Hacker News Reader

Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why apple is so hell bent on enforcing Safari/Webkit as the browser engine? My assumption is that if they allow Mozilla/Chrome to implement their own engines, they could add better support for PWA's, which would directly cut into Apple's AppStore business. But that answer doesn't seem satisfactory as you'd think that PWA's would be huge on Android devices without such restrictions but even then, PWA's are not very popular.

My personal bet: Apple will relent and roll out "browser engine choice" globally within 1-2 years.

View on HN

Just a desire to control this stuff probably. The WebKit browser choice is one of those super arbitrary things that Apple mostly does because it likes to be in control over what software manufacturers do.

They'll argue some customer beneficial reasons for it, but it all just comes down to Apple wanting control; it's what permeates every component of their software ecosystem, especially on iDevices; they control app installs, they control what kinds of apps can and can't exist on the iDevices and so on and so forth. This is the company that famously recommended anyone who wanted to view NSFW content to "buy an Android"; it's safe to assume that the wish for control is the endgoal in and of itself, given Apples clear desire to play a byzantine morality police in other areas.

Apple is the most textbook definition of a platform gatekeeper.

Mostly because they care about user experience of people using their phones. There is nothing that comes close to WebKit in terms of performance/battery life on Apple devices, even on desktop, where other browser vendors have been able to develop their rendering engineswithout restrictions, WebKit is still far ahead.

WebKit is also a bit better than other engines in “nativeness” too, with e.g. in-page widget behavior and such. Blink is second best here probably thanks to its shared heritage with WebKit, and Gecko is last with unstyled widgets and little behaviors being “off”.

The battery life/heat thing is big though, Safari is much better in that category and it seems like that property extends to WebKit browsers on Linux too in my limited trials with GNOME Web, so it’s not just a case of Apple using private APIs to gain an advantage or whatever. It’s a difference in architecture and likely dev culture — efficiency simply doesn’t get prioritized to the same extent by the dev teams of the other two engines. With Blink especially there seems to be more interest in coming up with APIs to give devs access to the contents of the user’s fridge or whathaveyou.

> There is nothing that comes close to WebKit in terms of performance/battery life on Apple devices, even on desktop

Now this is a true gem.

It came out in the Eoic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games and in app purchases. Those aren’t going to be on the web because of the lack of friction of in app purchases.

> I wonder why apple is so hell bent on enforcing Safari/Webkit as the browser engine?

security. browsers are famous for escaping their sandbox.

this is from November 2023: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/30/23982296/google-chrome-b...

Historically, that's also been a huge vector of attack in iOS too. From the old and famous slide to jailbreak to more recent Pegasus.

Realistically support for more than one browser engine is going to increase security in aggregate since it would implicitly decrease the impact of a vulnerability. This has a compounding effect where a zero day for Safari would become less valuable on the black market and therefore become less incentivized to a degree.

To give an example: A single Safari engine bug could compromise all iPhones, but if the market share was say 50/50 with Chrome, then the impact of a security vulnerability would now be halved.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com