I want to thank you all for open sourcing the Ente server and for supporting desktop Linux. Even though I already had a working photo backup solution that fulfilled my privacy criteria, I've switched over to Ente with a paid subscription to show my support.
The headline is definitely wrong due to all of the above and also due to iMessage being closed source. iMessage does not have the transparency or auditability to be on the same footing as Signal, which is free and open source.
Ad blocking has already been mainstream for a long time.
> As of March 2023, 31% of US adult consumers said they used an ad blocker to protect their privacy, with baby boomers (31%) being more likely than Gen Zers (27%) to use the tech, according to Tinuiti.
> As of Q3 2021, 37.0% of internet users worldwide use ad blockers, according to GWI data cited by Hootsuite. Among those, younger consumers are more likely to use ad blockers, with 25- to 34-year-olds taking the top spot. In the US, just over 50% of adults use an ad blocker on their desktop, per March 2021 CivicScience data.
To anyone looking for an alternative, the best free and open source desktop publishing software is Scribus. The look and feel of Scribus is closer to that of professional applications like Adobe InDesign. Scribus is able to import Microsoft Publisher files, though I've never tried the feature. Unlike Publisher and most other desktop publishing applications, Scribus also works on Linux.
Apple has no way of enforcing any kind of platform fee for PWAs since the developer does not need to interact with Apple at all. This financial conflict of interest is why the availablity of the full PWA feature set is desirable to developers and undesirable to Apple.
> it doesn’t mean the EU is actually competent to regulate the market
The EU has done more to improve consumer choice in the mobile app industry than any other region in the world. They can go even further, but their progress so far certainly demonstrates competence.
You obviously don't remember the situation with mobile phone chargers before the EU mandated usb charging.
Every manufacturer had a prorietary connector, voltage etc. Even different models from the same manufacturer often had different charging standards. Complete wasteful mayhem.
Why should anyone give Apple sympathy for restricting PWAs to Safari in iOS? There is no valid reason for Apple to prevent PWAs from opening in the default browser selected by the user.
You know as well as everyone else does that PWA’s require the browser to be able to integrate with the platform at the level of the OS which would break iOS’s security model.
You might want the EU to force iOS to be an open platform, but I don’t think that was their intent when they made the requirement to allow alternate browsers.
Preventing other browsers from implementing PWAs does not improve security in iOS. This is a self-serving restriction intended to discourage users from switching away from Safari.
With these changes, Safari is the only browser allowed by Apple to implement PWAs on iOS, which gives Safari an advantage over the other browsers that are not allowed to implement PWAs on iOS. Anyone who uses PWAs on iOS must do so via Safari. PWA users who prefer a non-Safari browser on iOS must switch between their preferred browser and Safari for their web browsing needs. The additional burden of maintaining two web browsers discourages these users from switching away from Safari, and the entire setup prevents these users from leaving Safari completely.
> Safari is the only browser allowed by Apple to implement PWAs on iOS, which gives Safari an advantage over the other browsers that are not allowed to implement PWAs on iOS
Thank you for explaining so succinctly why Apple is compelled by regulation to remove the PWA feature from Safari.
To do otherwise would be anticompetitive and risk the wrath of the EC.
Apple is not compelled to remove PWAs from Safari in the EU, because Apple has the option of allowing non-Safari browsers to implement PWAs. Apple chose to remove a PWA feature from Safari and prevent non-Safari browsers from adding PWA icons to home screens, which degrades functionality for all iOS users in the EU while still granting Safari an anticompetitive advantage.
As the article says, Apple is changing iOS in the EU to prevent non-Safari browsers from adding PWA icon links to the home screen, making this feature exclusive to Safari (and granting Safari an anticompetitive advantage). Apple did not remove PWAs in Safari, but they removed the ability for PWAs to be displayed full-screen in Safari in the EU.
Nothing in the article says that new PWA links can't be created in Safari. Read carefully:
> PWAs can’t be linked to alternative browsers.
If the situation that you think is happening were true, the article would simply say that Apple removed PWA links from iOS, instead of specifically saying that the removal applies to alternative (non-Safari) browsers on iOS.
According to the article, the latest iOS beta prevents non-Safari browsers from adding PWA icons to the home screen. These changes retain iOS's favoritism of Safari.
> PWAs can’t be linked to alternative browsers. Apple simply doesn’t allow it anymore at the operating system or launcher level. Users in the EU are forced to open them in Safari, if they want to open them at all.
Read it more carefully. PWAs are no longer supported, even in safari. Any old PWAs that were already in the launcher just become web links. They happen to open in safari, but they are not PWAs, and no new such links can be created.
This is just a way to not delete the old links from the user's launcher until they have had time to create new bookmarks in the browser of their choice.
If you are going to argue the this somehow advantages Safari, you aren't being serious.
The article doesn't say that. It says that Apple is changing iOS in the EU so that PWAs can't be linked to alternative (non-Safari) browsers.
The article doesn't mention any changes to other PWA features like notifications for PWAs/links added to the home screen via Safari. It only says that, in the EU, Apple removed full-screen mode for PWAs from Safari while restricting non-Safari browsers from adding PWA icons to the home screen.
> Now, when a user in Europe taps a web app icon, they will see a system message asking if they wish to open it in Safari or cancel. The message adds that the web app "will open in your default browser from now on." When opened in Safari, the web app opens like a bookmark, with no dedicated windowing, notifications, or long-term local storage. Users have seen issues with existing web apps such as data loss, since the Safari version can no longer access local data, as well as broken notifications.
> Progressive Web Apps are designed to offer a user experience comparable to that of native apps using web technologies, with the potential for users to add them directly to their home screen with no need for an app store. The latest change is particularly controversial because historically Apple has suggested that developers who are unwilling to comply with its App Store guidelines could instead focus on web apps. Now, the company's recent adjustments appear to contradict this stance by limiting the capabilities of PWAs and their ability to compete with native applications in iOS, raising questions about its commitment to supporting web technologies as a viable alternative to the App Store.
Based on media reports like this one, assuming that the website links do open in the default browser selected by the user and not just Safari, it looks like TFA's sentence "PWAs can’t be linked to alternative browsers" is incorrect or at least imprecise.
It remains to be seen whether iOS browsers using non-WebKit browser engines in the EU can implement PWAs independently and make use of PWA links on the home screen. I'll wait and see when the iOS update is released.
And how is that exactly? Can you please elaborate?
It's all so familiar: just a year ago Apple would have had us believe that "You know as well as everyone else does that third party browser engines must integrate with the platform at the level of the OS which would break iOS’s security model."
Well, that obviously wasn't true, but there's still sheeple who will take the bait again and again :-)
We're all waiting for your technical arguments on the point, but it doesn't sound like you are actually interested in having a conversation that could be called intellectual in some way.
Mozilla should have pushed for the removal of these anticompetitive platform restrictions sooner and more vigorously. But with Apple, Google, and Microsoft all under the antitrust spotlight right now, it's as good of a time as ever for Mozilla to highlight how these companies are using their platforms to hurt Firefox adoption.
There's nothing wrong with the FOSS agenda. The problem was Mozilla management spreading the company too thin across too many low-value initiatives, and spinning off innovative crown jewels like the Rust language and discontinuing Rust-based Servo rendering engine. Performance (and stability) is a feature, arguably the one browser-users care about the most, and being the home of some industry-leading tech on those fronts was valuable. More focus on high-value but difficult initiatives, and less on low-value features, should have been the order of the day. Instead it almost feels like the MBAs took over and they forgot they were a tech org.
Of course it's in Mozilla's interest to challenge Safari's Apple-imposed monopoly on iOS. Firefox does not benefit from being suppressed on iOS just because Chrome is also suppressed on iOS. Removing Apple's restrictions that prevent Firefox from implementing Gecko and Gecko-based WebExtensions (especially ad blockers) can only increase Firefox's market share on iOS. Those new iOS Firefox users would then be encouraged to adopt Firefox on their desktop computers, because they would finally be able to sync desktop Firefox with an adblock-enabled Firefox on iOS.
Disclaimer: I use Firefox on iOS, macOS, Linux, and OpenBSD.
> Those new iOS Firefox users would then be encouraged to adopt Firefox on their desktop computers, because they would finally be able to sync desktop Firefox with an adblock-enabled Firefox on iOS.
That's not true. People don't care about adblock-enabled Firefox on iOS, because they don't care about Firefox whatsoever. And they don't care about Firefox whatsoever because Mozilla doesn't care - they seem to be focused on just about anything (mostly CEO bonuses), except actually improving the browser to be a competitive product.
I use Firefox as my daily driver, and believe me - the temptation to just switch to Chrome is there, every day. Chrome is not only a better browser, the incompatibilities and annoyances (resulting from its de-facto monopoly) are enough to drive people away from Firefox.
The only reason why Firefox still exists, is because Google keeps paying Mozilla money to be their default search engine - and it remains in Google's best interest, it's their insurance card in a possible antitrust case.
> Of course it's in Mozilla's interest to challenge Safari's Apple-imposed monopoly on iOS.
Of course it is in their interest - because they are Google's sock-puppet.
Personally, I do hope that Apple's rules for iOS web engines get challenged - but only as a followup to an antitrust case vs Google, ideally with an outcome of separating the browser from the adtech company.
> actually improving the browser to be a competitive product
Firefox would be more competitive on iOS with Gecko-based WebExtensions on iOS such as uBlock Origin, which is exactly what Mozilla is advocating for with this page. It's contradictory to argue that people don't want ad blocking on Firefox by claiming that Mozilla isn't trying to improve Firefox, when in reality, Mozilla is pushing for the removal of Apple's restrictions, which would enable Mozilla to improve Firefox on iOS with WebExtensions, ad blocking, and other useful features.
> Of course it is in their interest - because they are Google's sock-puppet.
It would be Mozilla's interest to challenge Safari's Apple-imposed monopoly on iOS even if they received all of their funding from other sources, and the reasoning is simple. Mozilla is harmed by Apple hindering Firefox in all of the ways that the page mentions, all of which limit Firefox's capabilities, convenience, and attractiveness. To credibly claim that it's not in Mozilla's best interest to challenge Apple's restrictions, you would have to show that Apple's restrictions benefit Mozilla indirectly in some way that fully offsets all of the ways it directly hurts Mozilla. And Mozilla does not benefit from Apple's restrictions in any significant way.
> That's not true. People don't care about adblock-enabled Firefox on iOS, because they don't care about Firefox whatsoever. And they don't care about Firefox whatsoever because Mozilla doesn't care - they seem to be focused on just about anything (mostly CEO bonuses), except actually improving the browser to be a competitive product.
Firefox has seen meaningful improvement over the 2023 and (imo) is competitive with both Safari and Chrome and out-delivers both browsers on some metrics. To say that Mozilla does not care about Firefox is to say that the entire browser ecosystem is so stunted that an organization of Mozilla's size can keep pace with two of the richest companies on the planet while actively trying to focus their attention elsewhere.
It's nonsense.
In 2023, Firefox finally shipped fully offline translation support (a feature that literally no other browser has), they (finally) brought back full extension support to mobile devices, Linux support on Wayland improved, Manifest V3 for Firefox is now shipping (with blocking web request support) and it's actually pretty good, voice commands are now supported on Mac, Firefox managed to start surpassing Chrome's speed on Speedometer (for all the test's flaws, this is still an achievement). PDF editing launched, picture-in-picture view got a redesign. I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting
I know that plenty of people would have preferred that Mozilla not spend so much time and attention on rewriting parts of mobile Firefox, but even there it's silly to argue that they significantly rewrote parts of mobile Firefox because they're not focused on Firefox.
This claim comes up all the time and I genuinely don't understand how people can possibly believe this. You think that Firefox would be competitive with Chrome and Safari if Mozilla didn't care about it? Is the idea here that Chrome and Safari engineers are so lazy that Mozilla can keep pace with them by doing nothing?
Thanks for your perspective. I realize the way I framed my argument makes it seem as if Firefox was barely palatable, yet I haven't switched away somehow. It's an OK browser - but it's not 2002 anymore. IE6 was distilled shit, literally everybody hated it, the market could hardly wait to be disrupted. I even managed to convince my boss to put a banner on our website, telling IE visitors to use a different browser. The bar this time is much higher, and it requires a proportional amount of effort to clear. Meanwhile:
Firefox does not just have to improve faster than the competition, it needs to already be better, and to continue getting better, faster than two among the biggest behemoths of all time, to even hope to be competitive in a "free" (LOL, sorry.) market. Being objectively better by a huge margin is literally step 1, and we're. not. there.
Antitrust is the only way, and all three companies need a kick in the balls. Mozilla perhaps the gentlest, but a kick nevertheless.
Lunduke and JWZ seem to both have a bone to pick with Mozilla for various reasons, and some of their criticism is apt and fair, and some of it feels extremely personal. These articles tend to pop up from both of them every time that we reach a year end or donation campaign from Mozilla.
While sometimes I agree with them (and in particular I agree that Mozilla has gotten way too comfortable with advertising and with partnering with extremely questionable and/or harmful people and technologies), an issue with the criticism I keep coming back to is that Mozilla is in a position where it often gets blamed simultaneously for relying too much on Google for revenue and also for every single revenue stream it comes up with that isn't Google being somehow a distraction from Firefox.
I'm not actually a fan of Mozilla's current CEO or many of Mozilla's recent decisions, I do think on some levels Mozilla is floundering around. And you're never going to get an argument from me that CEOs shouldn't be paid less across the board. But it is worth adding some context to Lunduke's criticism in particular that the last few years have also seen some of the strongest financial developments for Mozilla in a while and I'm not completely sure what critics like Lunduke want if they're going to simultaneously call Mozilla out for being in the pocket of Google and call Mozilla out for looking to diversify revenue and push development towards what is by far one of the most popular buzzwords for financial investment and product investment/monetization in the entire tech industry at the moment. If Lunduke wants independence from Google, then short of antitrust this is how you get it: you build things that are actually monetizable. By that metric, even people who are critical of the CEO like me need to be willing to admit that she seems to on some points be doing an actually fairly decent job. Under her, Mozilla has finally started taking meaningful steps to diversify funding away from Google's influence.
I don't want to act like the frustration isn't legitimate. I do feel frustration when I watch Mozilla rewrite their Android tech stack for the Nth time. That effort could be better spent elsewhere.
But I'm also very firmly of the belief that you could replace Mozilla's CEO with anybody and the markestshare decline would look the same. This is not a problem of leadership. This is a problem of antritrust and Mozilla flat-out is not big enough to out-compete an anticompetitive market. I'm all for Mozilla getting better, but sometimes I see criticism here that if they just straightened their act up and made a fantastically better browser it would change everything. It wouldn't.
----
As a thought experiment:
In June of 2024, Mozilla Firefox will be the only mainstream browser with fully effective uBO support. Manifest V3 will be out so it will be gone from Chrome. Safari already has terrible adblocking extension support. Brave is not deprecating those APIs, but Brave also (as far as I know) doesn't have an extension store and relies on Chrome's so if those extensions get dropped from development on Chrome they will also not be available for Brave.
Come June, do we think that Firefox having indisputably the best adblocking of any other browser will move the needle on its market share?
I don't. I don't think consumers will care. I can't count the number of times that I have told people about features in Firefox that are objectively better than Chrome's implementations (multi-account containers, profiles, android extension support, fully offline translations, the TOR uplift project, actually encrypted cross-device sync, etc, etc...) and they didn't even know those features exist. Yes, some of that is that Mozilla is genuinely terrible at marketing. But a much bigger part of that is that the browser market doesn't really work that way anymore; default positioning and anticompetitive behavior are more effective steering tools than any browser feature set.
I agree that it comes down to antitrust. But the only thing I can think of that Mozilla can do about that is to
A) continue to diversify their revenue from Google (because Firefox itself is not monetizable) and to
B) start campaigning for intervention (which they are doing right now in this article).
Because even if Mozilla was able to build an indisputably better browser than Chrome, it wouldn't matter. You've said it yourself, alternatives were much better than IE6 and it still didn't matter. Does anyone think it's even physically possible for a company of Mozilla's size to outpace Chrome even more than Chrome and Firefox outpaced IE6? Plenty of other companies (including Microsoft) have been in Mozilla's position and have tried to do what Mozilla is doing, and their conclusion was that they couldn't compete with Chrome; they couldn't develop a separate browser engine from Chromium and keep pace. Microsoft decided that what Mozilla is doing right now was too difficult to attempt.
> Firefox does not benefit from being suppressed on iOS…
You have to understand that from the POV of 99.99% of users, Firefox is not "suppressed".¹²
Yes, Firefox on iOS has to use WKWebKit. But "if Firefox could use their own browser engine on iOS then Firefox would be popular on iOS" is magical thinking. Other than a handful of technical gurus, users absolutely do not care.
Many users do care whether their web browser has an effective ad blocker and other extensions. Apple's iOS restrictions prevent Firefox from implementing extensions like uBlock Origin. Remove those restrictions and Firefox becomes much more attractive on iOS. I can tell you that I'll switch the default browser from Safari to Firefox on all of the iOS devices I manage the moment uBlock Origin becomes available, and I'm not the only one with that preference.
> iOS products like 1Blocker work as well in practice
iOS content blockers don't work in any browser except Safari due to Apple's restrictions, which limits Firefox's usefulness and hurts Firefox adoption on iOS in an anticompetitive way. That is one of the reasons Apple should not restrict Firefox from implementing extensions on iOS. There is no reasonable justification for limiting browser extensions to Safari on iOS.
> I’m under the impression that Firefox on Android only supports a tiny percentage of Firefox extensions.
Firefox for Android can install every Firefox extension from addons.mozilla.org as of December 2023. Turn on desktop mode on addons.mozilla.org to see all of the options. Also, the beta channel of Firefox for Android can sideload any extension through the settings and this feature is on track to make it to the stable release.
> iOS content blockers don't work in any browser except Safari…
It literally didn't even occur to me that this would be the case. That's a travesty, and I appreciate the corrections.
As a Firefox fan, what's your take on why Mozilla has a separate ad- and tracker-blocking "privacy browser" (Firefox Focus) instead of making Firefox on iOS better?
When Mozilla launched Focus for iOS in 2016, Apple had two WebKit implementations on iOS. Focus was implemented with UIWebView (slower, with more extensive content blocking capabilities), while Firefox was implemented with WKWebView (faster, with limited content blocking capabilities).[1]
Focus was Mozilla's way of offering Tracking Protection on iOS in some form without slowing down the performance of its main Firefox for iOS app. In addition to blocking ads within the Focus browser itself, Focus also provided iOS content blockers, which ironically (due to iOS content blockers being exclusive to Safari) allowed Focus users to block ads in Safari but not in Firefox for iOS at the time.[2]
Focus migrated to WKWebView in 2017 after iOS 11 bridged WKWebView's feature gap, allowing Focus to retain its Tracking Protection feature through the transition.[3] With Firefox and Focus both on WKWebView, Mozilla then ported Tracking Protection to Firefox for iOS in 2018.[4] Tracking Protection improved Firefox for iOS, but could never be as comprehensive as the Safari-exclusive content blockers.
By that time, Mozilla had already launched Focus for Android in 2017[4] even though Firefox for Android already had the ability to block ads more comprehensively with extensions such as uBlock Origin. As a privacy-focused secondary browser with a one-tap "erase session" feature, Focus was a niche app that turned out to be well-received by users, and Mozilla probably did not have a good reason to discontinue it even after Firefox for iOS gained Tracking Protection.
That's really interesting background, thank you. I thought Focus was still a thing since it's still on the site* and just got an iOS update as I type this, but 2023's updates are all "Bug fixes and technical improvements" maintenance mode stuff. RIP Firefox Focus.
Waydroid runs Android apps on Linux and some people claim to have gotten it to work on WSL.
- Waydroid: https://waydro.id
Reddit threads:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/eofn...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/waydroid/comments/10y813d/is_it_pos...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/waydroid/comments/14e6t3g/does_maki...