Comment by mrpippy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrpippy | Hacker News Reader

I don't fundamentally have a problem with Chrome or Firefox on iOS being able to use their own engine. They're responsible, competent organizations who will regularly update and maintain their browsers.

What worries me is every app that's not a dedicated browser suddenly including an entire browser engine (the way that every app on macOS/Windows now does). Apps will import one version of Chromium and then not update it for *years*, long past the point where it contains security holes and lacks support for new platform features.

Steam on Win/Mac/Linux is still using Chromium 85! That's 2 years old, and it's a piece of software under active development.

I know of an actively-developed Windows game using CEF 3!!

In other words: do you want your favorite bank/airline/restaurant/government agency's app to be 100+ MB bigger and contain a growing number of vulnerabilities? I don't, and neither does Apple. If this goes ahead, I hope the App Store rules around it are thorough. Shipping a browser is a huge responsibility, one that most organizations are not prepared for.

The solution to this is simple, Apple needs to make their browser usable enough that people don't go to extremes such as packaging entire browsers with their code. In many cases Safari's Javascript engine will even beat Chromium's engine.

Android allows any browser engine you like (even Webkit if someone would manage to compile it) and people don't generally do nonsense this on Android. I don't see why the situation would be any different here. The reason is simple: the web view API is easy to use, automatically updated, and backwards compatible.

As another benefit, devices that have fallen out of support may receive updates for browsers, making them usable again.

Developers will package browsers in their code as a way to spy on users with fewer restrictions, not because Safari is unusable.

That being said, I returned my first and last iPhone after realizing that Firefox on iOS couldn't run the NoScript extension.

It is frankly shocking that Apple has managed to go this long while blatantly contravening the precedent set by United States v. Microsoft Corp., and I'm glad the EU is finally taking a stand on that front.

> Developers will package browsers in their code as a way to spy on users with fewer restrictions, not because Safari is unusable.

I've also seen developers cling to particular versions of Electron simply because their app is so brittle that its behavior on different versions of Chromium is not consistent or even breaks, which is frankly ridiculous. If it doesn't run on the latest version of Chrome at minimum it shouldn't be shipped.

> that people don't go to extremes such as packaging entire browsers with their code.

The app dev will simply use framework X and because of that it includes some version of some browser engine.

And then people are going to complain about not getting JIT access is unfair advantage to safari, but then if they do get a JIT entitlement they are going to slack on patching vulnerabilities...

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