphone from a Android-manufacturer, you can download whatever browser you want.

But if you buy an iPhone, you can only download browsers that are using Apples own browser.

Just because smartphones have traditionally been locked down, doesn't mean that it should be like that.

PCs were also pretty locked down the beginning. And Windows have tried a couple of times to move in that direction. But fortunately, we have a relatively open ecosystem when it comes to devices we use for "producing" things on. It's just missing that the devices we "consume" on works similarly.

PCs weren't made "open" by the government regulations. Any company if it wishes so could start selling a locked down Windows machine with no ability to replace the browser. Nobody will call this company "a monopoly" for that fact alone.

...which is equally ridiculous. If Sony is actively preventing Playstation owners from installing other browsers with their control over app distribution, then that too should be considered malicious and just further indicates how necessary sweeping legislation like this is.

That's exactly why markets aren't defined in that way. See judge's notes from Epic v Apple trial.

> Do you understand that you are spouting conspiracy theory brain poison?

Why don't you actually refute the points they made instead? If it's so obviously "conspiracy theory brain poison"

Webkit quite literally has 100% market-share on the iOS platform, as no other browser engine is even allowed. Same goes for the App Store, 100% market-share.

That's what countered the claim that Windows+IE were 'one product' as opposed to separate, right?

Outside of legal-land this seems like a BS argument, and even more so now. But legal-land is what matter first I suppose.

There was no mobile at the time.

It’s not about mobile or desktop, it’s about marketshare. So just all devices.

IE had a nearly 100 % percent marketshare and Safari is far away from 100 % marketshare.