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Comment by sgift | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

A standards body is not a suicide pact. If the standard in insecure, Apple should absolutely refuse to implement 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.

You're not considering the obvious: different parties put different importance on security, performance, etc.

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.

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.

Web browsers are among the most compromised software targets of anything ever.

Exactly. Competition drives innovation and progress.

And there is plenty of competition for the iPhone.

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