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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, I guess that's why the iOS browsers all suck so hard with autocomplete?

I always long for Firefox's url bar, it easily beats everything else since Firefox 2 came out or so. Nowadays you have to un-configure two layers of "let's put a search bar in your URL bar" but then it's still just amazing. Especially compared to google, which obviously doesn't have an incentive to have you skip searching on google.com... and apparently apple doesn't want to you complete just any old urls, but only apple approved ones?! This seems like such a useless kind of (soft, but still) gate-keeping...

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> Ugh, I guess that's why the iOS browsers all suck so hard with autocomplete?

No. Contrary to popular belief, browsers on iOS aren’t all Safari skins. They all use WebKit, but there’s a vast amount of functionality in a web browser that isn’t handled by the rendering engine. This is one example.

Non-Safari browsers on iOS are free to use whatever address bar implementation they like. If Firefox on iOS has a crap address bar, that is 100% down to Firefox.

>No. Contrary to popular belief, browsers on iOS aren’t all Safari skins.

I know some people hate Apple for both good and bad reasons, but it's pretty wild to me people think Apple does this. I mean right out the gate that would be pretty illegal, no?

...what are you talking about?

Every browser you use is forced by App Store policy to run off of the system WebView, which is Safari...other features being part of the browser doesn't change being forced into using that engine.

> Every browser you use is forced by App Store policy to run off of the system WebView, which is Safari

No. It’s WebKit. Not Safari. That was the whole point of this subthread.

What are you talking about lol

It would not be illegal. In fact the iPhone launched with only Safari.

Because Apple is selling the hardware device, they can decide what software they ship on it. This is not specific to phones, it’s true of all hardware. There’s no feature to load arbitrary browsers onto a PlayStation, for example.

> There’s no feature to load arbitrary browsers onto a PlayStation, for example

Not anymore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

That feature has been dead for over ten years.

I specifically meant letting you download, say, Google Chrome, and it's not actually Chrome but Safari. Unless I'm misunderstanding what that person described, which is totally possible.

right, it's just about the rendering part. so yeah, firefox can do that. I haven't really paid attention to this since I don't personally use apple devices. I'll make sure to pay attention to it though next time I use my girlfiend's ipad. I already installed firefox on there just to have a sane browsing experience, but it wasn't specifically for the autocompletion.

It seems like a useful privacy feature to me. I don't want Apple or Firefox to pass every site I visit every time I visit it to Google, Apple or any other company under US law.

Yes, although in principle this kind of list should only be necessary for fresh browsing profiles (plus people who don't keep a local browsing history). Once you've used the browser for a while, autocomplete should predominantly be powered by your local browsing history anyway.

Firefox on Android e.g. used to (or still has – I'm not sure what the state is nowadays after the rewrite) have a similar (although somewhat smaller) list of popular domains which it would use for providing autocomplete results if it couldn't find anything in your history, but local history always had priority.

I switched to Firefox about a year ago but I'm really missing the autocomplete from Chrome. I guess sharing my entire digital life with Google had some upside after all.

Joking aside - Firefox makes some strange choices and the I wish mobile and desktop could (optionally) share more of my browsing history. Maybe they do but the autocomplete doesn't behave the same across devices.

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