Why do they need to do that? Their platform, their rules. You don't want to play by Apple's rules then leave Apple's sandbox.
This is absurd. You have no rights and no freedoms while using a vendor's software. They knew the restrictions going in. This is going to die quickly in the courts.
This is in french court not US .European courts in general do not see it that way, Microsoft could not get away the same way with IE and Windows in european courts
Do you feel the same way about Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer and trying to crush all competition in the browser market? Or do you only feel this way because it's Apple's sandbox? At least with Microsoft you _could_ install Netscape. What's your choice here? Buy an Android?
I don't know you; this is a legitimate question. I don't actually know that I have an opinion on the underlying issue (I'm quite libertarian but also hate Safari). That said, I don't see how this is different from other bundling case law.
> Do you feel the same way about Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer and trying to crush all competition in the browser market?
Not a comparison. Windows was effectively a monopoly at the time where iOS is a strong but far from dominating force in mobile.
However if you want to make this comparison, honestly? Yes. I think the suit against Microsoft was justified simply because of how blatantly obvious their practices were designed to squeeze out other browser makers after the fact. However it's a different situation here: Safari has always been the defacto browser for iOS since the first publicly available version. There is no significant competition for Safari because there's no way to change iOS to utilize it in the same ways, and the Apple TOS for developers specifically states you cannot create apps that directly reproduce functionality of Apple's built-in applications.
Ergo, they are not decreasing the competition or being anti-market because there was no competition in the first place, and they made no secret of that.
Hard to argue they are not decreasing competition and not being anti-competitive when the TOS you quote specifically disallows competition. They literally prevent people from creating apps that compete with their own system apps. Again, at least you had the option of installing Netscape on Microsoft.
And I'm writing this from my iPhone. I don't love or hate Apple. But I don't think what they're doing is different than Microsoft.
This is a strange claim you're making. Squeezing out competition is bad, but banning competition in the first place is okay?
Would it have been okay if Microsoft had charged a 30% tax on all sales of anything (software and content) consumable on the Windows platform on day one?
Or what if the very first iPhone had a provision that for the rest of your life you were not permitted to buy a competing smartphone or participate in the development of one? If enforceable, Android might never have happened. Would that make it okay?
Yes. Anti-market behavior is the usage of monopoly (or near monopoly) to destroy competing companies after the fact with underhanded tactics and is generally agreed to be a Bad Thing.
Apple's behavior when setting up iOS could be construed as anti-market, but the fact is that market never existed. Ergo if you setup a company to make a web browser for iOS, you can't claim anti-market behavior because the policy in question predates your company. You effectively attempted to enter a market that does not exist.
Anti-competitive practices do not apply solely to monopolies.
If it's proven there isn't a technical reason why iOS can't support other browser engine (like there wasn't in the Windows vs. Netscape case), a judge could rule the artificial ToS terms should be lifted.
This happens every time a platform becomes too important/powerful. If Apple smartphones were niche devices with a very small user base, nobody would care. But they now have millions of users and are clearly a general purpose computer, so they will go under increased scrutiny. It's the price of success and they will sooner or later have to play by the (EU) rules. That or they improve Safari so few people have a reason to engage in lawsuits with them.
Hard to know. If a court decision forces them to allow other browser (engines) on iOS and people start moving away from Safari Apple may decide that it is in their best interest to make Safari the best web experience if they want to (re)attract those customers. See Microsoft and Edge.
Right, but I know Apple has argued at W3C against certain web standards and for others on the basis of security in a mobile context, power efficiency and functional alignment with touch UI behaviours. We don't know why Apple has chosen to implement some features (so far) and not others. Do you really want French courts deciding those kinds of technical decisions or taking those decisions away from mobile platform vendors?
Sure, that's the point of the standards process. Apple made their argument as a full member of the W3C and other standards committees. If they weren't convincing enough and the committee choose to go another way with the standard, then it's Apple's responsibility to accept that decision. After all, if the decision had gone their way, they'd expect the other vendors to adhere to it.
If a standard is insecure, all of the members of the standards body should be able to recognize that and change the standard. If that hasn't happened, then the other members must not agree that the standard has a security problem. Maybe it's something else Apple wanted to do that's conflicting with the standard and causing the security problem, just for them.
Apple's lack of support goes far beyond conscientious protest like you're suggesting. Mobile Safari has simple, egregious bugs that have been open for years. We're talking about things like being able to crash the browser with CSS or file selection, etc. I know this discussion is more feature oriented, but it's impossible to make the case that Apple is just rejecting features for the sake of the user.
Apple can make those arguments all they want but then they should allow third party browsers on iOS and let users have a choice. I don't buy the argument that browser engines somehow pose a unique security risk and have to be completely banned from the platform.
I'd like to launch a law suit against Nexedi because ERP5 is based on Zope instead of Django and I'd like to run a version on Django becaus Zope doesn't have the features I need but Django does. As a result they are unreasonably denying me access to those features. Does anybody know how I can start the litigation process in France?
From the press release, I'm not sure anyone is stopping them from developing on iOS.
What they don't like is that they have to write some different code on iOS and that costs them money. IANAL but I'd be a bit surprised if "write once, run anywhere" is enshrined in French law.
Back in the day, PageMaker ran only on Macs because only Macs had the underlying technology to support it. People bought Macs to run PageMaker. It was the "killer app".
If Nexedi's product was that good, they could convince people to buy Android devices.
Can a game maker sue Sony because it is extra work to port a game from XBox? Can they force Sony to support Kinect?
This will be interesting to watch. Apple has become a dominant player in the mobile industry and being in that role it restricts what they can do now (and could earlier get away with). Bundling related rulings had huge impact in the past on e.g. IBM and Microsoft.
In the mobile space? They own the mobile space. Which is why everything is labeled an "iPhone killer." No one labels a new product as an "Android killer."
Sport cars are often compared to Ferrari, but we don't say that Ferrari "owns a car space". iOS falls behind Android in pretty much every market share statistics I've seen.
They have some of the high end, competing heavily with Samsung's Galaxy S line and the occasional high end phone from other manufacturers. There's a lot of space in even the high-end market that's not owned by Apple, never mind all the lower markets.
Just because tech magazines really like them doesn't mean they actually have most of the market.
If you really want to go look for something to pick on... go look at how US telecoms companies fuck over the market by directly selling phones tied to contracts, making it incredibly difficult for a manufacturer to sell a phone if the telecoms companies don't want to put their weight behind it.
No. They own just "their portion" of the mobile space.
There are more Android phones in the market than iOS. It's very hard to say that iOS is abusing their position of 'power' and negatively influencing the browser market like Microsoft was back when.
Cited law 'déséquilibre significatif entre les droits et obligations des parties' means 'significant imbalance between the rights and obligations of the parties'
I dont even think it is related (it is not even translated in the post)
Definitely a PR stunt, but even so, being sued because you are so behind on standards that it's hurting other businesses certainly puts the spotlight on you.
The problem isn't so much about how apple is so behind on standards.
The problem is that they make it impossible for alternative browsers providing more up-to-date standards to exist on their platform, effectively locking away that userbase.
It's more that Apple is being very selective about which features to not include. Full screen support? Why would you not have that implemented yet in iOS? Notifications... all of these things lead to the conclusion that this isn't about security, it's about protecting the platform.
Yeah but Safari has pretty much 100% market share among iOS users.
As a web developer, Safari is a huge pain for me. Most of the time I can develop on Firefox and stick to the standards and most of the modern and/or commonly used browsers are fine. But Safari will have issues, and since I don't own any Apple devices and can't run Safari on the devices I've got, it's difficult to figure out which standard Safari isn't paying attention to and develop a workaround.
It really depends how you define the market. If we look countrywide [0] France has ~20% iOS, here in the UK we have ~40%.
But the product my company is selling (in the UK) is currently faced with a OS distribution of ~80% iOS and ~20% Android (some small number of web only clients). Why? We hypothesise that our customers have greater cashflow than the average Brit and as such the iPhone is much more popular choice.
It is also worth noting that this dominance has caused us to drop at least one feature from our product because the iOS devices seemingly have no way of reliably running a process in the background.
By your logic I could release an iOS only app and then claim iOS has a 100% monopoly because no one uses my app on android.
As for the background processes: that's by design. Only specific types of apps that have legitimate broad-appeal use cases for background processes (eg voip apps) are allowed.
There is a reason Apple products have high customer satisfaction survey results: a product is not just whatever shit you can throw together.
I was illustrating how product share depends on the market definition. I did not give a definition for a monopoly. This illustration could showed both that the parent comments' statistic is irrelevant/incorrect and that the market share is likely to vary significantly across a geographical population.
As for the background processes. I know that is by design. Believe it or not we are allowed by Apple to run our background process in a similar vein to most other Apps. Unfortunately the background process mechanism is not reliable enough for us. Hence why I said 'reliable'. Apple have no intention of improving this situation as we are not a large enough revenue stream.
I wonder what it would take for Android and IOS to be treated as distinct markets so that we can make progress on the plethora of anti-consumer and anti-competitive issues. For a market as large, valuable and consequential as "mobile platform", only ever looking at percentage seems too simplistic.
Android is not a like for like replacement. A customer is not "free" to change platform because there are large financial penalties if they have invested in an ecosystem due to deliberate decisions to create lock-in - they lose all the media, software and peripherals they have purchased.
Yes, that's exactly what is going on. Apple has market power from the lock-in they've established. Apple is abusing their market power to force customers on their platform to use their browser engine (and no others). Whether or not Apple has a monopoly is beside the point. This is anti-competitive behavior and if it is having a significant impact, it should be scrutinized and regulated.
In the US, all of the anti-competition laws more or less get described as monopoly law or anti-trust law. But distributor and partner programs have to be careful about laws in this category that have more to do with cartels and avoiding a situation where independent companies are agreeing not to compete. Those laws are more carefully enforced on monopolies but often hit individual manufacturers, etc.
I think winning in civil court is less likely than triggering a review and fines by the EU. If I were in Apple's shoes, I would fix this now that Microsoft wont distract anyone from their behavior. Any one of these butterflies could land on the wrong desk.
The Law that is being used actually gives power to the French Minister of Economy to cancel the provisions that bring 'déséquilibre significatif entre les droits et obligations des parties'. It can be very fast. It has already been used.
Allowing alternative browsers on iOS would be great. But the real change will happen when there is a way for users to change the default. I hope that is part of their "request".
With just that smaller change people could start using any of the existing alternatives available right now.
Very Nice, hope this will get anywhere. Apple got too far with its restrictions, but I also hope that this doesnt go sideways directly into flash issues. :)
Some(Apple) may say that the web/browser ecosystem is mess and it's not worth the investment though. However the restrictions on 3rd party browsers is weird. The application is sandboxed (thus no additional security threats compared to other apps) so I think the argument is political not technical.
The application is sandboxed but Apple does not really want to let third parties to put native compilers on their platform. I wonder if they could allow third party rendering engines but still force people to use Nitro (or how is their javascript engine called nowadays).
I think this is possible right now. The restriction in the license agreement only applies to executing code, not HTML rendering or network transfers. Since iOS 8 (I think), you can use JavaScriptCore separately from WebKit. So it should be possible to ship a browser app that uses its own renderer, as long as you replace the JavaScript engine with Apple's, but I don't know if that's worth the bother. Also, it will also run slower, because only the Safari app is permitted to do JIT compilation.
Since iOS8 all apps using can get JIT compilation if they use the WkWebView. From what I gather the JavaScriptCore does do JIT as well.
So, maybe it would be possible to build a browser that has its own renderer but uses JSC for javascript. But then, I suppose that most if not all of the demanded features are not HTML5 but actually javascript.
A few years ago, France passed a Law to protect small companies such as Nexedi against large companies that try to impose unbalanced contracts. [...] Not allowing the publication in Apple's AppStore of web browsers that are not based on Apple's own Webkit raises in our opinion the same issues as if Carrefour (a company similar to Walmart) was not selling any beans but those based on Carrefour's seeds. This may be legal in other countries but in France, it is most likely not.
This is incredibly weird to me. In France, you can sue to force a major company to sell your product if you don't like their terms? Is this just speculation, or is there actual case law? How is this even tenable?
And it only applies to contracts the aggrieved smaller party views as unbalanced. So you can sue if you don't like the contract offered, but you can't sue if you would accept the terms of their contract but MegaCorp just chooses not to do business with you?
If that's actually the case, I wouldn't be surprised if Carrefour changes their policy from "we only sell Carrefour beans and beans grown from Carrefour seeds" to "we only sell Carrefour beans".
Basically, if there was a clause in the Apple Store contract that said "to publish your software on our platform, you must give us three fingers of your right hand and your first born son", a judge could declare it void.
I feel that it's fair (at least the bean argument):
Say I ran a couple of farms which grew beans and employed 250 people to work on my farms. What would happen if my main customer Carrefour, one of the biggest supermarkets in France, decided to stop selling my beans and sold only theirs (grown and packed in a foreign country)?
I could try and sell to local shops, but it's unlikely they would buy the same volume as Carrefour. Or I could try and sell to another big supermarket, but they probably already have enough beans from other suppliers.
I'd probably have to let go of a lot of people, or even shut down the business, which would mean a lot of people would be out of work, and most likely relying on the welfare system to support them. So in return for a megacorp boosting their profits slightly, the country has to pay a lot in return to support unemployed people.
(How it applies in this case to Apple I'm not really sure though :P)
That would be your fault for basing your business on the support from another. Carrafour has no obligation to you. You're the one that built a business ignoring the real distribution risk of relying upon one company. That's on you.
>Is this just speculation, or is there actual case law?
France is a civil-law system, so case law is in theory irrelevant. In practice it isn't so irrelevant these days, but it still doesn't carry nearly the same weight that it does in common-law systems (like most of the US, though not Louisiana). On the one hand, this makes it much easier to ignore previous rulings by clearly corrupt judges. On the other hand, it makes consistent interpretation of the law much harder to achieve. It's a tradeoff.
In other words, Nexedi knows that case law is against them in the US, so they cherry-picked a location for the lawsuit that would allow them to circumvent this obstacle.
It's really hard to believe that Apple is holding back the 'mobile web' when it's shown time and time again that they have the best performing web platform in the market. It was true when iPhone was introduced in 2008, it was true in 2015[0] and it is still true now[1].
"In a nutshell, the fastest known Android device available today -- and there are millions of Android devices much slower than that out there -- performs 5× slower than a new iPhone 6s, and a little worse than a 2012 era iPhone 5 in Ember. How depressing."
Microsoft's problem was that they had a monopoly of the market and were distorting it. Apple has nowhere near close to a monopoly on the smartphone market, and there still is plenty of innovation in the 'mobile web' happening.
Speed is an important metric, but only up to a point. Once a browser renders a page faster than a user can interact with it any further improvement has very little impact. Any phone released in the past year or two meets that criteria for a well constructed page (obviously a badly written site is always going to perform badly, even on the best hardware.)
So, while it may be true that an Android phone is 5x slower than a new iPhone, that doesn't make a difference to the end user. They see the website working well on both devices. At that point it starts being about features, so iOS's lack of support for WebRTC, Beacons, Gamepads, Fetch, etc means the experience is worse. Not that Android supports everything, but if you compare iOS Safari to Chrome on Android[1] it's very clear that Safari is behind, even if it's faster.
As pages get more and more complex (say, because they have new fancy HTML5 APIs) that performance actually begins to matter, right?
I'm a web developer and I don't feel like iOS Safari is holding me back in producing the types of web experiences that myself or my clients are looking for. They're not asking for HTML5 Gamepad support. Instead, they just want an image carousel - Chrome doesn't support that but Safari does http://caniuse.com/#search=snap.
It's obvious you are not a web developer using HTML5/CSS3/ES6. iOS has became the new Internet Explorer hands down, and now it's the first platform I test on to check for compatibility issues (as it's the one that normally gives those issues).
Nope. (Front end) web developer by trade. What I say I say from experience - I've never had a client ask for a feature that Safari doesn't support. However, clients do ask for things like a carousel, which Chrome doesn't support natively.
iOS is a significantly easier support target compared to Android due to how much of a stable target it is. Android is a bit of a 'which Android?' when it comes to browser support.
"Build natively" means to create it yourself in vanilla JavaScript, like this http://meandmax.github.io/lory/. What's the use of a native element that only one browser has when you need cross browser support anyway?
"Natively" as in 2 lines of CSS rather than yet another JS dependency. The cool thinks about CSS Snap Points is that they fall back rather gracefully on brothers that don't support them to just standard overflow scrolling.
Well that's not what native means. Beyond that, the issue isn't that Safari is not implementing HTML5 features fast enough, it's that they are choosing to not implement specific ones in order to protect their platform. You just don't see that from other browser vendors (today)
Isn't that the point of this article? I don't think it's fair to criticize Apple for lagging HTML5 support in iOS, then say "what's the use of this element?" when it cuts the other way.
The criticism isn't that they are lagging HTML5 support in iOS(although it would be valid- that's no reason to sue), it's that they are specifically avoiding parts of the implementation to protect their platform. Things like full screen support, notifications, etc
You don't need snap to build a slider natively. Also interestingly snap is NOT supported when Safari is rendering stuff in a different app, only when you're actually in the Safari App.
Are you kidding me? "Which Android" doesn't even make sense in terms of the browser, it's not tied to OS releases and is therefore the same on every phone (except freaking Samsung... Their browser is even worse than Safari). Maybe WordPress sites that need a "carousel" work better on iOS, but I can't tell you how many times I've had to go back and fix something because it won't work on iOS right. I can tell you, however, that that number is now higher than it is for ie10. So yes, it IS the new internet explorer.
If they supported things like PWAs and other mobile web initiatives, people could build applications that run seamlessly on their phone, look like native apps etc, and they wouldn't go through their highly lucrative app store.
As phones get more and more powerful and things come along and mature like webgl etc, the reliance on native apps drops more and more. As does Apple's control.
Maybe I should get back under my tinfoil hat, idk, but that is my guess as to where their reluctance comes from.
Really? Don't they make 30% on every sale, including any subscriptions, iaps, and basically any money that changes hands? Don't they make it impossible for you to sell software that runs on iOS devices without them taking a cut? Wouldn't PWAs + some kind of external payment engine (paypal or whatever) completely bypass this?
I realise they also make a lot on hardware, but it seems like that's a revenue stream they wouldn't want to lose.
Their financial statements are pretty clear. Hardware is highly lucrative. Services, like the app store, are only recently consistently profitable. They definitely wouldn't intentionally make their devices less desirable to customers to increase service revenue.
Do you have any thoughts as to why they don't allow people to install things from outside of the app store? Or why they require all purchases through apps to go through their payment methods where they take a 30% cut?
Because it is definitely making devices less desirable. I presume you still can't buy books from the Kindle iOS app, for example. I know you can't sub on twitch on iOS.
To continue with the kindle example, Amazon could build a kindle PWA that works offline, allows you to buy books, and in every way works identically to their thick client app (it's just displaying text after all, it's not technically demanding). And Apple wouldn't be able to block them from allowing you to buy things, because you're effectively just using a web browser.
Because they want control over their platform and one (but not the only) reason for that control is to deliver a consistent and safer experience to their users. The app store is a part of that control but it's not some moneymaker.
The fact that you can't install random apps from anywhere on an iPhone doesn't make the device less desirable to anyone, statistically. Incidentally, if you have source, you can install an app on your phone without paying a dime to anyone.
Mobile safari was literally one of the reasons we decided to build an app instead of just having a mobile optimized website. So if that's they're strategy, it's working. Though it is a free app so it's not working _that_ well.
Perhaps by not allowing "basic internet access" ( html 5 is part of the web), Apple is a distrupter of a basic human right.
The platform, where we could least of all platforms, use our basic human right to browse the web is iOS. So Apple is, in it's own way, a company that blocks a basic human right. And the block it because of own financial gain ( using the app store instead of the browser earns them money)
Lets be honest here, are you saying that a web-based real-time-communications API is a basic human right?
> Apple has no reason to "not" include it, except financial gain.
The reason they have not to include it is that they have different priorities than browser vendors who want to jam mobile browsers full of every unripe API under the sun (like those that dangerously leak user's real connection info even when behind a VPN).
You are confusing the internet with the World Wide Web, Apple does not support Flash do you want to claim that a flash plugin is a human rights issue? Because I can guarantee that the amount of content you cannot access due to lack of flash is orders of magnitude greater than what you cannot access due to lackluster HTML5 support.
In fact I can't think of any HTML5 content which you would not be able to view, it might not be formatted properly but it will be accessible.
Could you argue that developers using HTML 5 are violating human rights because not every browser fully supports it? Developers are fully aware that not every feature is available on every browser -- yet they willingly use those technologies anyway. It's clear we should drag developers in front of a UN Tribunal to account for their willingness to deny the world basic human rights.
This has gotten beyond absurd. I can't remember when I voted to make HTML 5 a human right. I can think of a lot more important things that might ought to be addressed (and enforced) first.
obviously the standards process moves slower than innovation on web technologies, but many of the things that iOS doesn't support are not yet standards. E.g. WebRtc, which Nexedi's link shows had an update to the draft in September, so clearly it is not yet stabilized. The legal basis for requiring compatibility seems much thinner for complying with working drafts (or a working group note, edited August 31, September 7, and September 15, in the case of the webm link).
I mean, what level of compatibility should you have with a document that says:
> Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways.
Currently in the UK there is some controversy about human rights legislation and it being used inappropriately.
I think human rights legislation is fundamental. As such I really, really hope no-one ever uses it for something like this, even worse to win a case. It demeans it to use it to save someone having to write a bit extra code to have their commercial application sell better in China.
The problem is that this approach is perfectly fine when it comes to us programmers or more technical people, but for "normal" users this approach won't work, simply because they don't know the possibilities an up-to-standards iOS Safari would bring.
There's a saying; "What you don't know can't hurt you", and that can be applied for these users - whom make up the majority of iOS device users - since they don't know what they're missing out on. While you and me on the other hand knows what we're missing out on, both as programmers and users, we at least have the chance to vote with our wallets. I do, perhaps even you do, but as you can clearly see it's still not enough to even make a dent in Apple iOS device sales.
Apple has a monopoly on iOS devices. There is no competition. And if somebody would built a better or freer iOS device, Apple would use the full force of the state to stop them. So, in a very narrow fashion, Apple does use their government-granted rights to coerce you to buy it's devices, if you want an iOS one.
Of course, nowadays Android devices are more than adequate replacements for many users, so most people do have the option to buy outside of the Apple world, as you suggest.
And if you were complaining as a developer, that wants to distribute your software around, you'd have a point.
But the GP is complaining as a user, that has complete freedom to choose the phone he is buying. He just want the shinning locked-up one, but don't want the consequences of the locking-up. He has all the right in the world to complain about it, but if he won't do anything about it, why would anybody care to listen?
Now i might be in the minority here, but I feel this is akin to telling someone that lives somewhere with a landlord that won't maintain the building to "just move".
I know it's not the same scale, and i'm not trying to compare poverty and human suffering to a web browser, but IMO there are some similarities.
Switching to an entire other OS which many believe to be less secure, that in many cases doesn't have many of the same applications, and significant changes to everything you do on your device (which for many is their ONLY device connected to the internet), for a web browser?
People won't do it, and I (as a web developer) don't think they should give up everything for a few web features. But when one party is purposely holding the ecosystem back, something should be done. They need to improve, or open up the playing field to others that will improve.
IMO forcing "operating systems" to be more inclusive would be a good thing, and could really improve not only iOS, but Android and Windows as well.
I don't know how this would look legally, i'm pretty far from a lawyer, but the discussion is at the very least worth having without hand waving any complaints away with "just buy an android"
There is not a single browser that implements 100% of all HTML standards out there. Lets sue them all for violating human rights.
The browser landscape is complicated. Firefox is ahead in some ways, behind in others. WebKit has fantastic support for some things that Edge does not do. Chrome lacks some things that Firefox does.
Does any browser lack "basic internet access"? Nope. They all provide a solid foundation that lets everyone use the web. Are some experimental standards missing? Sure. It's complicated.
This argument is just absurd. Apple isn't denying anyone access to the web. Could we argue that a company forcing IE 6 on employees is violating human rights?
Does the HTML5 standard specify which video formats browsers should support now? Is webrtc part of the html5 spec now? Seems misleading for them to say they just want the HTML5 standard when what they are asking for isn't in the standard.
Many of the HTML5 technologies Apple is steering clear from make the Web more App like meaning they become a threat to their dominance with the App Store on their own platform. The longer they take to adopt them the longer they can benefit from the exclusiveness and control over iOS app ecosystem. I don't think sueing them will get them anywhere but it might be a push to get them understand that users are aware of the shortcomings.
If you mean the Android store, then no. You can for example find the "real" Firefox on the Google Play store. (The one on the Apple store is a Safari skin which has the problems the article points out)
Sorry, I didn't express myself correctly. I meant this chrome app[1] in the apple store. I was wondering if people with iPhones can at least install a different browser to take advantage of those features. But if you say that it's just a skin they are pretty much trapped there.
Calling it a 'skin on top of Safari' does not really do justice to all the hard work my team has been putting in Firefox for iOS.
Apple gives you (limited) access to WebKit. Basically: a rectangular area on the screen that renders web content. To 'skin' it, you have to build a browser application around that. A complete application that handles tabs, user settings, sync, history, bookmarks, reader mode, anything that does not happen in that 'rectangular view that renders web content'.
The simple truth is that 99% of the time when browsing is spent on that "rectangular area".
Maybe the term "skin" is not adequate, but IMO the features added by Chrome and Firefox on iOS are not that significant for the browsing experience compared to the "rectangular area". Thanks to Apple, WKWebView based browsers are always going to be second class citizens.
Personally I never understood why you decided to move to iOS. I think you should have stick to your guns.
From ordinary users, nobody cares about the web platform on mobile.
Native apps are faster, with better integration to platform APIs and features, lighter on battery, and consistent (even if a large part of an app is just a webview in a native app shell).
And for developers, they can actually be monetized and attract paying users, unlike mobile browser-based apps.
Safari on mobile is pretty up to date as mobile technologies come. Google Chrome is hardly any better:
So I don't really buy the conspiracy theory. People just want all kinds of desktop level HTML5 stuff on mobile browsers that they might or might not be suitable for. The most common HN response to Web 3D demos, advanced SVG/canvas etc is that people's fans started to blaze, CPU jumped to the sky...
> From ordinary users, nobody cares about the web platform on mobile. Native apps are faster
Well, that's a problem right there. Instead of helping the web forward, Apple is keeping the web and web-apps second-class citizens. And of course this helps their own app platform and app store to be successful, and as a bonus it keeps developers within the walls of their garden.
I don't understand how they can ever have parity though. Whatever a html/javascript web app can do is always going to work better in a native browser, regardless of your platform.
True, but the question is really how much better. Phone hardware is nowadays sufficiently advanced to draw DOM trees and handle mouse clicks in reasonable time and with reasonable energy.
At some point the browser becomes an OS, eh? I can't stand Apple, and their reasons for poor treatment of web-apps are surely from pure greed as you note, but I can't help but not care in this case.
The web-app development paradigm is terrible and can't die fast enough.
> Apple already spends tons of money to make an OS and a dev SDK for it.
Developers have to spend tons of money in building and maintaining cross platform apps written in any way: native, hybrid, or with a VM like NativeScript does.
In the real world budgets are limited and going native isn't always an option. Apple acts as if native was the only viable option, and as if we only had to develop apps for iOS.
This also shows how much checkboxes mean: the last version tested there is Mobile Safari 9. We are currently at 10, which has a huge number of improvements in the area of JavaScript and HTML5 standards.
Depends on the implementation. Sadly, thanks to Apple, in many cases we are still forced to use UIWebView since WkWebView is so broken for Cordova apps.
Web apps are cheaper and faster to develop. This makes it possible to try more new ideas and serve more niche markets that might not justify the upfront cost of full-blown native development. Why not let developers and users have a choice here?
Fancy graphics are not really the issue. It's things like service workers and shadow dom that are really crucial.
I've never heard anyone argue that developing native apps on two platforms (iOS + Android) is cheaper than developing a single web app that works on every device (including desktop).
I'm genuinely curious - is that actually a commonly held opinion?
Yeah it does depend on the app but a lot of things can be prototyped and iterated on a lot faster on the web. Building a real native app can come later, if necessary, once the idea has been validated.
Google Cloud Messaging for Push Notification is one great features which iOS stunted support for. It's amazing on Android, users can subscribe through a webpage, receive push notifications for news and stuff after leaving or closing the site. It's as if they have a native app installed and it's great for engagement. Shamefully not easily implementable on iOS like on Android.
I'm far from one to defend Apple on most things, but is Apple doing anything intentionally malicious here?
In the United States, forcing someone to write code is compelled speech, which is a violation of the First Amendment. I'm not aware of laws in France, but in any case, this seems like a completely wrong approach to solving this problem.
The real problem here is Apple's proprietary platform.
I agree that Apple's management of their platform is the underlying problem, but there's no compelled speech here.
Writing code to provide better HTML5 support is only one of the ways Apple could satisfy this complaint. Lifting the developer agreement / Apple App Store restrictions that prevent third-party developers from writing browsers with better HTML5 support is another.
I think they just ask for Apple to let developers publish custom web browsers (not based on Apple WebKit) on the App Store, which is currently not allowed by Apple.
The point is that feature compatibility is not everything. Apple may say that they develop webkit in a more power saving/secure/better manner than other browsers and this is the reason they lag on html5 features.
If a user wants to use a different browser because of $reasons and is happy with it draining the battery, the user should be allowed to. There is no technical reason for not allowing other browsers to work on iOS, it's purely a ToS/market/profits issue.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think most of the jailbrake exploits use some form of safari or webkit bug to modify the system. Apple is very aware that the browser is the most targeted point in the OS. By the nature of modern JS interpreters they would need some kind of low (or lower) level access to the CPU to be competitive and that will open a new vector, maybe multiple, for attack that Apple would not be able to control.
I think their decision is about a lot of things including the App Store, but security is certainly one.
For those of us who live outside of Apple’s distortion field, we know that
7-inch tablets will actually be a big portion of the market and we know
that Adobe Flash support actually matters to customers who want a real web
experience. We also know that while Apple’s attempt to control the
ecosystem and maintain a closed platform may be good for Apple, developers
want more options and customers want to fully access the overwhelming
majority of web sites that use Flash.
Adobe, 12 months ago[1]:
Adobe said that it will now "encourage content creators to build with ne
web standards," such as HTML5, rather than Flash.
Of course Flash was/is terrible, and not only for mobile phones.
But what keyle is pointing out is the irony of Apple arguing against Flash for being a proprietary and non standard technology, praising HTML5, and now relegating HTML5 as a second class technology in iOS.
Apple bashing Adobe was for much more than standards, but for keeping aspects out of their mobile browser that they felt caused either security or performance issues. I feel that their stance on this is honestly fairly consistant with that.
Well, Apple was bashing Adobe for anything and everything. I remember they bashed Adobe for being late to finish moving to Cocoa, at a time when some core Apple products hadn't moved yet (e.g. Finder, IIRC).
I remember Google I/O 2010 when Google made a big push to drive Flash support as a differentiator for Android, but every single attempt to demo Flash on a mobile device crashed it.
someone should also sue Apple (and Google?) for worse performance in the webview. something that run smoothly on native Safari was laggy in webview. haven't checked in a while though, not sure if this is still the case.
I think it may have more to do with the article being written by a native French speaker than sexism.
One of my friends routinely says things like "a woman has rights to his body" when speaking in English because in French possessives agree with the object not the subject, and the French word for body, "corps", is masculine.
In this case, since iPhone starts with a vowel, in French you'd say "son iPhone", so "his iPhone", perhaps.
Alternatively, in French you also always tend to the masculine form in the general case, so maybe that's it? It just strikes me as extremely unlikely that anyone would think, consciously or otherwise, that women don't have iPhones.
Yes, of course! Thank you for pointing this out. I guess I'm the ignorant one for not doing my research on the author/company before making such a loaded statement.
On your point about it being "extremely unlikely that anyone would think, consciously or otherwise, that women don't have iPhones", I was more referring to the older (20th century) authoring style where masculine references were used as a default rather than generalising such as "their iPhone".
I just did. 391/555. I ran it against FF 45 and got 429/555. Are we suing Mozilla now for not supporting the standard like we want them to? Obviously not.
Lawsuit is not just about not supporting web standards. It's also about preventing others from doing so. Even if gf 45 supports 48 more features it cannot do so in iOS
This actually could be something to hold up in court at least in EU.
It's not really different from when Microsoft was doing something similar with their browser, using their market position to force people using IE.
Apple could be forced to open their rendering engine and allow real fully fledged browsers to be used in iOS, because at this point, just fixing the compatibility to HTML standards on iOS may not be enough anymore.
Apple's rendering engine is already open. That isn't what the lawsuit is about. It's about opening the operating environment to other browsers (or rather, other rendering engines).
Seriously..... as an industry we've been back porting code and implementing browser specific hacks since day 1. Since Netscape Navigator, since every version of IE. Is it a pain? yes but ultimately it's the world we live in and i for one am glad.
If every browser just focused on 'the specs' where would the innovation come from. In fact i'd strongly argue that Apple / iOS is the reason we have such a standard web based eco system at the moment. I mean who remembers the dark days of Java Applets, ActiveX components and browser specific plugins? Apples firm stance on the lack of plugin support was a major factor in their demise and the birth of the amazing rich JS & HTML5 world that many here seem to take for granted.
In short it strikes me as the wines of a spoilt child complaining about their parents forgetting that they are the one's who taught them how to tie their shoes.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadThis is absurd. You have no rights and no freedoms while using a vendor's software. They knew the restrictions going in. This is going to die quickly in the courts.
I don't know you; this is a legitimate question. I don't actually know that I have an opinion on the underlying issue (I'm quite libertarian but also hate Safari). That said, I don't see how this is different from other bundling case law.
But IANAL.
Android phones are currently outshipping iOS about 4 to 1 http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp
Not a comparison. Windows was effectively a monopoly at the time where iOS is a strong but far from dominating force in mobile.
However if you want to make this comparison, honestly? Yes. I think the suit against Microsoft was justified simply because of how blatantly obvious their practices were designed to squeeze out other browser makers after the fact. However it's a different situation here: Safari has always been the defacto browser for iOS since the first publicly available version. There is no significant competition for Safari because there's no way to change iOS to utilize it in the same ways, and the Apple TOS for developers specifically states you cannot create apps that directly reproduce functionality of Apple's built-in applications.
Ergo, they are not decreasing the competition or being anti-market because there was no competition in the first place, and they made no secret of that.
And I'm writing this from my iPhone. I don't love or hate Apple. But I don't think what they're doing is different than Microsoft.
Would it have been okay if Microsoft had charged a 30% tax on all sales of anything (software and content) consumable on the Windows platform on day one?
Or what if the very first iPhone had a provision that for the rest of your life you were not permitted to buy a competing smartphone or participate in the development of one? If enforceable, Android might never have happened. Would that make it okay?
Yes. Anti-market behavior is the usage of monopoly (or near monopoly) to destroy competing companies after the fact with underhanded tactics and is generally agreed to be a Bad Thing.
Apple's behavior when setting up iOS could be construed as anti-market, but the fact is that market never existed. Ergo if you setup a company to make a web browser for iOS, you can't claim anti-market behavior because the policy in question predates your company. You effectively attempted to enter a market that does not exist.
If it's proven there isn't a technical reason why iOS can't support other browser engine (like there wasn't in the Windows vs. Netscape case), a judge could rule the artificial ToS terms should be lifted.
This happens every time a platform becomes too important/powerful. If Apple smartphones were niche devices with a very small user base, nobody would care. But they now have millions of users and are clearly a general purpose computer, so they will go under increased scrutiny. It's the price of success and they will sooner or later have to play by the (EU) rules. That or they improve Safari so few people have a reason to engage in lawsuits with them.
Webrtc absolutely has a security/privacy issue whereby local network information is exposed to the JavaScript environment of the page.
So, if Google don't think that's a problem, maybe you should ask them why not.
They don't own the platform where the ERP runs, apple does.
What they don't like is that they have to write some different code on iOS and that costs them money. IANAL but I'd be a bit surprised if "write once, run anywhere" is enshrined in French law.
If Nexedi's product was that good, they could convince people to buy Android devices.
Can a game maker sue Sony because it is extra work to port a game from XBox? Can they force Sony to support Kinect?
Most game consoles since the NES have had lock-out technology, and that's legal everywhere, as far as I know.
This is still their market to lose.
Just because tech magazines really like them doesn't mean they actually have most of the market.
If you really want to go look for something to pick on... go look at how US telecoms companies fuck over the market by directly selling phones tied to contracts, making it incredibly difficult for a manufacturer to sell a phone if the telecoms companies don't want to put their weight behind it.
There are more Android phones in the market than iOS. It's very hard to say that iOS is abusing their position of 'power' and negatively influencing the browser market like Microsoft was back when.
Cited law 'déséquilibre significatif entre les droits et obligations des parties' means 'significant imbalance between the rights and obligations of the parties'
I dont even think it is related (it is not even translated in the post)
Remind me which browser engine has 100% es6 support?
Now remind me which half-baked web api exposes local network information to the JavaScript environment.
Oh right. It's HN so apple is the work of the devil and Google is basically Jesus returned.
The problem is that they make it impossible for alternative browsers providing more up-to-date standards to exist on their platform, effectively locking away that userbase.
They were talking about HTML5 standards, not JavaScript standards. Standards like fullscreen support and notifications.
> It's HN so apple is the work of the devil and Google is basically Jesus returned
No one here has made such hyperbole except you.
Edit: That is not allowing an alternate browser to be the default.
I'm also very curious about the monopoly. iOS has an estimated 13% market share.
On that note, neither are monopolies. The problem comes when a monopoly is leveraged to stop other companies from competing.
Being whimsical about what would or would not appear on the App Store is certainly abusive.
--
Somewhat unrelated: https://blog.kapeli.com/apple-removed-dash-from-the-app-stor...
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274123/market-share-held...
http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Re...
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
As a web developer, Safari is a huge pain for me. Most of the time I can develop on Firefox and stick to the standards and most of the modern and/or commonly used browsers are fine. But Safari will have issues, and since I don't own any Apple devices and can't run Safari on the devices I've got, it's difficult to figure out which standard Safari isn't paying attention to and develop a workaround.
But the product my company is selling (in the UK) is currently faced with a OS distribution of ~80% iOS and ~20% Android (some small number of web only clients). Why? We hypothesise that our customers have greater cashflow than the average Brit and as such the iPhone is much more popular choice.
It is also worth noting that this dominance has caused us to drop at least one feature from our product because the iOS devices seemingly have no way of reliably running a process in the background.
[0] http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-ios-v-android-market-sha...
As for the background processes: that's by design. Only specific types of apps that have legitimate broad-appeal use cases for background processes (eg voip apps) are allowed.
There is a reason Apple products have high customer satisfaction survey results: a product is not just whatever shit you can throw together.
I was illustrating how product share depends on the market definition. I did not give a definition for a monopoly. This illustration could showed both that the parent comments' statistic is irrelevant/incorrect and that the market share is likely to vary significantly across a geographical population.
As for the background processes. I know that is by design. Believe it or not we are allowed by Apple to run our background process in a similar vein to most other Apps. Unfortunately the background process mechanism is not reliable enough for us. Hence why I said 'reliable'. Apple have no intention of improving this situation as we are not a large enough revenue stream.
Android is not a like for like replacement. A customer is not "free" to change platform because there are large financial penalties if they have invested in an ecosystem due to deliberate decisions to create lock-in - they lose all the media, software and peripherals they have purchased.
With just that smaller change people could start using any of the existing alternatives available right now.
So, maybe it would be possible to build a browser that has its own renderer but uses JSC for javascript. But then, I suppose that most if not all of the demanded features are not HTML5 but actually javascript.
This is incredibly weird to me. In France, you can sue to force a major company to sell your product if you don't like their terms? Is this just speculation, or is there actual case law? How is this even tenable?
And it only applies to contracts the aggrieved smaller party views as unbalanced. So you can sue if you don't like the contract offered, but you can't sue if you would accept the terms of their contract but MegaCorp just chooses not to do business with you?
If that's actually the case, I wouldn't be surprised if Carrefour changes their policy from "we only sell Carrefour beans and beans grown from Carrefour seeds" to "we only sell Carrefour beans".
Basically, if there was a clause in the Apple Store contract that said "to publish your software on our platform, you must give us three fingers of your right hand and your first born son", a judge could declare it void.
Say I ran a couple of farms which grew beans and employed 250 people to work on my farms. What would happen if my main customer Carrefour, one of the biggest supermarkets in France, decided to stop selling my beans and sold only theirs (grown and packed in a foreign country)?
I could try and sell to local shops, but it's unlikely they would buy the same volume as Carrefour. Or I could try and sell to another big supermarket, but they probably already have enough beans from other suppliers.
I'd probably have to let go of a lot of people, or even shut down the business, which would mean a lot of people would be out of work, and most likely relying on the welfare system to support them. So in return for a megacorp boosting their profits slightly, the country has to pay a lot in return to support unemployed people.
(How it applies in this case to Apple I'm not really sure though :P)
France is a civil-law system, so case law is in theory irrelevant. In practice it isn't so irrelevant these days, but it still doesn't carry nearly the same weight that it does in common-law systems (like most of the US, though not Louisiana). On the one hand, this makes it much easier to ignore previous rulings by clearly corrupt judges. On the other hand, it makes consistent interpretation of the law much harder to achieve. It's a tradeoff.
In other words, Nexedi knows that case law is against them in the US, so they cherry-picked a location for the lawsuit that would allow them to circumvent this obstacle.
"In a nutshell, the fastest known Android device available today -- and there are millions of Android devices much slower than that out there -- performs 5× slower than a new iPhone 6s, and a little worse than a 2012 era iPhone 5 in Ember. How depressing."
[0]: https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-andr... [1]: https://twitter.com/CraftyDeano/status/779461778677895169
This just means they can do it, but they won't due to own personal gains
If it was Microsoft, the story would have been completely different today.
Yes, because, for the 10000th time: Microsoft was a monopoly in the desktop market.
Apple has never been a monopoly on the phone market.
So, while it may be true that an Android phone is 5x slower than a new iPhone, that doesn't make a difference to the end user. They see the website working well on both devices. At that point it starts being about features, so iOS's lack of support for WebRTC, Beacons, Gamepads, Fetch, etc means the experience is worse. Not that Android supports everything, but if you compare iOS Safari to Chrome on Android[1] it's very clear that Safari is behind, even if it's faster.
[1] http://caniuse.com/#compare=ios_saf+10,and_chr+51
I'm a web developer and I don't feel like iOS Safari is holding me back in producing the types of web experiences that myself or my clients are looking for. They're not asking for HTML5 Gamepad support. Instead, they just want an image carousel - Chrome doesn't support that but Safari does http://caniuse.com/#search=snap.
iOS is a significantly easier support target compared to Android due to how much of a stable target it is. Android is a bit of a 'which Android?' when it comes to browser support.
Maybe the confusion is that Chrome =/= Android Browser
Nope http://caniuse.com/#search=snap
WKWebView is a mess just like UIWebView.
If they supported things like PWAs and other mobile web initiatives, people could build applications that run seamlessly on their phone, look like native apps etc, and they wouldn't go through their highly lucrative app store.
As phones get more and more powerful and things come along and mature like webgl etc, the reliance on native apps drops more and more. As does Apple's control.
Maybe I should get back under my tinfoil hat, idk, but that is my guess as to where their reluctance comes from.
I realise they also make a lot on hardware, but it seems like that's a revenue stream they wouldn't want to lose.
Because it is definitely making devices less desirable. I presume you still can't buy books from the Kindle iOS app, for example. I know you can't sub on twitch on iOS.
To continue with the kindle example, Amazon could build a kindle PWA that works offline, allows you to buy books, and in every way works identically to their thick client app (it's just displaying text after all, it's not technically demanding). And Apple wouldn't be able to block them from allowing you to buy things, because you're effectively just using a web browser.
The fact that you can't install random apps from anywhere on an iPhone doesn't make the device less desirable to anyone, statistically. Incidentally, if you have source, you can install an app on your phone without paying a dime to anyone.
Don't use speed as an argument.
It would be lovely to see a real Chrome benchmark on iOS, but alas, Apple doesn't want that to happen.
But, here is another point of view (perhaps it can help, i'd love to see html 5 support improve on iOS).
Internet Access is a "human right" and according to the United Nations ( https://www.article19.org/data/files/Internet_Statement_Adop... ) , they condemn countries that intentionally take away or disrupt its citizens’ internet access.
Perhaps by not allowing "basic internet access" ( html 5 is part of the web), Apple is a distrupter of a basic human right.
The platform, where we could least of all platforms, use our basic human right to browse the web is iOS. So Apple is, in it's own way, a company that blocks a basic human right. And the block it because of own financial gain ( using the app store instead of the browser earns them money)
> Apple has no reason to "not" include it, except financial gain.
The reason they have not to include it is that they have different priorities than browser vendors who want to jam mobile browsers full of every unripe API under the sun (like those that dangerously leak user's real connection info even when behind a VPN).
I'm not saying that it is though.
/sarcasm
- broadband
- a browser
Broadband is by ISP's and a browser is in this case by Apple.
And yeah, i don't buy Apple ( obviously). "Add to homescreen" is probably my most used functionality :p .
In fact I can't think of any HTML5 content which you would not be able to view, it might not be formatted properly but it will be accessible.
This has gotten beyond absurd. I can't remember when I voted to make HTML 5 a human right. I can think of a lot more important things that might ought to be addressed (and enforced) first.
I mean, what level of compatibility should you have with a document that says:
> Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways.
I think human rights legislation is fundamental. As such I really, really hope no-one ever uses it for something like this, even worse to win a case. It demeans it to use it to save someone having to write a bit extra code to have their commercial application sell better in China.
But to my opinion, everyone here knows Apple is blocking HTML 5 somewhat and there is almost nothing we can do about it.
PS. General public/buyers don't know and i already changed from iOS, because "add to homescreen" doesn't work as well as on Android
Sure we can! Vote with your wallet and don't buy Apple's products. Or at least write a complaint to one of their support centers..
There's a saying; "What you don't know can't hurt you", and that can be applied for these users - whom make up the majority of iOS device users - since they don't know what they're missing out on. While you and me on the other hand knows what we're missing out on, both as programmers and users, we at least have the chance to vote with our wallets. I do, perhaps even you do, but as you can clearly see it's still not enough to even make a dent in Apple iOS device sales.
To be fair, they also don't care at all.
Don't buy their devices. Apple is not a government that can coerce you into submission.
Apple has a monopoly on iOS devices. There is no competition. And if somebody would built a better or freer iOS device, Apple would use the full force of the state to stop them. So, in a very narrow fashion, Apple does use their government-granted rights to coerce you to buy it's devices, if you want an iOS one.
Of course, nowadays Android devices are more than adequate replacements for many users, so most people do have the option to buy outside of the Apple world, as you suggest.
And if you were complaining as a developer, that wants to distribute your software around, you'd have a point.
But the GP is complaining as a user, that has complete freedom to choose the phone he is buying. He just want the shinning locked-up one, but don't want the consequences of the locking-up. He has all the right in the world to complain about it, but if he won't do anything about it, why would anybody care to listen?
But no one can sell me e.g. an iPhone 7 with audio jack. And I can't build one on my own.
I know it's not the same scale, and i'm not trying to compare poverty and human suffering to a web browser, but IMO there are some similarities.
Switching to an entire other OS which many believe to be less secure, that in many cases doesn't have many of the same applications, and significant changes to everything you do on your device (which for many is their ONLY device connected to the internet), for a web browser?
People won't do it, and I (as a web developer) don't think they should give up everything for a few web features. But when one party is purposely holding the ecosystem back, something should be done. They need to improve, or open up the playing field to others that will improve.
IMO forcing "operating systems" to be more inclusive would be a good thing, and could really improve not only iOS, but Android and Windows as well.
I don't know how this would look legally, i'm pretty far from a lawyer, but the discussion is at the very least worth having without hand waving any complaints away with "just buy an android"
I think we have different definitions for "everyone".
The browser landscape is complicated. Firefox is ahead in some ways, behind in others. WebKit has fantastic support for some things that Edge does not do. Chrome lacks some things that Firefox does.
Does any browser lack "basic internet access"? Nope. They all provide a solid foundation that lets everyone use the web. Are some experimental standards missing? Sure. It's complicated.
This argument is just absurd. Apple isn't denying anyone access to the web. Could we argue that a company forcing IE 6 on employees is violating human rights?
Chrome is forced to use Safari under in IOS.
Google want's browser to get the ads revenue.
Suffers the web developer and end user.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-chrome-fast-secure/id...
Apple gives you (limited) access to WebKit. Basically: a rectangular area on the screen that renders web content. To 'skin' it, you have to build a browser application around that. A complete application that handles tabs, user settings, sync, history, bookmarks, reader mode, anything that does not happen in that 'rectangular view that renders web content'.
Maybe the term "skin" is not adequate, but IMO the features added by Chrome and Firefox on iOS are not that significant for the browsing experience compared to the "rectangular area". Thanks to Apple, WKWebView based browsers are always going to be second class citizens.
Personally I never understood why you decided to move to iOS. I think you should have stick to your guns.
Native apps are faster, with better integration to platform APIs and features, lighter on battery, and consistent (even if a large part of an app is just a webview in a native app shell).
And for developers, they can actually be monetized and attract paying users, unlike mobile browser-based apps.
Safari on mobile is pretty up to date as mobile technologies come. Google Chrome is hardly any better:
http://mobilehtml5.org/
So I don't really buy the conspiracy theory. People just want all kinds of desktop level HTML5 stuff on mobile browsers that they might or might not be suitable for. The most common HN response to Web 3D demos, advanced SVG/canvas etc is that people's fans started to blaze, CPU jumped to the sky...
PS. 50% of these group of apps are web applications - https://postimg.org/image/59r83pe5f/
Why shouldn't i be an ordinary user? All of these web apps are money related ;)
Is that DHL site using Web Push Notifications for either Android or Apple platforms?
Used it. Never liked it.
>Why shouldn't i be an ordinary user? All of these web apps are money related ;)
Ordinary user meant as in about numbers/outliers, not about some specific characteristic of the user.
Is there much missing from Safari for 99% of web browsing needs?
Well, that's a problem right there. Instead of helping the web forward, Apple is keeping the web and web-apps second-class citizens. And of course this helps their own app platform and app store to be successful, and as a bonus it keeps developers within the walls of their garden.
The web-app development paradigm is terrible and can't die fast enough.
The are de-facto second class citizens. The are apps that run on a second platform (the browser).
If someone wants first-class support, build for the OS.
Apple already spends tons of money to make an OS and a dev SDK for it.
Yes, that was my argument: Apple is favoring native apps.
Developing native apps helps Apple further build and exploit its ecosystem, and pushes us further down the rabbit hole.
Yes, but one can make it sound like a conspiracy, when it's in fact a DUH!
Developers have to spend tons of money in building and maintaining cross platform apps written in any way: native, hybrid, or with a VM like NativeScript does.
In the real world budgets are limited and going native isn't always an option. Apple acts as if native was the only viable option, and as if we only had to develop apps for iOS.
> All iPhone apps are web apps (C) S. Jobs
ヽ( ´¬`)ノ
> All iPhone apps are web apps (C) S. Jobs
ヽ( ´¬`)ノ
Safari on iOS is missing ten checkboxes in your link; Chrome on Android is missing two.
Fancy graphics are not really the issue. It's things like service workers and shadow dom that are really crucial.
I'm genuinely curious - is that actually a commonly held opinion?
Quite the contrary. The number of bugs (which in many cases are many years old) and non standard behaviours on Safari for iOS is astounding.
For example not being able to set the height on an <iframe> tag.
In the United States, forcing someone to write code is compelled speech, which is a violation of the First Amendment. I'm not aware of laws in France, but in any case, this seems like a completely wrong approach to solving this problem.
The real problem here is Apple's proprietary platform.
Writing code to provide better HTML5 support is only one of the ways Apple could satisfy this complaint. Lifting the developer agreement / Apple App Store restrictions that prevent third-party developers from writing browsers with better HTML5 support is another.
That would indeed be beneficial.
I think their decision is about a lot of things including the App Store, but security is certainly one.
Anyways you were a fool for believing it.
[1]: https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/11/flash-html5-an...
Of course Flash was/is terrible, and not only for mobile phones.
But what keyle is pointing out is the irony of Apple arguing against Flash for being a proprietary and non standard technology, praising HTML5, and now relegating HTML5 as a second class technology in iOS.
Because you don't know how the law works?
https://developer.apple.com/reference/webkit/wkwebview
There are bugs that have been there since it was released years ago and are still unassigned.
https://bugs.webkit.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=wkwebview&li...
[0] - "Anyone running html5test (http://html5test.com/) on his iPhone"
One of my friends routinely says things like "a woman has rights to his body" when speaking in English because in French possessives agree with the object not the subject, and the French word for body, "corps", is masculine.
In this case, since iPhone starts with a vowel, in French you'd say "son iPhone", so "his iPhone", perhaps.
Alternatively, in French you also always tend to the masculine form in the general case, so maybe that's it? It just strikes me as extremely unlikely that anyone would think, consciously or otherwise, that women don't have iPhones.
On your point about it being "extremely unlikely that anyone would think, consciously or otherwise, that women don't have iPhones", I was more referring to the older (20th century) authoring style where masculine references were used as a default rather than generalising such as "their iPhone".
It's not really different from when Microsoft was doing something similar with their browser, using their market position to force people using IE.
Apple could be forced to open their rendering engine and allow real fully fledged browsers to be used in iOS, because at this point, just fixing the compatibility to HTML standards on iOS may not be enough anymore.
Apple has plenty of competition and the mobile web has not stalled.
If every browser just focused on 'the specs' where would the innovation come from. In fact i'd strongly argue that Apple / iOS is the reason we have such a standard web based eco system at the moment. I mean who remembers the dark days of Java Applets, ActiveX components and browser specific plugins? Apples firm stance on the lack of plugin support was a major factor in their demise and the birth of the amazing rich JS & HTML5 world that many here seem to take for granted.
In short it strikes me as the wines of a spoilt child complaining about their parents forgetting that they are the one's who taught them how to tie their shoes.