Open-sourcing Chrome on iOS
blog.chromium.org
blog.chromium.org
Of course it's a brilliant move: by controlling the stagnation of web browser tech, they can force developers to implement apps with their high-lock-in native app frameworks.
Google does the same thing with Android, but it is not nearly as blatant as Apple's flat-out blocking competitive browser implementations.
How so? They have no restrictions on web browser development. Firefox has been there and I use it as my daily driver. Since KitKat, Android System WebView has been an app on in the Play Store based on Chrome that gets updated regularly.
Heck, you don't even have to use their phone app, you can install a SIP client. It's perfectly possible to use Android as it exists in AOSP without Google stuff at all. Some 3rd party apps may want to use things like Google Maps embedded, but there are projects that replace those and an Xposed module to fake the signatures to match. The Google-less Android system is really a decent experience if you're willing to put the work in to it.
That doesn’t work in Marshmallow, due to a bug, even if the user opts out, it will still disable the app during Doze.
The bug has been fixed in later versions, but you as a dev obviously can’t just leave a huge share of your users without working push notifications.
Surely another constant connection like SIP would also be terminated, no? I don't see how that would differ from another push notification system.
edit: to be clear I'm using a 3rd party SIP client (Bria), which I have indeed excepted via this method.
This was fixed at https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/c/221708/ and probably merged into many custom roms generated since. It also only occurred under fairly specific circumstances.
EDIT: Yup, https://romhut.com/versions/cm-13-0-20160508-v8-0 indicates it's been in CM for a while, which is probably why I haven't experienced it. Dianne Hackborn fixed this as far back as November 2015, it might have made it into 6.0.1 on some devices too, though I could be misreading.
This leads to the problem that you, as a dev, either have to leave a huge amount of users without working push notifications, or use GCM anyway.
This is the fundamental difference in philosophies behind Android and iOS.
Apple likes to build their software (most of the time) like Python - its an opinionated platform that strives to make that best decisions for users. They've determined there's very little user benefit from having multiple push notification services, and they don't want to give users a way to shoot themselves in the foot by enabling such a setting that would impact battery life like that.
Many of Apple's decisions can be viewed through that lense.
Well, I'm the user and I've determined that I'd rather not send private data through their servers, that I'd rather be able to do things like run a proper IMAP, XMPP, SSH or SIP client on my device without disconnections, etc. Those seem like pretty major use cases to me, ones which Apple shouldn't be making decisions for the user about.
If I ran an Apple device I couldn't use SIP and I'd be required to pay 4x as much for a phone plan rather than using a cheap data-only tablet plan for example. That seems prohibitive to say the least...
This is of course ignoring that the user doesn't get much of a say in what push notification delivery mechanism is used - that's up to the developer.
But, to be honest, if you don't trust Apple to handle your push notifications then I doubt you would trust them to do much else, and you should choose another platform.
Most of the time my concern isn't with apps that have a dedicated service backing them, but with apps which don't. I don't want Apple notifying me when something changes on my SSH session because I sent my SSH credentials to some 3rd party server that notified Apple to notify me.
I trust absolutely no one to handle those credentials properly, I need my device to do it. And I need it to do it by interacting directly with the server.
Android solution: You own the server. Your server pushes directly to you.
iOS solution: No ability to maintain SSH connections, instead you need to get a 3rd party app to open an SSH connection for you and send you a push notification via an Apple service when a change occurs.
See the problem? Trusting Apple alone isn't an option - Apple doesn't offer a service to send you a push notification for your SSH session. You need to involve a 3rd party.
iOS solution: everything goes through Apple, I generally trust them and know that they try to look out for me.
Android solution: every app goes through someone else's server, every app needs individual vetting because I have no idea what they're doing or how hard they're trying with their privacy. Where is the trying at all. That's the way you see it, how about the way I see it?
iOS solution: everything goes through Apple, I generally trust them and know that they try to look out for me.
Android solution: every app goes through someone else's server, every app needs individual vetting because I have no idea what they're doing or how hard they're trying with their privacy. Or if they're trying at all.
I like the iOS solution. You have it framed for my developer point of you, and I can understand that. But from your point of you, your solution has a lot of potential issues around privacy alone.
I'm not talking about general push notifications though, nor am I speaking as a developer. I'm speaking as a user, who also wants to connect to ssh, imap, xmpp and sip. The standard Apple/Google model is fine for most push notifications but absolutely not for things like this where a direct connection to a server is something that you as a user want.
That's the part I'm complaining about, not the general push message system, but the system of not being able to keep a persistent connection to a SIP or IMAP server without giving my credentials to a 3rd party so they can handle push and forward that off to Apple or Google.
iOS solution: everything goes through Apple,
I generally trust them...
and know that they try to look out for me.
Apple looks out for their bottom line. If your interest happens to cross that path, bummer.
Don't just assume a commercial interest 'looks out for you' because they don't. If your needs, or at least your perceived needs (due to effective marketing) fit with a company's strategy you might get the idea that said company does it all for you and your fellow users. This does not imply any causality, the company just does what it thinks is best for its bottom line. As long as a company serves the needs of its users they are in a position to do well. Vendor lock-in serves companies in that they have more freedom to choose their own path without bothering all that much about whether that path coincides with their users' needs as those users face a steep cost if they choose to change vendor. As long as the company keeps the extra costs - in money, limited features or usability - lower than what it would cost a user to switch vendor they stand to gain from this strategy.
You honestly believe that Google don't look out for their bottom line either?
You honestly believe that Google don't look out for their bottom line either?
But, to get back to your Google example, of course Google looks out for their bottom line. It just so happens that Google is not nearly as aggressive in herding their users into fenced corrals as Apple is. Google moves fast and often discontinues services so it is unwise to base your (company's) future on the existence of any specific Google service. Fortunately Google generally makes it easy to get data out of their services so a viable exit strategy is usually feasible. Apple is not that fast a mover which also implies they don't discontinue services at the rate at which Google does. Where Apple fails miserably is in their support for migrating data out of their services. This, again, fits the description I gave at the start of this sub-thread: Apple wants to raise the cost of leaving their services.
I learned recently that this isn't just a matter about the OS vendor making decisions, but that the OS vendors negotiate with the cell providers for longer timeouts:
https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/1000...
"The advantage GCM has is that Google has made agreements with mobile carriers not to timeout connections on those networks. Without those, websocket connection idle timeouts on mobile data connections will be unpredictable, and they tend to be more trigger happy (and also often just silently close without sending an RST)."
So, if you want to run a proper IMAP (IDLE, I assume) or XMPP or anything client, you'll need to negotiate with your cell provider for better timeouts.
Or just send TCP keepalives and accept worse battery life. I still get enough to get me through a day with my phone almost never sleeping fully due to all the shit I have connected constantly.
Also, note that that comment is completely unsourced - I'm curious if there's any evidence backing that or it's just bunk. It wouldn't surprise me, but I also don't see any references to that anywhere else. Moxie is known to hate the 3rd party app stores and stuff, so it might just be him bullshitting about a possibility.
https://developer.apple.com/reference/callkit
You can also push notifications to your device in an end-to-end encrypted manner. iOS 10 supports notification extensions so your private app extension can receive the encrypted payload, decrypt it, and then present a normal notification.
Because people could use whatever web browser they wanted and tons of people experienced 3-5 hour battery life, I imagine a lot of them would ditch iOS thinking that the iPhone was the problem.
And Apple would lose money.
There are some things Apple does that are very blatantly self-serving. I think there's are VERY reasonable explanations for this one (power usage and security being two).
I'd argue it's a platform that strives to make best decisions for Apple, and that's not the same thing as being opinionated.
Yes, there's an argument that there is very little user benefit from having multiple push notification services. But there's no inherent benefit to having Apple's service be the one-and-only service ever allowed to be used -- that's not an opinion, that's vendor lock-in.
There's an argument that there is benefit in not having multiple different web browsers on a user's phone. But there's no benefit to having Apple's webkit be the one-and-only web browser ever allowed on the phone -- that's not opinion, that's vendor lock-in.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a product holding strong opinions. But vendor lock-in is not the same thing as an opinion -- there is a clear difference between an opinionated product, and a monopolized one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Let's suppose Apple were to open up their APIs to allow other services to send push notifications to their devices. Since they are no longer the intermediary they've given up control on how often a developer's servers are sending notifications via the third party, they've lost a control on throttling how often notifications are sent to devices. What happens if the push service or the developer's backend is compromised (or misconfigured) and attempts to send hundreds of push notifications per second to thousands of phones? Features could be added to the OS to help mitigate this but the phone must still service the incoming traffic. Strictly speaking, this isn't Apple's fault but this won't be a sufficient answer for their customers.
Which isn't even considering that they need to figure out a secure mechanism for allowing third parties to uniquely identify iPhones.
> There's an argument that there is benefit in not having multiple different web browsers on a user's phone. But there's no benefit to having Apple's webkit be the one-and-only web browser ever allowed on the phone -- that's not opinion, that's vendor lock-in.
What happens if Mozilla, Google, etc. release a new browser engine for iOS with all the latest whizz-bang HTML features but at the cost of doubling power consumption? Apple support needs to deal with the customers who suddenly see their battery life plummet when switching to a new browser. 99 customers out of 100 will blame Apple for this. What if a vulnerability allowing RCE is discovered in the JIT code included in the third party browser? Apple has lost control of the patching cycle and their only recourse would be to remotely remove the browsers from their customers' phones if the vendor does not update the app in an acceptable timeframe.
I feel like a lot of Apple's decisions around the iOS ecosystem can be explained by looking at the problems they had with customers running Adobe Flash on the Mac.
What if I use an email app or notes app or other app that consumes twice the power of Apple's inbuilt app?
I don't see what's special about a web browser. It's just another app.
Unless you want Signal, which everyone (rightly) recommends. Finally off of almost every Google service, wanna install the latest and greatest encrypted chat app... too bad. But I recently heard Signal is finally working on it (after they closed my Github Issue as wontfix/by-design a year or two ago).
https://developer.android.com/about/versions/marshmallow/and...
Edit: I'm getting down-voted, presumably because people think web apps should have different capabilities than native apps. To those responding this way: why? I can't imagine why you'd prefer the locked-down app distribution channel of the Play Store, in comparison to the open web..
I think a lot of the newer APIs being exposed to the Web via the Browser are not very well thought out and will eventually be removed because of the risks they present.
Those APIs are available to all Android apps, including other browsers. The only complaints I've heard are about Push-style APIs and power saving essentially forcing you to use Google Services.
However you can write an App that persists in the App Tray as an icon that could maintain the App's Service component. The drawback there however is the persistent notification.
Well, the actual drawback is that you end up with over a dozen such notifications, your entire UI is full with them, and there’s no way to get rid of them, even if you developed the apps yourself.
On the phone they could then look if GCM is around (and use it) or if that other notification app is around (and use it) or propose to install said app. It's negligible in terms of user confusion because people on non-GCM systems likely know what they're getting into (except for those using Amazon Fire).
I, for example, develop an app connecting to servers that the users self-host.
I can’t modify the server, nor can I easily get it to send notifications.
But I want to be able to show notifications.
Luckily I can open a port to it and wait for them.
It’s impossible to solve with GCM.
Any Java library that depends on Java 7 or 8 standard libraries not available on Android, newly introduced JVM bytecodes, some of the Java 8 language features, annotation processors, ... isn't usable on Android.
Good luck getting Java 9 modules, or eventually Java 10 value types and updated generics when they become available.
Were all servers, mainframes and dumb terminals counted too? Back in the nineties I'm sure those counted for something compared with PCs.
Apple has a complete monopoly on the iPhone / iPad market and that market is bigger than Microsoft's market in the 90s. You cannot change the OS without changing the hardware. You cannot change the browser without changing the OS. PCs and Windows never had such restrictions.
So what's the difference? If you answer that the PC was an open standard whereas the iPhone is Apple's own toy, I personally don't think that's fair, given that Microsoft too has built the PC market ;-)
?!? Of course they do, just like Nintendo has a monopoly on the 3DS market, and Porsche has a monopoly on the 911 market, but that's just tautological.
If you meant "Apple has a complete monopoly on the smartphone/tablet market" then a 3 second Google search will show you that this is completely false.
Microsoft dominated the Personal Computing market. Apple is dominating the iOS market which is a subset of the Mobile Device market. I can buy a mobile device and experience the social and personal benefits from dozens of players.
And bringing it back to the point at hand. The reason Microsoft got in trouble is not because they had a monopoly. But because they used that monopoly to unfairly attempt to create another monopoly when a new competitor came into the market. Safari always shipped with iOS. There was never any competition to begin with.
Now, it can be argued that Apple has enough of a vertical stranglehold that anti-trust rules can apply. It doesn't have to be an absolute monopoly to violate anti-trust law.
And i do believe Apple has gotten a slap or two on the wrist for abusing their hold on content distribution. Ebook pricing for instance.
Now if Apple made it real hard to play any content from ITMS outside of Apple products, that may be cause for concern. And they did get slapped on the wrist about ebook pricing.
The US's case against Microsoft was that they leveraged a monopoly in one field (OSes) to gain market share in another (web browsers) through unfair licensing terms. Those terms were forcing OEMs like Dell to bundle IE and place it on the home screen.
I think the US case actually paints Google, not Apple, in a bad light. Apple does not license its software to OEMs, so there's no license terms that can be unfair. Indeed, if the point of the case is "OEMs should have more freedom and flexibility" - well, Apple IS the OEM.
But Google does license to OEMs under very strict terms. For example, if I am an OEM and I want to ship Google Maps or the Play Store, I must include all the apps Google asks me to, I must make Google the default search engine for everything, I must tell Google how many devices I sell, I can't sell any other devices with custom Android, etc. This is well beyond what Microsoft did, and is the basis of one of the EU's cases against Google.
The EU case against Microsoft is a little close to Apple, but only a little. Microsoft was accused of creating "disincentives for OEMs to ship third party streaming media players, and harms competition in the market for streaming media players." The concern there was that content providers would be forced to use Microsoft's proprietary media formats.
The analogy to Apple would be very strong if Mobile Safari had lots of proprietary features, like ActiveX. But instead Apple has gone the other way, e.g. by not including Flash. It does not appear that Apple is making a play to control the web through proprietary standards.
Also at the time web browsers were still relatively new. Today basically every device and operating system comes with one, it's expected. No one ever complained that Microsoft with shipping calculator or solitaire.
To whatever degree there might be a case against Apple (which I don't really see) there are some pretty significant differences from the Microsoft case 20 years ago.
It is.
There are also some simpler steps to start with though:
Apple could allow people to change the default browser on iOS. There are plenty alternatives to Safari. Let the people choose.
Apple could expose more WKWebView APIs so that browsers can actually do more interesting things and compete at a feature level. WKWebView is so extremely limited by Apple that the current iOS browser landscape is very boring.
Now would most users rather have the time spent on that, or improving Siri to give it more domains like the ones they added last year for third-party apps?
If the choice was between an improved Siri and the existing Chrome app as the default… Would that really be a smart trade off for their time?
( obviously Apple has the money to hire a lot more people, but let's face it that's not going to happen for this kind of thing)
I said it before but the #1 threat to all native app vendor is Google Chrome. As it's capabilities break through the native app turf, so will the smartphone user's demand for the most powerful and flexible browser on the market (Google Chrome) and the hardware associated with it (user perception is superficial influenced by marketing).
but yeah as long as celebrities go around with an iPhone, they are going to have that luxury brand tied with it.
There's a reason vast majority of smartphone users install less than one or two apps throughout the year, web apps loading faster (sub second AMP pages) and native app experience (PWA offering add to home screen icons, offline mode, caching) will continue put pressure on the already falling and commoditized native app market.
Aren't there people using the web version of that because the app is so bloated?
Those same users also use a fixed set of web sites.
Now your web app even gets it's own icon in your home screen along with other native apps and it works offline too just like other native apps.
You are right, there's not much to talk about when native apps are facing an existential crisis.
Most of the capabilities of the web are used in a user-hostile way: to annoy, track, or drain the user's battery. PWAs will make the problem worse. AMP is a reaction against this.
as the mobile browser increases in capability it's inevitable we'll see more PWA as it is good enough if not better than native apps in every measurable way unless you absolutely need native app to utilize the full set of hardware on the device or big enough or successful enough that it will be used by millions of people everyday.
This is really nonsense.
Native apps in general are testament to the UX failure that is Web standards and browsers. Think about the issues with CSS layout (e.g. Vertically centering) and (still) the relative poor performance of one page Web apps.
I heard someone else call native apps the new bookmarks. I think they're right. Think about the UX of a general purpose browser. You have to launch it then go to a site. That site's page is limited by the lowest common denominator of what a browser can do. It's also (at least) a two step process.
Native apps are generally task specific (e.g. Taking photos) or at least site specific (e.g. Facebook, instagram). This is much easier to use and understand.
That aside, Safari isn't what I'd call browser stagnation, certainly not to the degree Internet Explorer was back in the IE6 days.
What's more, Apple does a pretty good job of keeping users on the latest versions of iOS (compared to the likes of Samsung). The browser stagnation from OS version stagnation is far more damaging imho.
please... SPAs are pretty darn fast and they can be placed on your homescreen to open via single tap, at least in Android.
Check out https://events.google.com/io2016/
Stop whining.
Additionally, I would like to challenge the unsupported notion that WebKit is "stagnation of web browser tech". While there may be issues here and there, my impression is that Apple is overall committed to pushing the envelope[1] and adding compelling features.[2]
[1] https://webkit.org/blog/7122/introducing-riptide-webkits-ret...
[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/relea...
[1] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/browser-wars-is-chrome-o...
[2] http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/10/8381447/chrome-macbook-bat...
[3] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/230583-microsoft-claim...
Google web apps (gmail, google maps, etc.) seem to be a particular offender.
Seriously, what horse are you backing where iOS Safari is compared to IE6?!? What oh-so important feature you simply must-have, that would even begin to signify that iOS Safari is "holding back the web"?
The web dev world is absolutely mental at the moment...
That fact that localstorage doesnt work in private mode is 1 example.
From the Web Storage spec: "[localStorage] is designed for storage that spans multiple windows, and lasts beyond the current session."[1] Thus if a browser is discarding localStorage prior to the end of the current session, it's explicitly against the spec.
This is more than academic. If apps aren't written to explicitly use ephemeral storage then they may not function as expected in private mode, like, say, unexpectedly causing data loss.
If your site relies on using localstorage during the lifecycle of an individual page, you can always replace it with an in-memory mock polyfill if you notice it's missing. There's probably an NPM package for that.
It's certainly not the approach everyone would be happy with, but it allows developers much more flexibility than the contrary case, where private browsing is a silent effect that might make apps do very stupid things (like, say, downloading the same huge asset bundle into localStorage over and over.)
This would happen anyway no matter what storage or cache is used since all data is cleared after private browsing session is over.
Breaking localstorage (with an over-quota error) is not the way to deal with this. Polyfills are just more crap in complexity and downloaded bytes to compensate for a browser's issues.
It would be much better to have a navigator.isPrivate flag enabled so apps can check the environment accurately, not guess based on whether certain APIs work or not. It's not about SLAs but supporting standards. Deleting client-side data is all that private browsing needs to do.
Private mode means deleting the data, not disabling the functionality. Chrome and the rest handle it correctly.
Apple's total opaqueness on what their plans are for the future functionality of their browser certainly doesn't help either.
I tried to circumvent it a while ago when I was playing with the Web Audio API by allowing an iOS user to "upload" a video, from which I would then extract the audio using decodeAudioData. Unfortunately it returned an error on callback in iOS.
Perhaps it could still work by processing said video on the server and sending back the audio, but keeping everything client-side was my requirement.
get off my lawn etc.
Not buying it.
There are plenty of uses for newer standards, that's why they're created, but it only works if the browsers carry their weight and implement them consistently. Safari doesnt, and is thus holding back the progress, just like IE6+ did.
Service workers are another example of a feature that is missing in Safari. And an important one for offline support.
Its absence is a crippling limitation.
Yeah, the kind of "IE6" that beat Chrome and Firefox last year to be the first to fully support ES6 for example.
https://twitter.com/webkit/status/728643624464883712
Check http://caniuse.com/#compare=chrome+59,safari+TP yourself, and you see the differences in scores is mostly because they give 1 point to every API, however non-important it is. Meanwhile, Chrome supports some good ones (File Storage, WebRTC, Pointer Events etc), but Safari supports some good ones that Chrome doesn't too: MathML, HTTP Live Streaming, Video and Audio Tracks, SVG fonts. But Chrome also tries to push various proposals of (mainly) theirs, down everyone's throats.
Never experienced that with chrome, but I developed a kind of hate towards mozilla, for forcing IndexedDB and IndexedDB ONLY and refusing for anything else and therefore killing FileAPI and WebSQL
You don't give people a lot of credit for even minimal logic with that statement. I've dealt with a large number of low-tech users and every. single. one. of them has understood the relationship between battery life and the applications they run.
They also understand what having GPS, active WiFi and watching a couple of hours of video will do to their batteries. The only ones that have a problem with this are the ones that pay $800 for a device that struggles with normal 2-day usage because thin trumps mAh.
Have you used WebKit? I'm running into issues with bugs that were reported 2+ years ago.
For example, I have Google Maps installed, but if I make an app and add an MKMapView it is the same old Apple Map it is everywhere.
Another thing that makes browser engines special is that they can be used to build "native" apps. Apple famously banned Flash. But if they allowed you to use any old web engine they could run into the same problems with poorly optimized apps on their platform. So Apple's not just forcing other browsers to adhere to their efficiency-first priorities... it's forcing all apps.
Apps are free to be inefficient. You can use some horribly slow JavaScript engine and build all your code that way. You can use Python or Ruby. Another comment mentions that Cordova apps are allowed, so it doesn't seem like the WebKit requirement even applies when building "native" apps.
The other commenters are right. If people bought an iPhone, downloaded Chrome (the REAL Chrome), and use their phone and got six hours of battery life who do you think will get blamed? Apple.
People here all sorts of stories about how Apple doesn't have good battery life in the use chrome on their computer and it doesn't cause their computer to have five hours of battery life (even though Chrome is a known battery hog) so it must be Apple's fault. Blame the $900 phone.
For battery reasons alone I completely understand Apple's decision. There are plenty of other issues, such as keeping things updated with the latest iOS API is that are needed by the default browser, although some of that could be worked around with large third parties like Google.
I know they were missing features the people are absolutely clamoring for here on HN, but every time I asked they never seem to be something that I care about. I don't really care about web RTC, I don't remember the last time I wanted to have a webpage record audio, the fact that local storage doesn't persist across private browsing tabs is a FEATURE to me.
I think this fits well with the other article that's currently on the front page. Lots of people here in another text sites trounced Apple for their computer updates this year, but normal users seem to be very happy with them. A lot of these positions seem to just be too far out of Main Street (and there are so many iPhone sold that mainstream is GIGANTIC).
But the other thing is it's obvious when I play a game. Where is I don't really think about using Safari, but I'm sure I use it dozens and dozens of times a day. So I'm very conscious of the fact that Pokémon go or whatever else I'm playing eats my battery, but all the little interactions with the web browser eating an extra 20% probably wouldn't raise a flag for me; I'd just think my phone's battery life got a lot worse.
That's my best guess anyway
Correct. If it lasted 90 minutes they would clearly attribute it to playing the game. If however a regular mix of typical daily activities gets low battery life, that's just the phone's fault.
But I would add that Apple has done a lot of work to make their game APIs power efficient. Metal is a perfect example of a more proprietary approach that achieved significant speed and battery life gains.
I'm looking at you Pokémon GO.
It would be great if there was competition so that other browser developers could try to improve power efficiency even more.
I think the most charitable explanation possible is that Apple doesn't want any kind of "open with..." choice ala Android Intents because they aren't very usable. For the same reason they don't allow you to set the maps application or the phone application.
As a person who has done a lot of platform design, I can definitely relate to that desire. OTOH, as a user who prefers Chrome and Google Maps, it drives me crazy that the default is always to open Safari and Apple Maps.
The key phrase being "within the limitation of the platform." Apple's been pretty consistent in designing (and limiting) key developer APIs to be power efficient. And they're willing to ship later to achieve it. I mentioned WebKit. A more obvious example of this is their approach to multitasking. Android let apps do more or less whatever they wanted and they supported multitasking first. Apple waited until iOS 4, but the more structured and regulated set of APIs they came out with was much more battery friendly.
> I think the most charitable explanation possible is that Apple doesn't want any kind of "open with..." choice
Yet iOS 8 added a bunch of extension APIs.[1] You can literally open content in other apps via the system share dialog, including third party mapping and voip apps. The stated reasons for waiting until iOS 8 were that they needed to do a bunch of architectural work first.[2]
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Ge...
[2] http://www.imore.com/our-full-transcript-talk-show-wwdc-2016...
One argument I could see being made is that the browser is used more than others and thus warrants tighter control. But even that is weak. People are draining their batteries all day long playing games as it is.
Apple might have walled garden motives, but the security story is compelling on its own.
Which I applaud. But those APIs constrain all applications equally.
So if Apple allowed browser applications to include their own rendering engines, their APIs would naturally constrain those applications too.
Now it could be that Apple does not want to enable applications other than WebKit access to APIs that would allow jit compilation. OK, that is reasonable. But in that case, why not allow browsers to provide their own rendering engine but just mandate that only JSC is allowed to run JS?
Or why not just say that only Apple apps can jit and let the market figure it out?
(I'm going to drop the thing about 'open with...' because it was a distraction and ancillary to my main point, which is that Apple is doing this because they want to control progress of the web platform on iOS)
This objection makes zero sense. You cannot install any 3rd party app, just those that got approved. And a power hog or whatever app can always be de-approved.
Not so much with web apps.
See also: removal of the headphone jack, massive backlash, everyone still bought the fucking thing
So, yes, there are good reasons for Apple being very determined over what you can, and more importantly can not do with Webview and Safari on iOS: they do not want iOS to become too good a host for web-based apps for fear that they might out-compete appstore-bought apps as Apple does not make a cent off the former. This is also why Apple does not allow other 'real' browsers on iOS as those could be used to circumvent these restrictions. That thing about power consumption goes just as much for other apps as it does for web browsers so it is rather easy to defeat that argument.
By comparison, Edge doesn't have either, and Firefox has no Shadow DOM and old out-of-spec Custom Elements.
How is it that Safari is holding the web back in this area?
(WebUSB and WebMIDI have nothing to do with Web Components, they are hardware-specific device APIs.)
There's a quote:
"Make a system that even a fool can use, and only fools will use it."
Except it isn't true in this case. Which is unfortunate because developers should know better: supporting only a single brand is bad for competition, and will turn computing into a monoculture.
> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.
> 2.5.2 Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code, including other iOS, watchOS, macOS, or tvOS apps.
> by controlling the stagnation of web browser tech, they can force
> developers to implement apps with their high-lock-in native app
> frameworks
Yes, if Google were allowed to distribute their fork of the WebKit engine on iOS then everyone would stop writing iOS apps. Just like no one writes Android apps.
I think the mobile world will follow soon. When it does, control of the industry will be released from the two major players, and consumers will benefit from increased competition, just like it has for desktop software. So yeah, web-developer logic can put a smile on everybody's face. :-)
What "stagnation"? Semi-informed complaints aside whenever someone finds that their favorite desktop JS feature doesnt work on mobile, Webkit has been in the forefront of mobile web capabilities for ages.
Still better than Chrome on Android on several fronts. If it was just Chrome, we'd just have different unimplemented APIs and lower power efficiency.
And there's a much more obvious reason you don't want a competitor to have their own app platform on your platform. After some point they can be too powerful for your good -- the same way that continued support for Microsoft's Office or Adobe Photoshop was crucial for Mac OS/OS X success in the late nineties / early 00s.
Oh, and as somebody mentions elsewhere in this thread, how would an alternative browser implement GPU access (for WebGL APIs), or their JIT? They'd need to be given all kinds of first class access to the device which can be compromised or exploited.
Apple's environment is a walled garden. They don't hide this - in fact they make a virtue of it. And the market is so competitive that there are plenty of viable non-Apple alternatives.
It's one thing to argue the merits or not of a walled garden as a business strategy. However most of the arguments being made here seem... petty?
Why do so many prefer the walled garden? Sure, many will easily dismiss them as "stupid" but this can't surely be the case. iPhone owners make up about 43% of smart phone users according to CNN (Take it for what you will).
I don't have an answer, but I think it's worth asking the question.
What's the mystery?
No, I don't. I say it as if there are more important things to consider in the products you buy.
(Their products are also not _just_ sexy/trendy, clearly. They basically invented this entire category of modern smartphone despite many previous attempts by others.)
Sadly, average, non-technically minded users make up a large proportion of the global populace.
Sound quality is not the only important quality headphones can have. Could the same be true for phones as well?
I'd first ask: do people actually prefer the walled garden?
In my opinion, the walled garden has very little impact on the day-to-day experience of most users. Partly, this is because the most popular apps were historically available on iOS first (and perhaps exclusively). More apps gives the impression of more freedom, not less.
This makes the walled garden a non-factor for most people, so purchasing decisions are made based on other qualities: design, hardware, user experience, app selection, familiarity with the platform, brand perception, ecosystem lock-in, etc.
1. It just works+.
2. They have sensible defaults+.
3. I am not the product++.
+ for what I am interested in doing.
++ unlike the inhabitants of the open meadow nextdoor.
I've had Nexus phones and iPhones, and I like the software on both. But when I drop my iPhone and crack the screen, as I did several months ago, I can go to one of several Apple stores near me and get a replacement in about 15 minutes from polite, well-trained employees. That service also extends to OS and security updates for many years instead of just one or two.
The new Pixel phones cost more than $600, which puts them roughly in the iPhone price range. I certainly would not pay that much for something that is so important to my daily life if I had to ship it somewhere to get it repaired, possibly being without a phone for several days while I wait for it to come back. It won't run the latest OS after two years, either.
It's the same reason a lot of people buy Lexuses instead of Toyotas -- you are treated better when you need service, you get a nice loaner car instead of a ride home in a minivan shuttle, etc.
In general, as I've gotten older, I have learned that paying for service is just as important as paying for features. I sometimes buy things with features I don't really need in order to access the better service experience.
I think that puts the question wrong, the question is actually 'what's the actual downside to the normal person of the walled garden?'
Mobile Safari and the App Store are still gold standards from everything I've seen. Go look at any browser benchmark you want -- Anandtech has a bunch of them in any review article -- and the iPhone running Mobile Safari runs circles around flagship Androids running Chrome (this includes Google's own Octane benchmark). Part of that is the hardware but (1) the magnitude of many benchmarks is larger than the single threaded advantage the hardware gets in say Geekbench and (2) hardware is another walled garden(!!); if the unwalled garden is so much better in theory, why in practice isn't there a single Android phone that can match the iphone in single threaded performance?
On iOS browsers like Chrome and Firefox are basically unable to compete in terms of performance, web standards or features like browser plugins. So people that use them do so just to get sync. Of course Safari Mobile is decent nowadays, but that's not the issue.
iOS 9 eliminated that performance penalty-- it introduced a new kind of web view backed by an out-of-process renderer and JS engine, which, since it's Apple-blessed, doesn't have the JIT restriction. Third-party browsers updated to use the new framework can get the same performance as Safari.
But that framework is missing various things, such as content blocking. (That goes a long way to explain why there's both "Focus" and "Firefox" on iOS)
Not really - SFSafariViewController uses content blockers, autofill, etc. There's also WKWebView for those that want to implement their own content blockers and autofill engines.
Curious why you'd want safari's content blockers to run inside chrome or firefox though? That's not how browser plugins work anywhere else, and it seems like if content blockers were forced in to 3rd party browsers there'd be a lot more angst over that decision.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Safari...
Mozilla also made a statement about it: https://motherboard.vice.com/read/heres-why-firefox-for-ios-...
It is not something that WKWebView automagically does.
Because there's currently no way for those browsers to get any content blocking without switching to the slower WebView.
I'm fairly confident that both the Google Chrome team and Mozilla's Firefox for iOS team are better informed here than you are.
Apple has decided that Content Blocking is a Safari only feature. Apple has made the decision to not expose the private APIs in WKWebView that would allow browsers like Chrome and Firefox to use the same speedy content blocking.
The old WebView, UIWebView, also does not support content blocking. But since it runs completely in the same process as your app, you can replace the HTTP handling with your own and patch content blocking on top of that.
That is what Firefox Focus and Brave do for example. It works, but it is far from ideal. Also, it is likely an API on the way to be deprecated.
While it is technically possible to use content blockers in WKWebView, it can only be done via private APIs, and Apple capriciously bans apps from their appstore that use private APIs.
SFSafariViewController is useles for apps like Chrome and Firefox. It is an embedded Safari controller. Not an embedded generic webview controller.
SFSafariViewController has zero API. All it can do is display a webpage. Applications that use it have zero ability to even modify the UI.
That is intentional. It is supposed to be a Safari view. And for security reasons that is probabl good, otherwise it would be a gateway to your browsing data.
Because WKWebView has such a limited API that it currently is impossible to implement content blocking.
WKWebView is both a blessing and a curse for browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
A blessing because tt works really well inside that square area where content is rendered. It is as fast as Safari, as responsive to touch gestures, supports web APIs pretty well.
A curse because the API that it exposes is completely lacking. No way to intercept network requests, no way to interact with the DOM, no way to interact with JavaScript, no way to customize it fully, no way to do proper session store/restore, no way to interact with its internal caches, no way to set the cookie policy, no way to customize the context menus that it exposes, no way to handle errors better, no way to set headers on requests, no way to use content filters ..
I can go on for a while. You can look at the Chrome and Firefox source code to understand the crazy workaround both browsers had to do to get some pretty basic functionality.
Search for WKWebView on https://bugz.webkit.org to see what people have been asking for, for the past three years.
So WKWebView's dynamically generated code is running safely firewalled in a separate address space controlled by Apple and not accessible to your app, while older UIWebViews run in the address space of your application, and aren't allowed to write to code pages, so their JIT compiler is disabled.
Since it's running in another process, WkWebView's JavaScriptEngine lacks the ability to expose your own Objective C classes to JavaScript so they can be called directly [2], but it does include a less efficient way of adding script message handlers that call back to Objective C code via IPC [3].
[1] https://developer.apple.com/reference/iosurface
[2] https://developer.apple.com/reference/javascriptcore/jsexpor...
[3] https://developer.apple.com/reference/webkit/wkusercontentco...
Is that true? I understand the security argument against JITs, but I don't see why it would be objectionable to run a copy of e.g. Gecko if you excluded the JS JIT component. (Of course you would never actually do that. But I'm trying to tease apart the separate arguments and see if they're actually connected.)
It seems to me that the root cause for this is all the JIT. If the JIT in iOS has to be exposed via IPC for security (as claimed in a sibling comment) it's simply not going to be a win to try to use it in combination with a separate rendering engine, if it's even possible at all.
It is. Mozilla has an iOS port of Gecko. It runs well, even without the JIT, but we are not allowed to use it.
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/embedding/io...
Sorry I dont know where we keep the build instructions.
So you can maybe ship Gecko + SpiderMonkey, as long as you only run JS that's part of your app. But if you want to run JS from a website (or indeed any code from anywhere), you're not allowed to do that on iOS.
I haven't checked whether it would be OK to ship a browser engine that doesn't support JS at all, but that's a fairly academic question anyway.
That is not true. Many apps do this. Games have been doing this for a decade. It is not a problem to do this. Apple has never made a big deal of that. Only if you are trying to build a shadow app store.
Apple does not care. As long as you are operating in the spirit of their App Store.
You know when they care? When you start charging money for those downloads. Via an alternative payment channel. Or when you run an alternative app store from within your app.
If you download assets on demand, and some of those turn out to be executable* code, nobody cares.
* Where executable means 'interpreted' because you cannot run unsigned code. But for games that is fine, they have been doing this with JS, Lua and Python for a decade.
(You can downvote me - but this is based on a decade of experience)
The subject we're talking about here would not fly under their radar.
Pebble used this quite effectively to add phone-side apps to their product.
I guess what's bothering me is that there is an unstated assumption underlying this entire discussion which people never bring up: for performance reasons, the rendering engine has to be tied closely to the JS implementation. Specifically, calling over some IPC interface at every entrypoint into the JS interpreter would be a performance nightmare. This is the reason why these can't be disentangled. The connection to the interpreter is really an indirect one.
> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.
See section 2.5.6 of the Appstore guidelines
"2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript."
And regarding your quesiton: I'm sure you cannot replace their webkit usage with one switch to Blink... I'm sure the iOS internal webview is deeply integrated/
You can't "locally compile" code on iOS. That's against App Store guidelines.
Chrome on iOS has some neat UI innovations, though-- when you drag down on a page you see three icons; a + sign for a new tab, a refresh icon, and an X to close the current tab. So you can drag straight down to refresh, down then left to add a new tab, etc. I really miss that in safari.
It also syncs history, logins, open tabs, etc, with desktop Chrome.
Saying you can press the back button located on the bottom left side of the screen really doesn't cut it.
Looking at https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... there is:
autocomplete, autofill, content settings, content suggestions, crash reporting, desktop promotion, device sharing, dom distiller, favicon, find in page, first run, geolocation, history, infobars, metrics, open from clipboard, passwords, payments, physical web, prefs, reading list, search engines, share extension, signin, ssl, suggestions, sync, translate, voice
4. Wikipedia
6. Reddit
33. Wikia
37. Wordpress
40. Twitch
60. Github
61. Reddit Uploads
And there are open data projects like Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow that essentially publish all their content on open source licenses and offer free download dumps. Both are top 100 sites.
Then there are the news sites available without paywall. Those are just basic blogs with photos, video, and text accessible to the public. They aren't open source; you have to pay to republish their content. But there is essentially no special software you can't match with any open source CMS at CNN or the Washington Post or HuffPo or many, many other top sites.
I'd say the solid majority of the top 100 sites don't have any special closed source software, except for the proprietary search engine projects: Google, Bing, Yahoo, their respective mail and document suite projects, and the like.
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile
Both Firefox and Focus are in the top 100. Enjoy.
What did you mean here?
> Only to distribute through App Store.
Which is a big deal, since by default iPhones are locked down and can only install things from the app store.
Why don't more people use open source apps? I don't know, it's kind of weird since Android is a much bigger audience than, say, a Linux desktop. (On my laptop I don't think I use a single closed source thing anymore, at least not regularly.) I guess Android has a similar market environment as Windows instead of the open source ecosystem that surrounds Linux desktops.
I suppose it's like asking why websites are almost never open source. Why indeed?
React native with Firebase as realtime backend. Also has code push for OTA updates, mobx for state management, etc.
What's the technical issue?
Thats only used for user initiated navigation, not loading of assets.
You could still inject a JavaScript file or CSS file though to help hide pieces of the view. But that would be content blocking after the HTTP requests have been made.
I don’t know of a way to intercept the HTTP requests as they’re being made from a WKWebView like Safari does for content blocking.
I was seriously surprised to find Firefox on Ios to be so severely crippled.
Or at least, I hope this will soon be the case. Sadly, it not working on the iPhone will probably mean it's often not worth investing into at all.
https://blog.chromium.org/2017/01/open-sourcing-chrome-on-io...