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Comment by planetjones | Hacker News Reader

I struggle to get too excited about Edge on iOS because it's not really Edge is it. It will just be like Firefox which uses the built-in iOS WebKit-based rendering. So it's effectively Safari doing the rendering with some wrappers around it like syncing Windows favourites and sharing open windows with your Windows PC?

Maybe some corporations which have Windows on the desktop, but where most employees use iOS devices on the go, will find some use for this.

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I'm guessing this is the case with Chrome as well?

Indeed it is. Sadly!

Yes, and it's because of an Apple policy. They don't allow other rendering engines.

It is not that they do not allow other render engines. It is that APIs to dynamically execute native code are locked down on platforms such as Windows Mobile and iOS. If you cannot dynamically execute code you cannot build a JIT JS engine which makes your webbrowser too slow compared to the competition.

This is a policy who's primary goal is to ban other browser engines. They make exceptions for lots of other app types like games.

I guess in theory you could build a browser on top of a game engine, or is that just insane?

Tribes 2 had a full web browser in the game. It was a continuation of having a full IRC client in the first game, Starsiege: Tribes.

(Tribes 2 also had the IRC client. The IRC client initially drove players into chat channels to help them find ongoing games, and dropped a link when someone left IRC to join a game. It was decent matchmaking in 1998, and helped build the community as well.)

The browser itself wasn't as insane as writing the entire game menu in OpenGL, which at the time was uncommon. Game devs cited this choice (instead of using a simpler menu) as causing a 6-month delay in the project, leading to much less testing and a game that crashed frequently for the first few months after release. The ubiquitous "Unhanded Exception" pop-up became a meme for years after.

Pretty sure they don't allow you to download and execute code even if not using a JIT, unless it is an educational app. There are multiple policy reasons browser engines can't be on iOS.

This is true, though they do also explicitly restrict using other engines for web browsing:

2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.

I don't really understand how Edge having its own rendering engine would make me any more excited for it.

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