Apple serves its Users not Developers, most of whom appreciate there's only 1 icon they need to click on to access the Internet. Only developers think that having multiple browsers to choose from is a value-add - for most users it just adds unnecessary confusion and complexity.
Killing Flash wasn't a FU for Flash Developers. The only reason why Flash was banned was because it provided a poor experience on a touchscreen device, performed horribly and was a battery drain.
The way to get Apple's attention is for Google or Firefox to develop a superior browser and browsing experience on Android, that users take notice is missing from iOS and is regarded as a USP for Android.
> Apple serves its Users not Developers, most of whom appreciate there's only 1 icon they need to click on to access the Internet. Only developers think that having multiple browsers to choose from is a value-add - for most users it just adds unnecessary confusion and complexity.
And Apple's restriction has nothing to do with "only 1 icon"; you can ship competing browsers, and in fact Google ships a "Chrome" on iOS.
The restriction is on the rendering engine.
And note that this restriction does not "serve the users". Users who want a faster, or safer, or more compatible browser with some favorite site of theirs that is pushing the envelope on mobile apps via the web are not able to use a better browsers with a better rendering engine.
Look at how many people run Chrome and Firefox on Windows and OS X, when there is an existing browser available. They are not all "developers"; they are users looking for faster rendering, more compatibility with services that are pushing the envelope of web apps, a safer experience, and the like.
Sadly the Google Chrome on iOS is just a UI over the safari engine. Apple won't let Google port their web engine over to iOS like Google did for OSX. This means that Google Chrome on iOS is stuck with however Apple decides to render the web.
> Apple serves its Users not Developers, most of whom appreciate there's only 1 icon they need to click on to access the Internet. Only developers think that having multiple browsers to choose from is a value-add - for most users it just adds unnecessary confusion and complexity.
Now replace "Apple" with "Microsoft" in that sentence.
First, I think EU was wrong on Microsoft's case with IE integration. At the end of the day, a superior Chrome decimated IE's dominance, not EU's fine or mandatory browser chooser.
Second, at the time IE was stale beyond belief and quite obviously inventing compatibility issues just to further its own dominance. Safari team have done none such thing, they just move at their own pace, doing the usual Apple thing, you can complain about their obliviousness but still attribute malice? That's rich. Webkit is opensource FFS.
Firefox peaked at like 40% market share back in 2007 / 2008, before Chrome was even a thing.
The case against IE was not that Microsoft bundled it with the OS. Its completely different from what Safari on iOS is. The problem with IE back in 2000 was that Microsoft was:
1. Bundling their browser with their OS.
2. Had 90% of the browser market share as a result of (1).
3. Using that market share to break web standards and implement proprietary IE only features that broke html for everyone else and made it impossible to compete, because if you made a standards compliant web browser in 2002 it would not render pages properly that were designed for IE.
I don't exactly know what made the US fed care so much about preserving web standards over a lot of other violated standards by monopolistic entrenched interests, but their suit was entirely about Microsoft using its position as an overwhelming market dominator of web browsers to usurp web standards.
Apple really can't do that. Safari's market share, even as the only iOS browser engine, is peanuts. All they are doing is making their own platform irrelevant, and since they are not doing the whole "proprietary web that cannot render right in Chrome" thing, they aren't an antitrust case for being incompetent.
> Using that market share to break web standards and implement proprietary IE only features that broke html for everyone else and made it impossible to compete, because if you made a standards compliant web browser in 2002 it would not render pages properly that were designed for IE.
Well, Chrome is doing exactly that today. Extending HTML with proprietary features, leading to situatons where websites work "best in Chrome", even today.
The real difference is utterly unrelated to all that.
The reason Microsoft was on the hook was because it was a software vender forcing its choice. Apple is a hardware+software vendor, and when you own both the software and the hardware, you can make more restrictive choices and are not open to the same class of laws.
it's dumb, but that's the main legal difference here as to why the microsoft case doesn't apply to apple.
Preventing other rendering engines is Apple trying to leverage the strength of its iOS platform to help control the future of the internet. Nothing more, nothing less.
I can understand their wanting to have some say on what may be the sole future platform, but lets not pretend it's for some altruistic reason.
"Apple in 2015 is exactly the same company as Microsoft in 1998." OK, gotcha. Substantiation would be nice to see, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
The issue is not "one button," the issue is power management. Even in OS X, there is a noticeable difference in the energy efficiency of Safari vs. Chrome or Firefox. That matters way more on a mobile phone.
If users installed Chrome, and their battery died an hour earlier or more, would they blame Chrome? Most would not. Most people have no idea that different versions of the application (a browser) can have that large of a difference in power drain.
>most of whom appreciate there's only 1 icon they need to click on to access the Internet.
That's clearly bs though. Most of those could continue to have one icon they can click. Nobody is forcing two more icons on them. A page from Windows history - for a long time even though alternative browsers were always available people continued to click on the one blue e icon until IE languished more each passing day and alternatives got better and better. Apple could keep safari top notch and most will not realize that alternatives exist. But if they don't (as current status quo implies they're slower to catch up with standards and fix bugs) people switch and progress continues.
> The way to get Apple's attention is for Google or Firefox
> to develop a superior browser and browsing experience on
> Android, that users take notice is missing from iOS and is
> regarded as a USP for Android.
I think not suffering from websites saying "sorry, iOS is not supported" qualifies as a superior browsing experience.
But Safari for iOS is still pretty standards compliant, performant and modern, and far better than Android as a whole when you consider the huge chunk of Android users on an old version of Android that will never see an update (the same users who will just use the default baked in browser). Saying iOS isn't supported would generally be artificial constraints on the part of the site builder on principle, not an actual practical issue with serving them a web page.
You'd easily be shown to be the asshole when a jailbreaker or someone with a proxy spoofed their user agent and loaded your page just fine. Not supporting a browser without a valid technical reason that the layperson can ever sort of understand will totally undermine your position.
Sure if enough popular Internet properties targeting the mobile web decided to commit commercial suicide and started purposely ignoring one of its most lucrative user-bases. Should enough websites do this, I'd expect it would just increase the appeal of native Apps.
Ultimately I'd think the only noticable effect it would have is the 2s it takes users to navigate away from the site to never return again.
Reading the threads on this page has really solidified for me that this is the exact same phenomenon as the IE winter. Your comment (and a few others) are word for word the argument for why everybody had to keep supporting IE6 for all those years. You're totally right, of course; it's just a shame because we were just beginning to get excited that this problem had been solved!
This was solidified for me years ago: back when people used to get worked up about Apple vs Android[1], any talk about the negatives of restricting browser choice, keyboard choice, etc was met with "not everyone wants a platform that they can completely hack to run Gentoo lol, most people just want a phone that works". Hearing people say that on HN without even a hint of self-awareness of the actual danger of arbitrarily limiting choice on a platform was shocking, but I got over it years ago.
[1] For the life of me, I have never understood how childish one has to be to have an _emotional response_ to something like that. Whenever people would ask me my opinion and I'd state why I chose X over Y, they'd project "Wow you really hate Apple" onto me for some reason.
And one way your serve users is by enabling developers to produce compelling content for them, instead of using them as leverage to extort developers into walled gardens.
Killing Flash wasn't a FU for Flash Developers. The only reason why Flash was banned was because it provided a poor experience on a touchscreen device, performed horribly and was a battery drain.
The way to get Apple's attention is for Google or Firefox to develop a superior browser and browsing experience on Android, that users take notice is missing from iOS and is regarded as a USP for Android.