Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome | Hacker News Reader

Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome

9to5mac.com

294 pointsivell553 comments

https://www.apple.com/safari/switch/

I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched. It was amazing. It was such a relief to move away from IE and all the arcane levels of details I had to remember back then to artisnaly get IE to behave like a moderately modern (for then) browser.

Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking. Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution.

Now these days the only thing keeping me tied to chrome is finger muscle memory. The death of manifest v2 is the 2nd to last nail.

Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.

The problem is I use safari on iOS. Generally not a bad browser. Equivalent and superior to Chrome is certain aspects. I don't really need to run Chrome on my phone. Safari is good enough. However... for a local build only I use maybe it's possible.

> "Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place."

You wouldn't be worried about vulnerabilities that the vibe coded browser could produce? I use plenty of LLM generated code, but a browser wouldn't be something I'd try on the Web.

So long as you don't distribute it and it doesn't become popular, don't underestimate security through obscurity. Malicious actors won't know about this homebrew browser's (presumably many) hypothetical flaws.

In a way, cryptography is the ultimate security through obscurity.

Well-designed cryptographic systems are designed so that you can understand everything about the system and still not get inside.

It's pretty much the exact opposite of security through obscurity.

I think they meant it in a tongue-in-cheek way, as in: my private key is "obscure"?

Only if you're limited to knowing exactly how the actual cryptography works. If you understand exactly how the key derivation works, and know how that is seeded, then you can very much get inside.

Yeah I use the Xbox edge browser sometimes, even popups break because they’re like wtf is this.

He's describing a chromium fork not a full on vibe coded browser.

That doesn't protect you from browsing banking sites and your potential crypto wallets.

It would be nice benchmark for models. Something like generate web browser from web standards in rust, c, and a language of your choice. An automatic judge would score the results by amount of found vulnerabilities and functionality. We could also see if generating code by LLM in rust makes it safer or if language doesn't matter anymore. And you know that it will work eventually, because AI labs need models capable to write new fully working models themselves to reach AGI or whatever you call it.

> old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched

steady on, youngster

To be fair, that only tells they've been in the industry since at least 2008.

I used NCSA Mosaic before Netscape Navigator, and gopher and wais before all that.

The day Mosaic added an <img></img> tag was the day it all started to go wrong.

There has never been a </img> tag: elements that in DTD days (HTML 2–4) had EMPTY content model, and which these days are called void elements, cannot have an end tag. If you write </img>, it’s a parse error, though in practice all implementations you care about will ignore it.

I'm kind of happy though that <marquee> still works. It's deprecated for a reason, but reminds me of when the web somewhat tried to have a language of common elements rather than being just a sandbox of styles.

Oh yeah, I used Gopher at uni. I think this whole world wide web thing is probably a fad. :P

Yeah, I still remember 8 bit home computers being sold as "build it yourself" at electronic stores.

---old enough to have been in the industry when ChatGPT launched.

> Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.

I mean, helium exists. https://github.com/imputnet/helium

Google Chrome launch comic for nostalgia: https://scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/

Also good context for why the launch of Chrome was such a big deal.

Obligatory updated comic link: https://contrachrome.com/

A good context for why the market dominance of Chrome is such a big deal.

> It was such a relief to move away from IE and all the arcane levels of details I had to remember ...

Why hadn't you moved on to Firefox?

Back when Phoenix launched it was not a reliable alternative to IE or Opera, it was more like a sign of protest. You’d use it to tell the world that you didn’t care if most of the internet didn’t work for you, as longs as you where “sticking it to the man”.

I remember developing web pages with the purpose of ensuring they would work in both, so Phoenix was my main driver, but whenever anything was “done” the real work started of also getting it to work in IE, it was always a monumental effort. Sites with buttons for “go here for pheonix/go here for ie” where common. My friends who worked in the windows ecosystem mostly saw Phoenix as some “crazy hipster trend” and didn’t have a care as to if anything they made worked in it or not.

It absolutely was. Phoenix became immediately superior to IE.

Never fell for the Chrome trap.

Seriously never used Chrome?

I never used it as my main browser

Phoenix launched right at the peak of IE’s market dominance and that name lasted about a year, so if you are remembering it that way, it was very early. By 2005, Firefox had ~10% global market share; by the time of the first Chrome release in 2008, Firefox had ~25% global market share[0]. So the OP had plenty of time to switch away from IE before Chrome showed up.

In any case, nobody got to quit dealing with the misery of IE6 until some YouTube engineers did a little caper[1] that gave everyone else an excuse that their big brain business bosses would finally listen to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#/media/File:Brows...

[1] https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

There was half a decade between the Mozilla Browser stopped being called Phoenix and the launch of Chrome. Firefox usage peaked at some 30% of desktops the year after Chrome was released.

It's not like Firefox wasn't a "viable" browser at the time. It was quite mainstream.

Moving from IE to Firefox was a much more memorable experience than going from Firefox to Chrome. But yeah, first Chrome was fast. I’m quite sure any of the today’s browsers would be fast if running in the pre-react world though.

>but whenever anything was “done” the real work started of also getting it to work in IE

due to IE not being a standards compliant browser.

As others noted, Firefox was around for a long time before Chrome and was not called Phoenix all that time, so it sort of seems like you looked at a piece of technology a month after launch, didn't like it, and refused to took at it again for 10 years? I mean that right there is at the level of moral complaints, not just performance or rendering.

> due to IE not being a standards compliant browser.

Yes, but unless you wanted to exclude >90% of users, you could still not ignore it...

I never said one should ignore them, I just implied the post seemed to slam Firefox ("Phoenix") for a situation that was IE's fault.

I’m still using Firefox, I was adding the perspective from back in the start of “why didn’t you just move over from IE” like everyone would just move because an alternative existed. Most didn’t and i get it. I am not the norm. I also ran gentoo back then which is not an option for most computer users.

Also being “technically most standard compliant” doesn’t mean anything to the average user who’s just angry that their browser isn’t showing their MySpace page correctly.

Calm down. Not every bit of real perspective on software short of “Firefox is perfect” is an existential criticism of it existing.

I've been using Firefox since I think basically its 0.1 release as Phoenix in 2022 and it already worked great at the time, no need to keep IE around (which I couldn't after switching to Linux in 2003). In fact, for years it was my "always works" fallback because I was using Konqueror otherwise. Firefox had two name changes in quick succession - Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox, but it was already over in 2004 so it's weird to keep calling it Phoenix for the more important time after that. In response to the name changes, there was a funny extension to randomize the name so you got "Firechameleon" and "Hypnodinosaur": https://github.com/miraleung/firesomething-2/blame/master/de...

> You’d use it to tell the world that you didn’t care if most of the internet didn’t work for you, as longs as you where “sticking it to the man”.

This is eerily similar to how I feel about using Firefox today. Not that I am sticking it to the man - I just want there to be diversity in the market and not have every viable option be a way for a megacorp to have presence on my computers.

Because your clients used IE by default, relied on ActiveX controls, or were forced to by corporate IT policies.

> I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched. It was amazing

Mi was a web dev then too, forced to develop for ie6.

At the time I remember asking why is google making a browser? How do they make money, and in the long term will their browser work for my best interests, or theirs?

So that’s why I’ve always used Firefox.

> Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking

I think you're misremembering or you didn't try Safari at the time. The first version of Chrome was not very different from Safari which it was just a shell of anyway.

The first Chrome did use a fork of WebCore, the HTML part of WebKit, as its rendering engine, but added its own V8 JavaScript engine. The speed of JavaScript was the main differentiator. And _that_ was very different from Safari, and every other existing browser ... The quote is correct.

V8 kept getting even faster, including adding faster RegExps, which pushed the other browsers to speed up their JS too. Firefox is now using that RegExp implementation too, even if they're not using V8.

WebKit was itself a fork of the KHTML browser engine. And just like WebKit diverged from KHTML, Chrome diverged from WebKit.

My memory as a Mac user switching to Chrome when it came out was that the performance was basically the same as Safari. I'm sure V8 was faster than JavaScriptCore, but the web wasn't nearly as JavaScript-heavy as it is today so it wasn't something you noticed in normal use. Maybe if you were a heavy gmail-in-the-browser user.

The main reason I stuck with Chrome was the tab isolation. WebKit was super crashy back then, with Safari crashing several times a day just browsing the web. In Chrome only one tab would crash instead of the whole browser. This was one of the original selling points in addition to performance.

I switched back to Safari when I got my first Retina MacBook Pro, since Chrome had terrible performance in HiDPI for the first two years of retina Macs.

you know we already had firefox back then? anyone with half a brain only used IE for the institutional website with ActiveX that wouldn't work otherwise

And Opera! God I miss old Opera.

You had to make your website work for IE users with weird tricks because among other things it had a different way of rendering CSS.

> The death of manifest v2 is the 2nd to last nail.

Yeah. I think Google underestimated how many people they pissed off here. There is a reason I and many other think that Google has to be disbanded.

Either way welcome to the resistance!

> Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution

And things went downhill from there...

Yeah, this is one area where I look forward to Rewrite in Go and Rewrite in Rust keep doubling down, unfortunely Rewrite in Java or Rewrite in C# are grandpa technologies and not fashionable.

It’s a shame.

Rust compile times are an issue for agent throughput.

C# can approach Rust speeds with some effort, but generally has faster compile times and is less verbose.

>I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched.

So basically not very old. Also Firefox existed long before and had pretty significant marketshare. In some countries it was well above 50%.

That's some next level revisionism. When Chrome launched there existed for many years a fast, modern and extremely nice to use browser already.

As I remember it, Chrome was way faster than Firefox, but I was in high school and probably stupid. Firefox wouldn't catch up to Chrome until Quantum, which was amazing when it first dropped, but now Firefox is slow again.

No, Chrome was way faster than Firefox. You were not wrong. It grew right alongside HTML5, and Chrome put a lot of effort into V8. Firefox was definitely better than IE or Safari, but Chrome could do everything that Firefox did without the memory usage that Firefox had. It's funny how memory usage is now abysmal on Chrome, too.

I've tried Chrome too on that wave of hype, including on some pretty slow machines. Like the Eee PC, and for a few months, not few hours btw. It wasn't perceptibly faster than Firefox, at it had its own slowdowns, just a bit differently. For example as I remember, Chrome often rendered a page visibly faster than FF, but it was actually unusable and frozen static "image" of sorts for a few brief moments, and only then it become active. FF had a slower time rendering, but at all times it was not frozen statically, just some elements were loading. Things like that. In the end, I returned to FF not because Google had some bad rep back then, but purely because Firefox was better and more pleasant to use. I'm still baffled how that "FF - slow!" campaign worked out eventually.

Yes, they were both much of a muchness when taken as a whole, though some people definitely did find that one or the other was notably faster for their typical workloads.

But Chrome won the vast bulk of its market share not because it was technically better in every way, but because they spent much more on marketing at the exact time IE entered terminal decline.

> Firefox is slow again

Currently I am feeling this too but only for one site, GitHub. Which is where is spend most time during the day...

Quite sad, I don't know if it's GitHub's fault or not but Firefox needs to figure out what's going wrong here soon or people like me may be literally forced to Chromium.

I hope you are talking about Opera?

Opera peaked at 12. I had it installed even till 2016? The later versions completely lost the plot for what a browser is.

Also had safari 5(?) on windows because I liked seeing a progress bar for page load. Which opera 12 also had.

Maybe I just like progress bars.

Both of them, Firefox and Opera were like that for years.

At that time, Mozilla refused to implement some new CSS standards as they deemed it impossible in their engine. Chrome came along and a year down the road Firefox had got the features for some reason without much trouble. Revisionism is failing to accept that Chrome ate Firefox' lunch within months, for extremely good reasons.

You are talking about a completely different set of events happening years after the events I'm discussing. Both of us are correct, because that's two different topics.

Maybe just quit assuming everyone is clever and just clearly state what, specifically, you are referring to.

Do you mean Firefox? Because when Chrome was released, it was blazingly fast compared to firefox

> a fast, modern and extremely nice to use browser already

That's some revisionist lies. Slow, crashy, a memory pig with a big leak problem, stuck on a single process architecture. It was none of fast or modern. Whether it was extremely nice to use is debatable, but lots of people rapidly voted by switching.

It very regularly crashed and took down the entire process.

It's fine to lament the Chrome monoculture, but we misdiagnosis it if we don't remember the seeds were sown via Mozilla's incompetence. They made it crystal clear they couldn't and wouldn't do better, and the next 5 or more years made that inarguable.

Also Chrome got its initial market share largely by paying third parties to bundle it in their installers in the mode of Bonzi Buddy and Virtua Girl.

As one would expect of a browser made by the world's largest advertising corporation.

My high school blocked websites with a proxy set in IE. To bypass this we would install Firefox on a flash drive and run Firefox from it. When Chrome came out everybody switched instantly because it worked so much better for our use case. Maybe a regularly installed Firefox could have been competitive, but my first use of Chrome was a night and day difference compared with Firefox.

I went back to Firefox on desktop and phones when it was clear Chrome was going the way of IE in terms of being too large a market share for it's own good or the good of users and developers. These days its much better than when Chrome first came out, but I also toy with librewolf or other even more user oriented alternate browsers.

I hope ladybird will take be the same type of successor to chrome, but this time not in the hands of a corporate organisation.

You sure you were still using IE when Chrome launched and not some other browser ?

Kinda bugs me when people who are against Safari/Apple are also the same people pushing Chrome/Google. Sometimes it feels like web developers these days are basically Chrome developers.

I do get it. Chrome has the majority of users, so it’s easier to just develop and test on Chrome and know you’ve covered most of your users.

But isn’t that just pushing us towards a Chrome monopoly? Safari holding back some web features is annoying, sure, but having Chrome decide what the web should support and everyone else having to follow doesn’t sound much better to me.

I agree, and it amuses me that the Chrome advocates call Safari the new IE! My mortgage website and DoD website and VA.gov, etc all don’t tell me I have to use Safari or they won’t work. No, they say I must use Chrome (or sometimes Edge).

As soon as Apple is forced to allow Chrome on iOS, I won’t even have that opt-out available to me. If you want to use Google, they have a whole mobile OS you can use. Why take away my choice as a consumer that prefers Safari? And Apple's on the device they build and sell? Not to mention all the security flaws that would entail...

>As soon as Apple is forced to allow Chrome on iOS, I won’t even have that opt-out available to me.

Those are quite the mental gymnastics you're doing here. You know, you could just choose not to install Chrome, right?

>If you want to use Google, they have a whole mobile OS you can use.

If someone bought an i-device, they don't get to choose, Safari is forced on them.

>Why take away my choice as a consumer that prefers Safari?

Calm down, nobody is taking away your choice by allowing Chrome to run its own browser engine on iOS. You're totally delusional and making shit up that would never happen.

Apple is the only one that's forcing you to do anything. They are the ones that took away your ability to choose. You seriously sound totally brainwashed.

Ok, I'll bite: How would you choose not to install Chrome? You would just... not use the web? Some choice.

this is the same as when IE was the standard

Which was the point

You must be trolling, you can't be this stupid.

The implication was that website makers won't be forced to support Safari because they'll just decide to require Chrome.

If Safari weren't a piece of intentionally hobbled crap, maybe it could compete.

Maybe Apple shouldn't hold back web standards to force people to install native apps where Apple can extract 30% of all purchases from the apps.

Hold back Chrome standards, you mean? Features that work in Chrome but not in other browsers. There are even features that work better in Safari than Firefox. Not everything Chrome pushes should automatically become the standard.

Personally, I don’t care about most of those Chrome specific features. I use Safari because it’s fast and battery efficient. The fact that it’s not made by a company whose main business is advertising is a nice bonus.

Sure, Apple has an advertising business too, but it’s nowhere near the scale of Google’s.

This is how it actually works:

Browser vendors come up with improvements.

The W3C board (which Apple and Google are a part of) gets to vote on the implementations and suggest changes.

The new feature either becomes a standard or not.

Apple wields their power here to block any new feature that could make a web browser compete with native apps where Apple can extract 30% of all purchases made through apps.

Apple isn't making suggestions for any changes to the proposals, they just block any new feature that might let browsers become as functional as native apps, purely out of greed.

Or, you can go see with your own eyes how web standards actually work.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200329112109/https://twitter.c...

That's a different topic.

It's not even implied, it's very explicitly stated in the second sentence but GP chose to attack a straw man anyways.

Wait you can’t install chrome on iOS? I can see it in the Apple Store - is that a regional thing? I’m in Europe.

I think this is referring to the fact that the chrome IOS app is just a chrome wrapper for web kit and not "actual" chrome.

IE stood for a lot of things, and I'm guessing they're talking about the "failing to implement standards" part rather than the "websites that proscribe use" part.

that completely misses the point of the IE problem, which was developers forcing IE due to not testing any other browsers. badges saying "works best/only in IE" were not due to any failed standards IE didn't meet.

i think as developers it's easy to forget that, and just think about our own difficulties having to maintain IE compatibility. but that was the post-IE transition era, not really having to do with the "IE problem" of being forced to use IE for certain sites as with Chrome today. At least IE back then wasn't spyware like Chrome is today.

for example, on my required to use website dfas.mil, I get the following message impeding any loading of the site:

> Our website has detected that you are using an unsupported browser that will prevent you from accessing certain features. An update is not required, but it is strongly recommended to improve your myPay experience.

> The current list of browsers supported by myPay includes:

> • Chrome 72 or later

> • Edge 80 or later

Apple already announced it, but the work to port stuff like Chrome’s UI shell simply hasn’t been done.

Look at the developer blogs: https://blogs.igalia.com/gyuyoung/2024/08/08/chrome-ios-brow...

You can also compile your own, with ‘use_blink = true’ ‘in your .setup-gn file’: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/i...

I push Firefox not chrome though

I haven't searched caniuse recently, but has safari stopped cock blocking PWAs?

Im not sure, but I regularly add apps to dock or Home Screen. Not sure it’s the same.

yeah, that might just be urls masquerading on the PWA to shade Apples complicity in hating a web standard.

caniuse doesn't differentiate between markets, but it appears that even here within the EU we're now back to being allowed to use most basic features.

However, previously you got an exemption on the 7 day TTL on Web Storage, by being installed as a PWA. This must have been too generous. I guess they figured that if you combine lack of stable local storage, with no support for the Background Synchronization API, nobody should be able to implement anything of value on top of these APIs.

And just in case this isn't enough, let's just hide the install option even deeper than before. On iOS the path is now something along the lines of

1. Tap site's domain name 2. Meatballs menu 3. Share 4. More (Meatballs again) 5. Scroll until you find "Add to Home Screen" 6. Leave "Open as Web App" switched on 7. Add (upper right corner)

There is no obvious install prompt, and no clear browser level affordance. Nothing in the flow even tells you if PWA functionality is supported by the website. You might end up with just a weird shortcut that opens a URL full screen.

Thanks I hate it

They are, we are one step away to rename Web as the ChromeOS Platform.

Additional note those are also the same people pushing Electron garbage, Chrome in a box.

First let us install other browser engines on iOS, and then we can talk.

Safari has the most obscene monopoly of any browser ever. IE 6 came pre-installed on windows machines, but you could always install Mosaic or such.

Google Chromebooks come with Chrome as the only default browser, but you can still run Firefox on Chromebooks just fine (even in two different ways, the supported android app version, and the semi-supported linux terminal + launching firefox that way).

Heck, iOS's monopolistic behavior is so bad that multiple regions (the EU + Japan) have already ruled against their behavior, though in reality Apple has complied in a way that makes it impossible to actually make a second browser engine for iOS still (going against the spirit of the law, but the courts haven't caught up to them yet).

Safari is also an awful browser in that it requires someone to buy an expensive machine to see if their site works on it.

I can run a windows trial copy in a VM to see if my site works in IE, I can run Chrome or Firefox on linux to verify if my site works in them. I can install a free android emulator on any common OS to see that my site renders right in those.

But Apple doesn't give me a legal way to freely run an iOS simulator nor even a macOS VM on my linux machine, I have to pay money, to buy their hardware to see if my site will work on Safari.

And even worse, Safari is the browser with the largest number of rendering bugs and quirks currently, while also having a huge number of users (since iOS users can't install another browser), so any web developers are basically forced to shell out for apple hardware.

Can you be more specific on how iOS blocks other browsers? You mean for embedded browser engine in apps?

iOS does not allow third party browser engines. Every browser you download from the iOS App Store is using 'Safari Lite' under the hood. It's ostensibly for security, but it's more about control.

I would bet the security claim holds up, I have definitely seem more RCE mentioned from Chrome than from Safari.

I would bet Google's track record would easily allow them to defend this in court. More an issue with Google though.

I guess that might have something to do with the fact that Chrome is vastly more popular than Safari, and also available on many more operating systems.

No, it's definitely about control. Allowing an arbitrary browser means allowing access to platform stuff from portable (gasp!) APIs. And Apple doesn't want that. They want an iOS app to be the primary face of everything important, and the other stuff to be an expensive port.

And the problem isn't abstract. Safari lacks a ton of very useful API implementations. Like, try programming a QMK keyboard on an iPhone: it's literally the only platform in the whole world unable to run the Via web app.

You're probably going to lose your first bet.

> It's ostensibly for security, but it's more about control.

The security angle is easy to understand.

Not sure why Apple cares about control.

But it easier just to want to make Apple seem bad, so there's that.

It's not that easy to understand.

"Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit JavaScript." https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/tim-berners-lee-on-apples...

Forgive my ignorance.

How is the iOS engine requirement considered a monopoly?

iOS is a de-facto monopoly in the first place.

Ridiculous take

Android’s global marketshare is 70% of mobile so you would have to declare a monopoly as “things I can run on an iPhone” as your position for that to work

There is plenty of competition and choice to iOS, you just won’t find that on Apple hardware for reasons that have held for three decades

Why would I use the global market share to determine if someone has a monopoly, though? It seems like a flawed way to determine how much choice consumers have.

For example, there's a monopoly on garbage service where I live, but he company with the monopoly has basically 0% of the world market.

How do you defend a company with 30% marketshare being a monopoly but the other company with 70% market share isn't? I can see the duopoly argument, but no idea how apple could be a monopoly by itself

> How do you defend a company with 30% marketshare being a monopoly but the other company with 70% market share isn't?

One allows you to install different browsers, the other does not.

Being a monopoly isn't illegal (in the US). It's what they do that matters.

Now, that doesn't mean Apple is a monopoly with iOS, because the Sherman act doens't dictate it only looks at US only markets. It look at what makes sense in the context. Of course, a court could decide that regardless of what the numbers are internationall, what matters in this case is just the US market.

Trying to predict that is useless at the moment though because the US courts are all over the place.

Being a monopoly isn't illegal. So many discussions gloss over this fact, and people get at each other's throat over hypothetical abuses and ad-hominem scenarios.

Abusing a monopoly is illegal. Alphabet and Apple are both unquestionably monopoly businesses, and make incredible year-over-year revenue through market-damaging services like AdSense and the App Store. If they are allowed to continue, then other Fortune 500 businesses will copy their decisions, thereby destroying genuine market value that they provide in exchange for safer, more exploitative revenue streams.

In the case of AdSense and Apple's App Store both, I think that any fair FTC investigation would conclude they are shakedown services that harm the greater economy.

When nothing is stopping you from using an alternative i just don't see it

You could have said the same thing about Windows during it's antitrust case.

Fat lot of good that logic would do Microsoft when they were deliberately gimping competitors.

You couldn't have, though. Market share was a part of that Microsoft decision. At the time, they had 90-95% of the global market share — there were very few competitors. Apple has a higher though still in the 50s percentage-wise market share in the US, but a 20-30% share globally. Alternatives are much more viable in Apple's case, and often cheaper. You have to want an Apple device to get one, and it's very easy to get an Android instead and not lose out on any important software or functional ability.

In addition, I think Apple has so far somewhat successfully argued that they have reasons for restricting their ecosystem that aren't just a thinly veiled "because we want to crush competition". They argue that their devices are safer to use, and that allowing arbitrary software full access to the system would compromise that. Similarly, they limit third-party software from tracking you. They certainly aren't saints, and I disagree with a many of their choices (their app store cut could've decreased long ago, for one, and they're now adding ads into their own services) but they often seem like the only large corporation of their kind that even tries to have a set of beliefs and care about their users, and I think intent should matter.

I personally like that there's one popular ecosystem that has a particular perspective, and another competing popular ecosystem that has a totally different perspective. If you think all of the above is bullshit and Apple sucks, you're free to use Android and install exactly what you want on your phone. I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.

> I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.

Apple is responsible for market damages inflicted onto software distribution by picking-and-choosing who gets to ship, and where their money goes. It is reflected in Apple's astronomical service margins, which unfairly reward them with even higher ROI than the iPhone hardware itself (!!!), somehow. It is seen in Apple's back-room negotiations with Amazon, Netflix, Google, Epic and X, where they use their de-facto power to force unfavorable distribution terms and draw up protection fees. It's present in their entitlement system, which gives Apple the option to artificially hamstring competing services that want to integrate with iOS. It's inherent to Apple's developer program, which has been used to revoke software signing certificates when Apple simply disagrees with a competitor.

Do we really think they deserve that money and power? It's not encouraging them to make smart choices.

In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option. A factory-new iPhone could use all of Apple's offered services with a hardware-attested eFuse that says the device was never jailbroken. If a user wants to do foolish things like play Fallout: New Vegas with Proton, give Dropbox system-level integration a-la iCloud, use an updated RCS client instead of iMessage, install Fortnite or use a third-party app store, then Apple can give them that choice without endangering other people. It isn't impossible, they already do this with macOS, running the same XNU kernel, and with an architecturally indistinct ARM chip.

That would alleviate the market damages that Apple is responsible for, and create a positive pressure on iOS development to improve software-wise. Right now, Apple is being rewarded for extorting their competitors, pettily attacking consumers, blocking software features, stuffing ads[0] into first-party apps, and visually degrading iOS. They are clearly being protected from software alternatives that offer a less-invasive alternative to Apple's disgraceful OEM packins. Which is a shame, since Apple was historically not opposed to taking advantage of free software and making high-quality packin software that legitimately did compete against alternatives, like QuickTime and iTunes.

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-to-ditch-unsolicited-f1-ads-n...

> In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option

But… they do offer their services as an option. One option is to use their devices and services, and another is to use a different, equally popular company’s devices and services. Why should they be forced to make hardware that can be used in ways they don’t think it should be?

I agree that Apple could change or build many of the things you’ve described. You’d like them better if they did. Maybe I would too. I still don’t understand why they should be required to. It feels odd to say that the market would only be fair if they were forced to be more similar to their main competitor in one of the core ways in which they’re different.

> I still don’t understand why they should be required to.

It harms the market. There are good indie devs and companies being unfairly punished for trying to ship good software on iOS. Apple's double-standards are the #1, red-alert issue.

The secondary issue, and one that upset me, is that it encourages Apple to make worse products. If Apple has an adjustable taxation knob that users have no control over, they can extort developers in exchange for making the platform worse. Apple knows that alternative App Stores and billing methods will destroy this status quo, which is why they invest millions lobbying against Europe's common-sense DSA/DMA laws. If the United States adopted a similar regulation, then Apple's financials would crater, jeopardizing their company's future simply by making iOS behave like a normal Mac or PC.

Apple should not be gambling their future on an exploitative status-quo, they should be reinvesting in capabilities, security and making products that people want to buy. Just like Google and their AdSense monopoly, I think Apple's terrible choices are informed by a captive revenue stream that they abuse to boost their quarterly reports.

I'm not defending anybody. I'm just saying, if I live in a market where one company has 99% of the market, somebody coming in and saying "There's not a monopoly. They only have 30% of the global market! " isn't going to make me feel any better, because I don't live everywhere in the world. I live where I live, and that company has 99% of the market there.

I just don't think the 30% of the global market number is relevant to anything in terms of arguing if somebody has a monopoly. Are there even any countries who use a definition of "monopoly" that uses global marketshare to determine if there's a monopoly? Surely those definitions all look at marketshare within some specific region?

that argument doesn't relate to this discussion at all, though. you aren't limited to only buying Apple devices in your neighborhood, are you?

There are entire countries where one company has 93%+ marketshare. Yes, maybe people can go to another country where the marketshare is different, but do we all seriously think that the global marketshare not resembling a monopoly definitely means that there's no one market where a monopoly exists?

I imagine trying to effectively use (or market) a competing product in a region with 93%+ marketshare is a painful experience, regardless of whether the global marketshare is more balanced.

Using global marketshare hides details like that. Apple could have 100% of the market in China and India, and Android could have 100% of the marketshare in the rest of the world. This would put, worldwide, Apple at about 35% and Android at about 65%. I would argue there are clearly monopolies in that case, though, even if the worldwide numbers are 65 and 35.

ok, so in which countries does iOS have 93%+ or 100% marketshare (as you claimed)?

iOS is 93%+ in several countries, including Bahamas and Bermuda. I assume there are also some countries where Android is 90%+.

Did you read the post you replied to?

Are you just being pedantic about the definition of monopoly or did you fail to understand the problem as it was explained.

Do you use ios? If so do you like using broken websites? Do you have no desire for things to function as intended?

Id imagine its very annoying as a developer to have your things broken for no reason other than pure corporate greed.

If you do use ios then you probably enjoy paying more for an inferior product so ig this is more of a feature than a bug.

> Id imagine its very annoying as a developer to

...test on more than one browser platform? Seriously? Is this how lazy the industry has become? Is this how far we've fallen?

Having websites say "if it doesn't work, install Chrome" is not choice.

> so you would have to declare a monopoly as “things I can run on an iPhone” as your position for that to work

Yes, that's pretty much it. A similar concern applies to Google and Android.

But you can install other OSes such as Graphene on Android phones, I dont think you can do that on iPhones can you?

https://grapheneos.org/

On a lot of Android devices you can't install ANY other custom OS because of locked down bootloaders. If you want GrapheneOS specifically that list is even narrower due to 1. official support 2. hardware security features just missing from the devices.

Sure, but on many, you can, which supports their point.

Painting Apple and Android devices with the same brush in this particular regard doesn't make a lot of sense.

Can you install any other OS on any iPhone at all? As far as I am aware the best Android phone for installing non stock OSes on is the Google Pixel itself, Googles own 1st party phone.

I have seen Android booted on an iPhone. It was a long time ago, and I don’t think anybody continued working on it because... why do it when you could already buy an Android device?

Also, I'm curious... can you really install an OS besides Android on a Pixel, etc? AFAIK it's just different distros of Android, it's not like you could install BSD or something, right?

You can install various linux distros (not android distros) such as postmarketOS and Ubuntu Touch on a Pixel 3a

https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/sargo/

I figured Linux would be available, since Android is a Linux distro itself (of sorts, at least). But no other OS's like BSD, Unix, or Windows is available. Am I to understand correctly that only the Pixel 3a is able to run Linux distros, or was that meant as an example?

That's not how monopolies work, though.

It's absolutely how they work. If there's only a single grocery store in town (and for whatever reason others can't be opened), is that somehow not a monopoly even though there are several pharmacies and hardware stores?

You can buy whatever phone you want. Many of them can run multiple OSes if that’s what you want. There is not a single mobile platform in town.

When Ford sells me an F150 I don’t cry about them having a monopoly on their Sync platform. That’s not now monopolies work

If you don’t like the town with only one grocery store, you can move to any other place you want.

And what about the other mobile platform (singular)? That one’s also making it harder and harder to sideload apps.

That's not a good analogy for the situation. A better grocery-based analogy would be if there's only a single Bob's Grocery in town (and for whatever reason more Bob's Groceries can't be opened) but there is a Sally's Groceries in town. Then Bob's Groceries isn't a monopoly. The only thing Bob's Groceries is a monopoly of is Bob's Groceries, which is a useless tautological argument.

Apple has neither a monopoly on phones nor on app marketplaces.

They don't have a monopoly on phones. They do have (something like) a monopoly on app distribution on the iOS platform.

Maybe monopoly is not the right legal category, and maybe what they are doing is perfectly legal and always will be, but I don't think the fundamental point can be argued away with analogies like these.

Bob's Grocery likewise has a "monopoly" on distribution of products in their store. They have no control over Sally's Groceries.

Still not any kind of monopoly

Does Ford have a monopoly position on the F150 because I can’t run Linux on it?

As much as I am pro-android, this is a dumb take.

Numbers say otherwise.

Because Apple controls the only browser engine that runs on iOS and iPadOS. There are no alternatives. Chrome, Firefox and other browsers are just the browser chrome on top of the Safari/WebKit engine. Apple will not allow anything else.

> browser chrome

Bad choice of term!

Fun fact, the Google Chrome team was very aware of “browser chrome” as a term when they named their browser. They make that clear in the introductory comic.

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_24.html

iOS and iPadOS aren't the most dominant OSes, so therefore this can't be a monopoly.

Apple isn't the most dominant business on earth, so maybe they can't do anything in violation of antitrust?

Not how it works. You define a relevant market, and the market of iPhone users (which a stable market, there are barriers to just switching to android tomorrow) can be used for evaluation.

This really is a grey area. You can't define "the market for electricians in my local town" and get any antitrust protections. Defining the market is a huge part of how politicians make this political and therefore something they can profit from.

I know that, but how does that adversely affect the customer, who does not pay for browsers.

Agree that it should be easier to test on safari from other platforms.

But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.

I can’t make it website owners problem that their site doesn’t work on non-Google browser. Apple can.

Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.

Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.

I'm getting some serious "Microsoft has to protect Internet Explorer from evil competitors like Netscape" vibes from this comment.

Safari simply sucks. If WebKit was any good, then Apple wouldn't have to worry about allowing third-party engines onto iOS. The situation on Mac tells us everything we need to know.

IMHO, that also should be addressed from the legal perspective very strongly. But forcing Safari for every Apple owner is certainly not the solution.

>IMHO, that also should be addressed from the legal perspective very strongly

Then do that FIRST (or at the same time). Don't give us, yet AGAIN, the tired bs song and dance about how you'll make things worse first and then totally someday address the other part properly, and oops what a surprise that turns out to be too hard nevermind.

>But forcing Safari for every Apple owner is certainly not the solution.

Objectively it is a solution though. Because it's been done, and it's been more effective than nothing, while meanwhile nothing has happened from a legal or political angles. If a better solution can be done down the road great, but a hack dealing with a problem non-optimally can absolutely be better then just having the problem completely unaddressed. And count me skeptical that any government is going to have the will or capability to actually address what a lot of us already hate about not just the Chrome monopoly but that entire approach (I don't in fact want my web browser to be a full lowest common denominator operating system with low level hardware access thanks). I dislike much of what Apple does now but I'm glad their selfish interests have happened not to align that way either. Until monopoly lock-in gets better addressed, one of the main ways to push back is via another monopoly lock-in that has different incentives.

That's ridiculous. You can't solve a monoculture with the legal system. The only solution is forced diversity, and to that end, I congratulate Apple for being the last guardian of the web as a truly open platform.

(I still remember when communities like Hacker News were screaming and howling at Apple for daring to rid the web of Adobe Flash, a corporate-owned proprietary monoculture cluster-f**k of security vulnerabilities. The virtue of Apple's influence on the web is painfully obvious in hindsight.)

Yes, you can. See the landmark United States vs Microsoft 2001 antitrust case.

I'm not sure that's a great example. Even though Microsoft lost, it had no real consequences - the company was not forced to split, MSIE remained a core component of Windows, and Netscape was still forced out of the market because they couldn't compete with free MSIE. By 2003 or so, MSIE was up to ~95% of the market.

> You can't solve a monoculture with the legal system.

You absolutely can, and we absolutely have. You believe this because anti-trust action was derided as anti-growth in the latter quarter of the 20th century, by people who knew exactly what they were doing (see also: banking deregulation).

It's one of the major reasons we're stuck with such horrendous corporate and individual wealth inequality today.

Google should never have been allowed to buy DoubleClick, ship a browser, or ship general-purpose client operating systems.

Okay fair, you can avoid a monoculture with the legal system. Bit late for that now, unfortunately.

It wasn't really any better when Apple killed things off. For years afterwards I was running into devices that had embedded Java applets for configuration over the Web that no longer worked. Sometimes I'd run into an academic's personal web page that had examples that used Flash or Java and no longer ran for the same reason. There was a lot of useful legacy code that got broken overnight when Apple led and others followed in killing off these kinds of plugins.

For all the claims about security problems - and there were many and the complaints were valid - people seem a bit too willing to overlook the much greater attack surface of modern browsers that still incorporate similar flexibility and functionality but through other protocols and native Web standards now instead. For better or worse today's "evergreen" browsers roll out new functionality more quickly than before but their most important innovation was introducing frequent automatic security updates to a general non-technical audience at a time when that certainly wasn't the default for most desktop software. Take a look at how many significant security issues get fixed in any of the major browser on each update cycle and you can see that even today this is still far from a solved problem.

Allowing Google to use their control of the web to kill the most effective method of blocking ads is the solution?

No.

People need to stop using Chrome and Chromium based browsers and use browsers based on implementations of the web standards that are out of Google's control.

Firefox on Android supports the full version of uBlock Origin.

Chrome on Android doesn't support it.

if someone told me you have to use ie6 so chrome doesn't take over every browser, then I'll just use chrome

At the time the roles were reversed. The spin was "use Chrome to break the IE browser monopoly." And Chrome was a better browser, and much faster. It worked.

Firefox broke the IE monopoly. Chrome rode Firefox's coat-tails with exclusive access to advertising space on the #1 website in the world.

No. Chrome was so much better than Firefox it wasn't even a contest. Firefox, when it came out, was honestly pretty crap - I tried it and went back to IE in pretty short order because it was noticeably faster. Chrome was a huge leap over either IE or Firefox when it came out, and people switched for that reason.

That is a weird alternative history. Even by Firefox 1.0, it was a dramatically better browser than MSIE in every conceivable metric -- except for support for Microsoft's proprietary extensions like VBScript, ActiveX, and NTLM auth support. (It also failed to replicate some of MSIE's most outrageously terrible bugs.)

When Chrome was released, Firefox was four years old and had already gained 33% market share with momentum on its side, mostly through word of mouth. Chrome was a bit better in some respects, a bit worse in others, but it had the Google marketing juggernaut allowing its market share to skyrocket.

chrome started picking up on firefox when they released 4.0 and started doing some heavy UI updates which made it feel chonky, whereas chrome was this smooth looking browser that paid attention to webview realestate by putting the tabs in the topbar

Not if ie6 is your only option

> But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.

It's my device. I should be able to whatever the hell I want with it.

You bought it knowing that you couldn’t.

If the one other competitor didn't allow it, then would we be allowed to complain in your mind?

This argument is terrible, we're lucky the one other competitor, for now, allows installing what you want or people like you would argue everything is fine.

If nobody makes the product you want, that is called a business opportunity.

I'll happily give it a try, if you can give me a small loan, say 100 million dollars.

I said it was a business opportunity. Not necessarily a business opportunity for you personally. But if a gap in the market did exist, it would be an opportunity for Microsoft, or Meta, or Dell, or... I hear Firefox wanted to build a phone...

Okay, and now let's finish the thought: why don't Microsoft, Meta, Dell and co. invest in this space?

So? There are TWO platforms to choose from. T.W.O.

Your argument ... isn't one.

> But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.

Easy. Just legislate that the only browser allowed on iPhones is Firefox. That way, Chrome can't monopolize the web, and iPhone users get to have a decent browser.

>But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.

And giving Apple a monopoly is a better idea?

>Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.

Forcing users to use the Safari browser engine when they install Firefox or anything else is not the way to protect anyone from anything. It's abusive in its own way. And Apple is not going to save anyone from Google. People are still using Google services through Safari, because they are services Apple either sucks at or doesn't offer.

>Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.

So you're fine giving over all control to Apple. Apple already has way too much control. Being on the W3C board, they use their power to block any browser API that could make web browsers more capable, which would cut into their native app mafia racket where they charge 30% of any purchase done through an app. They don't offer any alternatives, or any changes - they just squash anything they see as competitive to native apps. That's how fucked up they are. They are literally holding back progress for no good reason - not security, not for privacy, it's purely for their own greed.

> Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.

Then maybe Apple should invest a fraction of their fortune on making Safari better. Competition is good. Apple doesn't care about competing because they have a monopoly. If they were forced to actually improve WebKit and Safari, maybe people would choose to use it.

And instead they choose to keep the browser diversity alive by taking away your right to choose (your browser in iOS). A sad state of affairs that this is the only thing keeping us from complete Chrome monopoly.

>Safari is also an awful browser in that it requires someone to buy an expensive machine to see if their site works on it.

I remember a long time ago they used to make a Windows version of Safari you could download and install, but at some point they stopped.

For testing one could use any other webkit browser. Most of them have similar rendering quirks to Safari.

Anecdotally that's not enough. I've deal with multiple quirks that only happen in Safari but not in linux-based webkit browsers

I'd be super interested to hear about those!

They still have webkit builds for Windows and Linux etc, and you still don't need to buy anything special to run it. I think they also have a (mostly?) headless one, and a mini-browser which is intended to test the engine (so it doesn't have things like bookmarks or profiles or anything like that, a good fit). Similar options exist for FireFox and Chromium so it's not really a Safari/Webkit special. Usually gets used when you use a standard containerised browser testing CI step.

Either way, if someone is still manually testing their website instead of using a standard automated testing system you're probably not really in a league where this matters anyway.. and if they are, you probably have a device farm already.

Not sure where the "my thing is so important, I have to test it on a real device, but I can't pay for it" niche is.

If it's browser monopolies you're worried about, Apple beginning to allow other engines on iOS is going to instantly cement Chrome as the only browser in the game.

Apple's Safari enforcement is the only reason Chrome hasn't completely taken over.

"The only just monopoly is my monopoly"

There is no monopoly right now. Chrome and Safari are both in use enough that you generally need to test against both.

Once real Chromium is available on iPhones, there will be a monopoly.

Having websites say "if it doesn't work, install Chrome" is the opposite of consumer choice.

Not trying to be glib but isnt that on the website and not Google/Chrome?

I want to use Screen Studio, but it is a MacOS only app (and I'm on Windows). Is that Apple's fault?

Apple doesn’t claim that it’s proprietary operating system is an open platform. The web is supposed to be an open platform.

Yes, but why are we attributing website author's actions on another company?

But there's also not consumer choice now. If devs are so lazy as to only test on Safari because they absolutely have to, you can bet your bottom dollar they aren't testing Firefox or anything else if it comes along. Therefore, if Apple keeps the Safari monopoly on their platform, you have only the choice of Safari on iOS, and only the choice of Chrome everywhere else. So there's no consumer choice even if you get your preferred outcome here.

Diversity is not an intrinsic good. It only is good inasmuch as it enables other things which are good. If the browser diversity we have (limited though it is) isn't actually providing choice to consumers, I don't see how it provides any value even if we do preserve it.

Diversity is an intrinsic good in an open platform, even if it impedes things which are good.

As I like to say: "Safari is the new IE."

Also, you /can/ run macOS in a VM on Linux: https://github.com/Coopydood/ultimate-macOS-kvm

I use that to test our website at work in Safari, though without a GPU (there is no virto-gpu driver for macOS and my PC's GPU doesn't support vGPU) the performance isn't great.

Chrome is the new IE.

The difference is that Microsoft wanted to stall the web, while Google wants to accelerate it faster so that nobody else can keep up.

The commonality is the de-facto monoculture being sold to web developers. "Works best in Internet Explorer" was the problem twenty years ago. Now we've got lazy web developers who bemoan the absence of Chrome on their customer's phones. Right now Apple is the last thing standing between them and slapping a "Works best in Chrome" banner everywhere and abandoning support for Safari.

I've seen plenty of websites with a "Works best in Chrome" banner, usually because they use some non-standard web API. Though, I've seen plenty that clearly just didn't care to test outside of Chrome, so they just assume you're using that.

My gripe about "Safari being the new IE" was more about how broken some websites can be in Safari and having no good way of knowing or testing that. At work, my boss said out website didn't look quite right on his iPhone and it took more work than I'd thought to track down the piece of CSS that Safari rendered differently for some reason.

Personally, I don't use macOS or iOS and I also use Firefox. Generally, things seem to work the same between Firefox Chrome and Safari, with Safari needing the most amount of "tweaks".

When websites are broken in Safari it is, almost invariably, because the web developer was lazy and only ever attempted to make things work in Chrome. This has many risks, including an unintended (but still pathological) reliance on Chrome implementation quirks and undefined behaviours.

Chrome is the new IE because it is fostering the return of the lazy developer who thinks the web can be reduced to a single web browser.

Safari is not the new IE. It is highly standards compliant, it’s actively maintained, and it’s not making web developers lazy.

I only use Apple hardware. I’ve never used safari only Firefox or brave. I don’t understand why you are saying it is a monopoly.

On macOS it isn't an issue. But on iPhone all the browsers are just different user interfaces for Safari's rendering engine

Oh wow. I didn’t know that. Is that true for brave too?

Basically not possible to do JIT (needed for decent JS perf) on iOS for 3p apps (since that requires pages that are both writable and executable) and then on top of that Apple bans 3p browsers specifically in markets where they're allowed to.

When submitting apps to Apple, all browser apps are required to and are basically glorified WKWebViews. Apple doesn't allow any other browser engines when submitting apps to app Store.

At least in US, Firefox on iPhone is basically a reskin of the Safari engine.

At least on iOS, if I am not mistaken, you can only run the Safari Engine. Even if you run Firefox or Chrome, it is running Safari under the hood. That is what I understand. Please, correctme if I am wrong.

> First let us install other browser engines on iOS, and then we can talk

Just checked in the App Store, I can install Firefox, Opera, Brave, and many many other browsers on my iPhone.

Those are not the same underpinnings as their desktop/Android brethren. All of these iOS apps are still using WebKit.

Can you use some of the cloud providers that now allow for a macOS instance? I know I know, but maybe better than nothing?

No because apple mandate 24h leasing minimum time.

Agreed but ironically it's this monopoly that keeps webkit in the game

I‘m a long-time Safari user, and I still prefer it, but I nonetheless concur with everything you said in this post.

When you install Chrome, which you cannot accidentally do, and when you set it as the OS browser default, which you also cannot accidentally do...

... the next time you launch Safari, it will say that the default browser has been changed, "Did you mean to do that?" and of the two options presented ("Keep using Chrome" or "Switch back to Safari") the Safari option will be the default.

The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice. As the only major platform that hasn’t been functionally taken over by Chrome/chromium, iOS represents the last real defensive line against Google owning the web.

Remember, you are a web developer, not a chrome platform developer. Don’t be complicit in Google’s slow-moving coup.

The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform. Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.

Safari is a dirty monopolist on mobile just as much as Chrome is on desktop.

I reject your assertion because it promulgates the lie of "browser choice". The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.

A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.

> The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.

Says who? I certainly don't agree with that statement, the "web as an open platform" was unrecognizable when proprietary clients were the norm.

If web developers stop ensuring their sites work in Safari, consumers will be forced to install Chrome. That's not browser choice. An open platform means that CONSUMERS get to choose which browser they use, not web developers.

(And before you say it, consumers can choose Android, where 99.9% of people use Chrome, but apparently that's okay because they "chose" it.)

It's a chicken-and-egg problem. How can you get web developers to test their websites in Safari, when the majority of Mac devs haven't opened Safari in ages? We have the answer already. Safari doesn't compete on it's own merit.

WebKit is a second-class citizen on the web, and we can argue about why that is, but nobody can sincerely deny it. Apple's strategy has been dead in the water for over a decade. iOS lost.

Safari is still relevant and iOS hasn't lost; the very existence of this thread serves as a clear rejection of that framing. If Safari wasn't competing, or if iOS had lost, nobody would care.

Meanwhile we have people bitching and moaning and meanwhile, as a Firefox user, I go to Safari when I encounter a website that doesn't work in Firefox. Because at the end of the day, developers are forced to test in Safari, and that is a Good Thing. No developer is forced to test in Firefox.

>the very existence of this thread serves as a clear rejection of that framing.

The existence of the "Switch to Safari" campaign is a clear rejection that Safari is competing - it's not, it's the laughing stock of web browsers in 2026, it holds the same place that IE6 did in the early 2000s.

>Because at the end of the day, developers are forced to test in Safari,

I'm not forced to test in Safari, because I don't have money for an iOS device. So Apple users can continue to suffer with whatever browser they use on their i-device. I really don't care, and Apple has done this - not me, because they offer no way but purchasing their hardware to test their wonky browser engine.

And yes, you can emulate an android device on MacOS, so don't bother trying that again. You don't need to purchase an android device to test on android.

This (incredibly lame) campaign is only referring to macOS, not iOS. The grandparent asserted that "iOS lost."

On macOS, Google plays with a lot of dark patterns to get people to install Chrome. I can't count the number of times I've visited my sister or parents and seen Chrome on their Mac, and their explanation is "because Google told me I needed it."

That's not choice either.

Sure it's choice. I use Firefox on Linux; I have to forego a handful of websites, but nothing is a dealbreaker. YouTube works, Gmail works, my life isn't interrupted without Chrome installed.

It sounds like your family is using Chrome because it's more convenient. It's 2026, we can't blame anyone given what Safari spent the past decade doing. Apple does not provide convenient Safari sync for Windows and Android devices, which comprise the majority of smart devices sold. They don't support the normie extensions that people use on Firefox and Chrome. Safari lags behind Chrome in features, WebKit lags behind Blink in cross-platform support, and Apple doesn't allow Safari forks to boost their market share. Apple draws very clear and arbitrary lines in the sand, and then redrafts them once they finally change their mind about PWAs or notification support. By the time it reaches Safari, your parents have been using the feature in Chrome for 8 months.

We may have to agree to disagree. Apple's incessant marketing for their own inferior, ad-ridden packin software is part of why I left macOS to begin with. It's infantilizing to be told that I can't be trusted to make a smart decision, when Apple's own suggestion is a half baked, self-serving alternative. I empathize with Mac users that ignore Safari because that's exactly what I did on my Mac, too. I'd have been using Chrome if Firefox wasn't an option. And I still would, because WebKit is a dog's dinner on my OS.

Just because you are able to make informed choices doesn't mean everyone can. Nor should everyone be expected to.

If you think my mother or sister have the faintest idea what a web browser is, or how one might be better than another, then you haven't met my mother or sister. To suggest that they made any kind of informed choice is absurd. They were influenced by marketing, plain and simple.

Personally, I'd be fascinated to see an in-depth study showing what percentage of web users chose their browser based on true/objective criteria, as opposed to marketing, brand preference, herd mentality, or wrong assumptions. Is exposing someone to marketing really what we mean by choice?

It's worth remembering that choice isn't necessarily the pure good we intuitively believe it to be. Western consumers have an extraordinary choice of food, yet that hasn't necessarily translated into healthier diets. This is especially problematic when the choices themselves are shaped by corporations whose interests aren't well aligned with the consumer's.

99% of Mac users are installing Chrome or Firefox using Safari. They are objectively assessing it in a real-world test, and deciding that Safari lost. You're lucky there's no convenient way to uninstall Safari from the OS, the user telemetry would be a bloodbath.

Apple is a corporation too, and they have their own (quite sizable) financial interest in gimping the web as an alternative to native app distribution. Apple used to recognize this, and prioritized interoperability with OpenGL and OpenCL as a hedge against the web becoming the only cross-platform API that the Mac supported. The Apple of today has abandoned those interests and lost all pretenses of humility. They are equally as mask-off as Google or Microsoft is, pushing Metal and WebKit just as shamelessly as Microsoft crams the corpse of DirectX into things. This isn't a charity project, it is another way for Apple to control iOS software distribution, their primary service cash cow, Tim Cook's pride and joy. Apple is happy to give Google money for their Apple Intelligence integration, this isn't a grudge that they take seriously.

Apple could have supported KHTML upstream, and killed Blink in the cradle. They could have made Safari a billion-dollar cross-platform product, and won. They made this horrible bed, and now they want to users to moralize Google's victory. Why would anyone, knowledgeable or naive, insult themselves by standing with Apple here?

This is why the EU forces the Browser Choice Dialog: https://developer.apple.com/support/browser-choice-screen/

You use Firefox, but WebKit is in fact the default on Fedora

I do use safari in my playwright tests, and it led to me doing a note on my known limitations page - that those tests take longer than Firefox and Chrome, my daily drivers. But, that could be due to using it on Linux maybe. I do hate having to dig out ios devices for app testing.

Fedora’s default browser also uses WebKit

If web developers stop ensuring their sites work in Safari, their sites will still work in Safari because Google ratifies and publishes the web standards that Chrome follows so that Safari and other browsers can follow it too, something that Safari actually does less than Chrome.

Consumers choosing Android isn't a choice of which browser to use, it's choosing which operating system to use. That doesn't sound like you care that consumers get to choose which browser they use, that's letting Apple choose which browser that Apple consumers use then telling them they can choose a different operating system instead.

But there is no browser diversity on mobile. I'd like to use Firefox on iOS.

There is absolutely browser diversity on mobile. ~30% of people are using Safari on iOS. ~70% of people are using Chrome on Android (and have the "choice" to use Firefox but don't).

Maybe folk mean that iOS only uses Safari rendering regardless of which wrapper is running? Meaning Apple users don't have a choice, one rendering engine only, not diverse.

No, vrganj said mobile. There is browser diversity on mobile devices by virtue of operating system diversity on mobile devices.

You're delusional. Safari is forced on every browser on iOS, you install Firefox but the browser engine is Safari. You install Chrome but the browser engine is forced by Apple to be Safari.

This isn't browser diversity, iOS is a browser monoculture, it's all Safari under the hood. How can you not understand this??

>I reject your assertion because it promulgates the lie of "browser choice".

The only lie being told in all of this is the one Apple tells when you install Firefox on an iOS device. It's not Firefox you're installing, it's Safari. Every browser on iOS is Safari - you have no choice at all.

>The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.

Then put your money where your mouth is. If Safari can compete then let other browser engines on iOS. If it can't then it deserves to die. Artificially inflating it by forcing on iOS isn't the utopia you think it is.

>A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.

Apple iOS is a monocoulture - every browser is Safari whether you want it or not.

There's no argument you can make to escape the fact that Apple is helping nobody but Apple by forcing Safari on iOS.

There is no browser engine diversity on iOS. Reskinned Safari doesn’t count.

That's not what diversity means. I agree there's no browser choice on iOS.

Choice is what the individual (supposedly) has. Diversity is what actually exists across an ecosystem. iOS is the last bastion of browser diversity, because despite all this supposed "choice", it's pretty much all Chrome everywhere else.

On the contrary. There are plenty of choices on iOS but no diversity.

Reynard exists for those who can sideload or jailbreak iOS:

https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser

Real Gecko on iOS

Nice!

Chromium on iOS can also be compiled with blink, using the ‘use_blink’ flag.

> The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.

This is a wild statement. For an individual user, what is the point of browser diversity if you are locked into your browser by OS? A weird number of people here are okay with this particular example of anti-consumer behavior simply because it offsets the chrome monopoly. That's not a healthy web, that's competing layers of dysfunction.

For an individual user, what is the point of browser choice when developers stop testing in Safari and instead say "if it doesn't work, install Chrome". That's not giving the consumer a choice.

There are three choices: use Safari for sub-par site experience, use Chrome for compatible, don't use the site.

Yes, except the Safari experience is only sub-par because the developer chose to use some bleeding edge feature that doesn't fall back gracefully, or is relying on a Chrome bug, or a lax feature implementation in Chrome.

There's no reason for Safari to have a sub-par experience except for the laziness of some web developers.

100vh, PWAs, and full screen support that isn’t absolute garbage aren’t exactly bleeding edge features

Being able to block trackers and not use ridiculous amounts of RAM aren't exactly bleeding edge features either

> There's no reason for Safari to have a sub-par experience except for the laziness of some web developers.

How about a browser with a captive userbase that has less incentive to stay up to date with web standards?

Your argument is that we should expect developers to target/test their app on many different browsers where any random CSS property behaves differently. They will have to buy a device just for this purpose. Because it is obviously developers who should have to pick up the slack here, not Apple.

Developers should develop for the web, not one particular browser. There are desktop and native mobile applications that manage to work across multiple operating systems and cpu architectures, and you’re telling me web developers can’t test their shit on a handful of browsers and configurations?

You're correct but it's not always this simple. Apple drags their feet with the implementation of some standards and sometimes there is nothing to fall back on. Many of those standards are just bringing functionality available in native apps to the web so we can only speculate that they do it to keep apps on the App Store. One good example is push notifications: they took a long time to support it, and the "Add to Home Screen" requirement makes it almost worthless.

That’s not a good example, that’s literally the worst example you could have possibly chosen. Push notifications are an anti-feature. It is a disgusting embarrassment that they were ever considered part of the web platform, and I admire Apple for rightfully resisting it.

Safari is a better browser because it doesn’t support them.

I see that reaction a lot but it doesn't make sense to me. Yes, there are apps that abuse them, but that is why it requires your permission. Exactly like how native apps require your permission to send you push notifications. So why are push notifications only acceptable in native apps?

> Safari is a better browser because it doesn’t support them.

It has supported them since iOS 16.4. The issue is they made enabling them so high friction for users that you're better off publishing a WebView wrapper to the App Store instead. More work for app devs, worse experience for users, but great for Apple because it's still on the App Store.

The Healthy Web in 2026: Some users can't have a choice so other users can.

Nobody called the current situation healthy. But it could get a lot worse.

Though an interesting consequence is that allowing iOS users to install firefox but not chrome would be a strict improvement over the current situation.

It would be a strict improvement if it wasn't a red carpet for Google to make the obvious legal arguments.

Unironically and emphatically yes. Choice is predicated on diversity. You can have diversity without choice, but you cannot have choice without diversity.

If diversity fails to occur naturally, some amount of forced diversity helps to keep the ecosystem healthy.

People can just not buy cages, i.e. phones from apple

I agree. Consumers should be allowed to buy a cage or not.

Well, they are, and then complain they are in a cage

They shouldn't complain. Non-cages are available.

Are they? Or are a bunch of Chrome fanboys and web devs complaining on their behalf?

One analogy I think of every time this comes up on HN is the kernel and linux. Why do we not speak of a similar lack of diversity?

To me, chromium is the kernel and the browsers are the distro. We do like that there is a shared kernel in linux, yes?

I acknowledge that this is reductionist, as there exists another lack of diversity for consumer operating systems, in there really only being Windows and Mac / iOS and Android.

The Linux kernel isn't a good comparison because kernel development is not led by a corporation with its own distinct commercial interests. Sure Linux a monoculture, but it's a uniquely healthy one.

And the Linux kernel isn't a good analogy because the web is a standard, not an implementation. In that sense it's more akin to UNIX, or IP-based networking.

I do share your thoughts and sentiments at other times (and peer commenter too). The contrarian in me likes to offer up this analogy, though I interpret it much more loosely than the HN critiques I earn each time. To me there is an argument I feel can made that a shared "browser" kernel has some advantage in, for example, security. More eyes, more contributors, which number more organizations than Google these days

https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/chromium/contri...

Still, there is a difference between contribution and control, which I hope and dream can and will change.

https://www.learninternetgrow.com/who-controls-chromium/

I will add that I appreciate your response, generally, but especially the missing hyperbole. This civil discourse is very preferable.

Linux isn’t a good analogy to Chromium due to the differences in history, licensing, and project governance.

Linux is GPLv2, it has many outside contributors, it was built from scratch, and it has Linus as a neutral party as the final decider in terms of the direction of the project and what gets included.

Chromium is a mix of LGPL, BSD, and other licenses depending on the component. Chromium was originally forked from WebKit; it isn’t a from scratch project. Google decides what changes get merged to Chromium.

The user could have bought an Android phone instead.

However, if Apple allowed different browser engines, eventually no one would be able to choose anything but Chrome regardless of what phone they bought.

>The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform

Maybe you don't understand that I have to spend several hundred dollars for the privilege to debug Safari's shitty bugs. That's FUCKED UP. It isn't "being lazy". I shouldn't have to spend money so I can cater to a shitty browser. And Apple does some weird-ass things with their browser that make it wonky, and you can't debug some things without an apple device. Touch events are one particular iffy thing Apple does differently, because "think different" apparently means "we do whatever the fuck we want so pay us to debug things that shouldn't need debugging".

>Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.

Give me $500 to buy an Apple device and I'll fix things so it works for the shitty browser iOS users are forced to use. It has not a single fucking thing to do with "being lazy", and you're a shitty person for suggesting that's how this works.

I've had to pay thousands of dollars on Android devices I don't want in order to test my website and fix shitty Chrome bugs. I sucked it up. You can too.

If the cost really is an issue for you, I'm sure you know that you aren't forced to pay $500 to Apple. You can easily find hand-me-down Apple devices that still runs a current operating system for a pittance -- or free if you have a network of friends or family. No need to pay Apple anything.

Well that's some nonsense. You can install the Android emulator on MacOS, or whatever OS you use for developing - you can't do that with iOS. You have to purchase a mac to do it.

And I can't even buy only an iOS device, because the iOS device has to connect to a laptop/desktop version of Safari to use its debugger - so I need to purchase two Apple devices!, just to debug the mobile device.

I wouldn't be complaining if I could install the iOS simulator on any other platform - but even on iOS the iOS simulator sucks badly, and it only works on MacOS. It doesn't "simulate" touch events correctly, as they function differently on a real iOS device.

[flagged]

No shit, shelock. Of course a real device is better. But 99% of iOS problems I've been able to solve using Browserstack (paid for by my work). It's the 1% of iOS bugs that they had to buy me an iPhone and a Macbook to fix. I don't get to use those devices to debug my own projects. That requires me to spend a lot of my own money. I've never had any problem with any touch events on android browsers - but I'm sure I would if Safari were on Android, because Apple is the only one that does crazy shit with their mobile browser because they tHiNk DiFfErEnT.

My previous response stands as a perfectly adequate response to your last post.

No, you're just an Apple shill. "Incredibly cheap" is not cheap, it's still quite a few hundreds of dollars - I have to buy an iOS device and an Apple desktop/laptop to run the Safari debugger to debug the iOS device... so it gets expensive really quickly to debug a shit browser that is intentionally hobbled by a greedy company.

Tell me you're not a web developer without telling me you're not a web developer. And if you are, you must be new here, or really bad at it. I've been developing websites for 30+ years, so I have no doubt I've been in this game and paying attention way longer than you have. Go have a seat over there, this pointless internet interaction is OVER.

Remarkably, it still remains a perfectly adequate response to (the substantive parts of) your latest post. Calm down and read it again.

>Remarkably, it still remains a perfectly adequate response to (the substantive parts of) your latest post.

Only in your dim-witted head.

Go have a seat over there, this pointless internet interaction is OVER.

>Remember, you are a web developer, not a chrome platform developer. Don’t be complicit in Google’s slow-moving coup.

This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding, much like how many think standards groups (e.g. W3C) decide how the browsers works.

(Standards groups can invent the best feature ever for the Web ... and it won't matter in the slightest if browser makers don't adopt it. ALL STANDARDS ARE SET BY BROWSER MAKERS ... the standards bodies are just the mechanism they use to do it.)

Likewise, the browser a web developer user uses is already set for them. EVERY web dev (except those at companies big enough to care about the "long tail" of browsers) uses one browser: the most popular one.

It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"

> This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding

No, it doesn't. I wasn't talking about web standards bodies. I'm talking about the practical reality of the web as a platform that is resilient against slight differences between browsers. Such resilience can only come from developers who understand that their job is to target the web and not just Chrome.

It is you who misunderstands:

> It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"

You are literally arguing for the web to become the Chrome Platform for the convenience of web developers. Sure we can have other browsers, so long as they're perfectly compatible with Chrome's quirks. This is precisely what it means for the web to be the Chrome Platform, not the open web. We've already reached the point where it's assumed that Chrome is perfect and anything that deviates from Chrome is someone else's bug. It's sad.

I'm not arguing anything, I'm telling you what reality is.

The reality is that 99% of web developers all use the exact same browser, and it isn't Chrome or IE or any one browser its "whatever is the most popular browser currently" (really it's "most popular for your customers but 99% of companies have customers who use the same browsers as everyone else).

You can bury your head in the sand and say "oh the mean web developers aren't using my pet browser" ... but it won't change the fact that no one wants to test on an unpopular browser, then test again on a popular one: EVERYONE is going to test their site with the browser most likely to use that site.

Late to reply, but for the sake of posterity:

You are correct that many developers complain about Safari because they are lazy little shits who would much prefer the whole world be forced to change which browser they use in order to make their jobs a bit easier.

Nobody is saying anyone needs to test on an unpopular browser. Safari on iOS is, by the numbers, very popular.

Browser diversity is merely an after-effect of Apple having complete control over iOS, if it was profitable to let Google coup the entire web, they would do it in a heartbeat.

It's obvious Apple isn't doing this to "protect the open web" because if that was true, they wouldn't have stopped developing Safari for Windows.

> Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.

Wild how low the bar has gotten. The web would be so much better if there were ~10 browsers, each with around 10% market share. Web sites would have to suck it up and put some effort into browser testing and compatibility. And stop relying on features of a single browser. I remember writing software that had to work on over a dozen platforms. But developers today can’t manage to support more than one browser?

It's been a long time since I've encountered an issue with a particular browser. After IE was gone, unless you were using bleeding edge features everything that works in one browser works everywhere else.

If your website doesn't work on one browser, you probably need to raise a bug report for that browser rather than change your site.

Back in my day I’d test on IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and links/links2/lynx.

> The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform. Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.

There's multiple issues with Safari and people complaining aren't "lazy". To start with it's a much buggier browser than Firefox or Chrome. Sure if you go on caniuse.com, almost everything is marked as supported but with Safari in reality it's always ""supported"" and you will deal with non-sense bugs, most of the features are sort of 95% there and they stopped development claiming it's good enough. They also have very poor QA and regressions happen often.

Next, Safari is the last non-evergreen browser, it's still tied to the OS and thus lags behind in updates.

And to finish with, Safari is also only available on Apple devices (harder to test with) and tied to a specific OS version (how are you officially even supposed to test the bugs on version X without paying a third party company? I don't know).

I'm not against Safari but Apple really needs to put some money to make it more modern if they want to actually compete with Firefox or Chrome without their OS lock-in.

It's a balancing act.

Lack of browser diversity is bad because it puts too much control in the hands of the only browser vendor.

Lack of browser choice is bad because it puts too much control in the hands of whatever browser vendor they use.

We need both for a healthy web.

Ideally we want both, but diversity is more important, because it's a necessary prerequisite for choice. You can have real diversity without choice[0], but you can't have real choice without diversity[1].

[0] Imagine that everyone was mandated to use one of five different browser engines, such that each had exactly 20% market share.

[1] Imagine that you are free to choose between five different browser engines but everyone else picked #3 and websites are only ever tested on #3 and all the others don't work so well.

Safari has real problems compared to Chrome on other platforms.

Primarily, incognito mode is difficult to access. Android allows a shortcut to be dropped to start in this mode.

Cut and paste is also awkward and uncomfortable in Safari compared to Android.

My first move on iOS is to install Firefox Focus, to get Safari's history under control.

Apple used to release Safari for Windows, but then for obvious reasons it stopped.

Apple is all about control.

Ask your LLM for details but

TLDR

Apple since mid 2024 was forced by EU and Japan to allow other engines.

There are hurdles but the path is open.

Both Chrome / Blink and Firefox / Gecko have made prototypes but haven’t moved past that.

It seems that there is no money or will to see it through.

So it’s not all “Apple bad doesn’t allow it”

> Ask your LLM for details but

No, mate. You need to provide details. The onus is on you to support your claim.

I understand your point. But hear me out.

I’ve been following this subject for years and this is my best and honest personal summary.

It’s just people don’t know that this is a thing and are “locked” into believing that things are the same as in 2020.

If anyone is interested in details, LMK. It’s one Google search away anyway.

And lest anybody say it's not possible, I personally use a jailbreak tweak for this on my iPhone 11 / iOS 18 / Dopamine 3.0 that works flawlessly:

- https://github.com/guacforlife/ReynardDefault

- https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser

First let us pick the search engine we want tobusey

> Apple has complied in a way that makes it impossible to actually make a second browser engine for iOS still (going against the spirit of the law, but the courts haven't caught up to them yet).

Damn thats pretty evil, I just looked it up. For those curious, Apple forces you to release your EU app with a different browser engine specifically for European users as a completely separate app, meaning you would have Facebook World edition with WebKit, and Facebook EU Edition with whatever new engine they want. Basically not worth the hassle to maintain two separate apps.

It's even worse. Apple has taken malicious compliance to a new level with the Digital Markets Act and alternative browser engines. Apple requires a strict compliance regiment. Developers need special authorisation, and must meet extensive security, privacy, and vulnerability management requirements. All of those are opaque and up to the subjective determination of Apple's changing whims. Meaning they'll go out of their way to deny an engine (or update) for any or no reason at all.

And it gets worse. Developers have reported limitations on testing, restrictive contractual terms, and uncertainty surrounding updates when users travel outside the EU.

Not even Google has managed to navigate this gauntlet. Our EU leaders are asleep at the wheel.

Honestly I rather a new app store I can install cannot just be propped up easily…

https://webkit.org/downloads/

Your Linux download is right there.

> Safari has the most obscene monopoly of any browser ever. IE 6 came pre-installed on windows machines, but you could always install Mosaic or such.

Mosaic was a fair bit earlier, but yeah, I ran Netscape 4 until Mozilla M18. Never used IE as my main browser in many years of Windows use.

EDIT: I guess Netscape 4 and Mozilla M18 were both pre-IE6, too, but still Mozilla/Firefox for the IE6 era.

> But Apple doesn't give me a legal way to freely run an iOS simulator nor even a macOS VM on my linux machine, I have to pay money, to buy their hardware to see if my site will work on Safari.

Try GNOME Web (Epiphany). It's webkit based, keeps up with Safari, doesn't disable access to the Safari devtools, and it sends the exact same user agent string. Should be essentially bug-for-bug compatible. It's otherwise an anemic browser, but you don't need much for testing.

You should ditch Chrome. And switch to FireFox.

I've been very happy with FireFox.

Agreed!

Nope. I watch a lotta youtube on a PC, FF runs vids like crap because Google changes something, and FF struggls to play well unlike Chrome or Edge.

That's the only reason I am not switching to FF 100%. I do use it though but not as a main driver.

I've had zero problems with Youtube on FF for I don't remember how many years. I'm on Mac though.

> Nope. I watch a lotta youtube on a PC, FF runs vids like crap because Google changes something, and FF struggls to play well unlike Chrome or Edge.

I generally use Safari on my Apple devices (and YT works) and Firefox on any Linux machines. If something does not work on Safari I try Firefox on my Mac. In the past I've also sometimes used Chrome when no other option works.

So one option could be to use Firefox as a 'general use' browser, and switch to something else on an as-needed basis.

A bit of a hassle, but it may be the best compromise currently.

Interesting, YouTube runs fairly well on my system with Firefox. I do get the "Experiencing interruptions? Find out why" pop-up often. It's funny though, the only interruption I actually experience is the pop-up. If the pop-up went away, so would all interruptions.

I have a paid sub, and runs youtube without any ad blockers on chrome and FF. The issue happens only on FF

Yeah, I would not be surprised at all if there's "if not Chrome UA, show popup" code somewhere.

I have the same in Safari when I have uBlock on, initial video load takes forever and i get an occasional interruptions pop up in the bottom left of the screen

Never had a problem with that.

Many replies about Firefox having no problems on Youtube but I will confirm your complaint that it's an ongoing issue for some of us.

I keep retrying Firefox over multiple years and it's still not quite equal to Chrome for Youtube 4k playback ...

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28783904

2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42176450

2026 still talks about the problem: https://go.tabbit.ai/blog/firefox-youtube-4k-stuttering

And a recent Youtube comment (2026-September) notices that Firefox doesn't run as well as Chrome on his modern high-end laptop with 64GB RAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIE_PkuFeng&lc=UgxfGeBL6sopr...

4k? That might have something to do with it. Though given a big enough box that too shouldn't be an issue. But I'm using a decade+ old thinkpad driving a fairly high res dell and it works well enough.

I use 4k without issues

"Works on My Machine" reply.

I sometimes have difficulty with YouTube 4K on Firefox on my Mac Studio (M2 Max with 64GB). I don't really care though, because 1440p is always well and truly good enough. (And really 1080p is more than good enough except that the default bitrate is absolute dogshit. Most of the time I'm choosing 1440p is because it's bitrate is not dogshit.)

"Nope. I watch a lotta youtube on a PC, FF runs vids like crap because Google changes something, and FF struggls to play well unlike Chrome or Edge."

You must have a hardware problem, as I'm playing 4K videos on a 1st-gen Ryzen and GTX 1080 using Firefox and I've never had a single issue since I got the machine, around the 4th week the processor was available to purchase.

r7 1700 and GTX 1080 was my setup for a long time. still is, just relegated to an htpc (albeit not a very power friendly one). the 1080 in particular was (and remains) such a reliable card.

The 1080 was quite amazing when it came out. I still have one here that I use as a test card. Of course it can't do anything useful for the amount of power that it consumes but still, the amount of horsepower in there was very impressive.

"Of course it can't do anything useful for the amount of power that it consumes"

Until about the top-end of the 3000 RTX series released, the GTX 1080 was still king of raster performance.

I'm playing modern games like Marvel Rivals at 1440p no problem. Risk of Rain 2 4k no problem. STALKER 2 1080p no problem. It even runs most of my VR games perfectly fine, with me only needing to switch to my RTX 5060 machine for Into the Radius 2.

Even today, it is a very capable card, despite the power draw.

Ah yes, my bad, for gaming it is still usable depending on the games but I don't play games. A lot is expensive, it needs power and you only have so much of them. Currently running 2x modded 4090 with 48G VRAM each, 2x 3090 and 4x RTX 4000. Adding a 1080 would be silly :)

I've used FF for the past 20 years (Linux and Windows). I have seen thousands of youtube videos in that time without a glitch. So have many hundreds of other FF users.

If FF is not working on youtube for, it's not working for you and you alone.

They do that on purpose. To keep you using Chrome.

Some of the related posts:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/youtube-is-slowing-video-loads...

ty. This... yes, you know why I don't use FF for Youtube...

This is why you should only use firefox, with a proper adblocker, for youtube.

I just use Brave for YT. Adblock built in!

I used to use Brave and it had no issues on YT.

I stopped using Brave for no reason i don't remember. (no, not to do with the CEO)

I've been using FF across Linux, MacOS, and Windows for years. I can't remember the last time I had an issue playing YT videos in it.

Firefox should just have a 'Chrome' mode where it just shamelessly looks exactly like Chrome. Apart from Chrome removing the flag to hide the close buttons on tabs, I think the UI is damn near perfect.

we're getting closer with the nova redesign

No thanks.

I am perfectly happy with Chrome.

Ive used Firefox as my daily driver for around 12 years. I switched to Chrome a couple weeks ago to see what the fuss is about and I am shocked how glitchy it is in comparison. Firefox is a much more stable experience.

I routinely have 100's of tabs open on a 32G 10+ year old box (an ancient W540), it's rock solid.

I switched to Brave and could not be happier. Chrome user experience without creepy panopticon.

Nah I switched to Brave. Firefox is still slower than any chromium based browser.

Came to say this. No way that I will use Safari. As a regular user, why not (even though UX choices are really weird). As a developer, never ever ever. Firefox dev tools are simply on another level entirely. As someone who has escaped two years ago the Apple ecosystem, Firefox too.

Maybe a bit of an edge use case, but I use the translate page feature a lot in browsers. In Chrome you can switch back and forth between languages seamlessly, but in Safari translating a page requires reloading the page - which can cause issues on forms that use POST. Even worse, I've found that switching back to the original language just doesn't work on pages loaded with POST - the page gets stuck on the translated version (which can sometimes cause issues with some poorly designed javascript components like calendar widgets) even after reloading the page. This causes issues frequently enough to prevent me switching to Safari.

On the plus side, though, Safari will also translate text in images.

Safari also tries to guess whether a page needs translation, and won't even offer you the option if it doesn't think you need it. (The menu bar item to translate the page will be disabled.) Which means you can't translate pages that are only partially in a different language, or which have enough of your preferred language for Safari to decide that translation shouldn't be offered. Sure, you can right click -> translate, but you have to do that for every piece of text, and it only displays the translation in a popover that closes once you do anything else.

Agree on both points. Translation is a very second class citizen in Safari. The selection of languages is also incredibly limited compared to Chrome. This is one of the reasons I stick with Chrome.

Chrome is the new internet explorer. Lots of people coming up with all sorts of arguments why they have to use it and can't switch. Internet Explorer used to be like that. MS really abused users and they still wouldn't switch. It's a form of Stockholm syndrome.

The history of Chrome is that it first displaced Firefox as a reasonable alternative (while funding that via a nice ad deal). And then they just steam rolled Internet Explorer to the point where MS gave up and rebuilt their browser around Chromium. It was that good. Fifteen years ago.

But these days you have to put up with a lot of crap from Google. Ad blocking works better on other browsers. Even some Chromium browsers (like Brave). But the thing with Chromium is that all Chromium derived browsers outsource most of the browser internals to Google. Google decides what features to implement, what PRs to merge, what features not to implement, etc. They set the standards. Safari, Firefox, and hopefully soon Ladybird are the only alternative browser engines keeping them somewhat honest on that front.

I use safari regularly and it has not really kept up. All kinds of stuff that is partly broken for rendering. Especially on heavily dynamic sites. Chrome at least works for any web standard which IE did not.

Where do you run in to this? I switched from Chrome to Safari about 5 years ago and can count the number of websites I’ve had issues with on one hand, I think.

Strava is an example of a website that's dog slow on Safari. Pages take 10+ seconds before they start rendering.

Interestingly gmail suddenly started loading dog slow in Safari for me. I'm on an older version of Safari so that could be a factor - so bizarre though. I wouldn't put it past them to be doing that deliberately.

Mobile Reddit is awful on Safari, but it speaks more about Reddit developers than it speaks about Safari.

It’s more like devs only test on chrome.

Yes. These days if a site is broken in Safari there's a ~70% chance it's broken or degraded in Firefox too.

For what it's worth Firefox is my daily driver and I've never run into a site that was broken in it. Safari I definitely have.

Yup, just like during the bad old days of Internet Explorer's dominance. I remember encountering websites that only worked on the Windows version of Internet Explorer as late as 2006. We had a nice time in the late 2000s and early 2010s when web developers coded against standards instead of against the market-leading web browser. There was competition between Firefox, Opera, Safari, and a revitalized Internet Explorer. I don't remember IE 7 and later being that bad, though by then I had switched to Firefox on Linux/Windows and Safari on Macs.

Then came an upstart web browser from Google named Chrome....and now we're back to the bad old days of web developers coding to the dominant web browser again.

I have never cursed at a website for a rendering issue.

I have cursed too many websites to count because of their broken form designs (like assuming a particular postcode format) or reliance on cookies from ad vendors for basic functionality. If your website needs to generate “a new google recaptcha cookie” (whatever that means) before I can enter payment info, then sorry, no es bueno.

Google has always aggressively promoted Chrome, too. The promotion is just invisible to most people since most people run Chrome.

If you visit a Google property using a Gecko or WebKit-based browser you'll get hit with banners nudging you to switch to Chrome and Google's iOS apps ignore the long-available default browser setting when linked are tapped, prompting you to choose between your default browser and Chrome even if you don't have Chrome installed.

And then there's the whole thing with how Chrome for Android conveniently never gained the ability to run even pared-back MV3 blocker extensions. Massive conflict of interest there.

I wish Google were called out for this stuff way more, but more often than not they're given a free pass.

> Chrome is the new internet explorer.

My take is Safari is the new IE.

It is packaged with the OS. I can't get an older version of Safari without an older version is macOS. From a testing standpoint, this means we have a bunch of hardware or images we never update so we can test against.

That was the IE thing, it was baked into the OS. Also, trash dev tools. Crashes pretty easily with the console open for more than 30s.

> Chrome is the new internet explorer.

Most people who say this didnt go through the pain of why IE was such a PITA. IE held back web development by years because either they refused to add features or they added features that only worked with Microsoft approved.

Chrome came along and accelerated web platform development since their products relied on a thriving web ecosystem. They did it using open source software, and built out consensus using web platforms.

Chrome is the new IE will only be true if other browsers are out innovating Chrome (not true), or Chrome has abandoned web platform (not true).

There's only one browser that drags their feat adding features, and that's ironically Safari. Firefox too to an extend, but that's mostly mismanagement and lack of resources. Apple has no excuses.

Chrome is the new IE in that it has become an engine/frontend monoculture. Remember those little "Best viewed in IE" badges that used to litter the web because devs stopped testing their sites in Netscape? That's where we're headed now with Chromium/Blink and it's just as bad of a thing now as it was then.

Also worth noting that some of the discrepancies in capability are in features that Google decided to push despite opposition from other members of the consortium (like WebUSB).

> Chrome is the new IE in that it has become an engine/frontend monoculture

That's a strange argument. I dont see HN saying this year all of us are going to buy Android, because iOS has become too popular. That sentiment is only valid is iOS is dragging their feat and if they stop innovating, effectively holding the market back.

I still havent seen an example where Chrome is holding everyone back. If anything, the complaint is the other way - they are doing way too much and we want them to stop.

And for HN crowd to be against that is very silly.

The web is an open standard (nominally, at least), but ceases to be so if a single company controls it. At that point the company’s vision is instead the standard in which nobody else gets meaningful say.

It’s not just Apple. Mozilla has pushed back against Google’s proposals plenty of times too. Google doesn’t always know best and often acts more in their self-interest than in that of the web.

So the issue isn’t that Google is moving too fast or doing too much, but that they’re unilaterally deciding the future of the web, which is not something any single party should be capable of.

> but ceases to be so if a single company controls it.

How does Google or any company control the web? I can launch a website fuckgoogle.com today and Google can do nothing with it. However, I cannot publish fuckapple on Mac Store or App Store.

It's the direction of the web they control, with the various specs involved becoming ever more complex and more difficult to implement in new web engines (complexity as a moat) and with many of the APIs getting added being better suited for surveillance capitalism or as a project for somebody's promotion within Google than for building high quality software.

Its it a web platform committee represented by Mozilla, Apple and others? What other alternative do we have?

It is either one company 100% controlling the ecosystem (Apple with iOS) or a committee controlling the ecosystem (web platform).

Between these two, there's only one that is truly open and democratic.

I remember the "Best view in Chrome" notices that I get today browsing Japanese web sites. It is already a problem and I have to spoof the browser agent for some web sites to get around Javascript blocks that only allow Chrome through.

> Most people who say this didn't go through the pain of why IE was such a PITA.

I did and "Chrome is the new internet explorer" is more accurate than what has been uttered since Chrome split from WebKit, "Safari is the new internet explorer".

IEs problem wasn't that it was behind in features, it was that it used IE-specific plugins and was heavily integrated with Windows Explorer. Safari is and has not been either of those.

Safari has the same manifest v3 limitations that preclude the full-blooded ublock origin you get with Firefox.

Why don't they lean into ad blockers and making the web less shitty? Is it because the web staying shitty makes people use apps instead?

I’m sure that is a part of the reason. I hate apps with a passion…

It's because with the way that the most capable adblockers are built, they can't function without injecting code into every page and intercepting traffic. The privacy implications for someone installing an adblocker extension with malicious intent (or more commonly, a formerly legit blocker gets bought and gets turned malicious in an update) are dire.

I don't buy it. Your browser itself does these things, Apple could bake their own into the browser.

I notice no difference using AdGuard (in basic mode, with only the content blocking rules and no page read access) in Safari or uBOL in basic mode on Chrome vs. using UBO on Firefox. And in uBOL’s case you can always increase the filtering level if you’re willing to grant the extension read access to pages to basically match uBO. You can even hide/delete elements or add your own custom rules.

I feel like most people who make MV3 complaints didn’t bother actually trying it, they just repeat the default anti-MV3 talking points.

I personally notice a lot of difference between AdGuard and UBO.

AdGuard just blocks much less.

Does it block ads in youtube videos?

Yes.

The MV3 API isn't enough to block YouTube ads on their own, but Safari ad blockers which also include web extension API blocking can see enough traffic to block YT ads. 1Blocker does this, and even StopTheMadness Pro's blocking have enough flexibility to do it.

Google serves ads and videos from the same servers. Adblock can't use DNS to drop the ads without dropping videos too. Ublock in firefox sees the actual content in my browser and can distinguish youtube videos from ads.

But how does ublock origin lite, the v3 version, blocks adverts on youtube just fine?

Google doesnt turn on MV3 and have it break ads day one that would highlight a negative change for users. Google wants people to move to MV3 and notice no difference and then they can start chipping away later.

It's cute that you think they have level of sophistication in their strategy.

It doesnt require sophistication. Just implement MV3 and then when the conversation about adblockers comes up make a note that its probably not wise to cut it as extensions have switched to MV3 and its a controversial topic. Its easy to see how different teams would come to this without collaborating, its the MV3 team doing what they do and the ad block team reading the room.

Safari never supported the API’s needed for uBlock Origin. That said, Safari also has its own API available for blocking stuff

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...

I’ve been using Safari since 2003. I was previously using Konqueror, so the transition was pretty easy. It’s always been fast and reliable and Mac-like. It’s nice to have a browser that is a browser and not something that’s attempting to be another operating system.

You deserve the kudos for just mentioning Konqueror and extra +1 for using it.

I liked Konqueror but abandoned in favor of Chrome browsers and variants especially after working on frontend projects.

You deserve the kudos for just mentioning Konqueror and extra +1 for using it.

I liked Konqueror but abandoned in favor of Chrome browsers and variants especially after working on frontend projects and stoped using KDE

If Safari worked in all major OSs like Chrome, Brave and Firefox, I could consider that. I own a Mac but didn't switch to Safari because I use multiple OSs for my work.

It even used to run on Windows...

I suspect that was a legacy from when they planned for iOS not supporting any third-party apps. If they want to force devs to target mobile Safari, the least they can do was to provide the desktop version on Windows.

Once apps dominate (which requires devs to have a Mac anyway to compile and debug) and turns out nobody use the Windows port, it's just a money sink.

Android provides an emulator so you can debug Android apps on MacOS. Apple should do the same, but they won't.

The UX of Safari is just... not as good as chrome. On my phone, on my desktop, I just feel too much friction in the daily cycle of opening a thousand tabs.

The UX of Pages and Keynote are, IMO, far superior to Word/Powerpoint and Google Docs/Slides, but they lag adoption from... ecosystem inertia? I mention this as evidence of my objectivity in reflecting on UX.

'Find in page' is in.... 'Share' (on mobile). But Apple has the best UX, so who am I to argue?

Or you can just start typing in the address bar and it will list it below the autofilled list

It may list it at the end, sometimes after a random delay, and sometimes fail to find something known to exist. Case in point: I just typed “autofill” into the address bar. Took about 1 second before anything showed up in the dropdown, and lo and behold, “Find ‘autofill’ — no matches”. Deleting “autofill” and typing it in again — “4 matches”, and dropdown entries appeared as I typed. What a shitshow.

This is very much my experience with Safari in general. Each one of these glitches in isolation isn't enough to push me away, but I had enough of them that it became unpleasant to use. The most annoying one was where I hit enter on the address bar and the page would just do nothing. Sometimes for 5, 10, 30 seconds. It was intermittent but annoying as fuck. If I clicked on the address bar and hit enter again it would work. Turns out it's been a bug for 15 years. Thousands of reports, still not fixed. Such a basic function for a web browser and they can't get that right.

One of the world’s great mysteries is how Apple cannot figure out basic search features working consistently

And 'History' is under 'Bookmarks'!

yeah, for one, you can't put multiple tabs in a stack/accordion group

To each their own I guess. I hate Chrome and love every single thing about Safari.

Tell me more (I'm in earnest):

What do you love about safari?

Basically, its speed and minimal, Mac native UI. Chrome is not a Mac UI and feels bloated.

Ultimately they’re two WebKit browsers one of which feels like a real Mac app.

I like Safari. I certainly trust Apple more than Google with my data. It's faster and doesn't mine my email and web data to train models (yet).

If it gets particularly bad, I'm sure some impartial team will make another browser engine with Opus 5.5 but for now I can tolerate the minor inconveniences in Safari.

I was building an pdf export feature for one of my projects the other day.

And safari still behaves differently than my other browsers.

I usually try to give safari a chance whenever I’m working on Macs. I’m always forced to install chrome for some reason or another.

Until the random compatibility quirks stop I don’t see myself returning to safari.

Safari has two types of PDF export: One is through "Export PDF" and should be a faithful copy of how the browser renders the HTML. The other i through the Print menu item and will be the text and images put onto paper sized sheets.

I use all three browsers on a daily basis. Chrome for accessing google owned properties and things I click on from Google search, Safari for reddit and hacker news, and Firefox for everything else.

Safari is always the best on my Mac, but my complaint has always been the lack of plugins.

But just now I ported one of my favorite plugins from Chrome to Safari using ChatGPT. I told it I already have it installed in Chrome so it can get the source code there, and then told it to port it and install it.

After 20 minutes and few bucks in tokens (estimated, I actually used my 6% of my $20/mo plan), I have Session Buddy in Safari.

So maybe the plugins aren't a problem anymore...

I ported one of my favorite plugins from Chrome to Safari using ChatGPT.

Why use ChatGPT? Safari has a built-in plugin builder now.

1. I didn't know it exists. Now that I do and I looked into it...

2. I have an M1 chip and I'm not sure it's supported.

3. ChatGPT can open both browers, not sure if Safari plugin builder can

But if it does all those things, great. My point was more that plugins won't be a problem anymore because AI can build them.

Here are some reasons I don't use Safari in place of Chrome for certain things:

- it doesn't like to serialize the state of tabs. Chrome is pretty good at somehow snapshotting the entire state of tabs to the point where it can be reconstructed after relaunch, even offline.

- webpage loading is sort of janky. Chrome will show the webpage streaming in live, but Safari will simply freeze in place until it's done. Maybe this is due to an Apple philosophy decision, but I don't prefer it.

- similarly to how Safari doesn't seem to serialize tab states, navigating forward or back usually needs to load the page from scratch, including resubmitting forms or whatever.

- speaking of forward and back navigation, I'm kinda annoyed that each time I use the trackpad to navigate history, I have to wait for the swipe animation to finish before I can interact with the webpage. I try to always use cmd+brackets instead now, because it's much faster.

- IIRC, it seems the newer macOS 27 betas caused Safari to develop an issue where after it's been open for long enough, certain types of videos will stop being able to play at all until the browser is quit and restarted. kind of annoying, combined with the lack of tab snapshotting, because I have to manually visit each tab to load it on each launch.

I still daily drive Safari and use it as my main browser. But I keep an instance of Chrome open for tabs that I never really close. And then I have an instance of Orion for spreadsheets. (I use spreadsheets to keep track of medication usage, sleep times and finances)

How many people in this thread would dump their Android for an iPhone if they: - allowed real 3rd party browser engines - let you uninstall all the apple bloatware apps

If you added "Allowing manual sideloading of apps" to that list I would jump to an iPhone in a heartbeat

yes, having an ADB type of CLI tool is a must.

Ditto

There's TrollStore, but that's a hack not an official way.

https://ios.cfw.guide/installing-trollstore/

TrollStore isn't supported on iOS versions past 17, so if you want to use an OS released in the past three years (and still receiving security updates) it isn't an option.

Not me, because Apple still disallows direct competition with their other 'apps/features' like Compass.

I’ll dump my iPhone for an Android as soon as:

- iMessage works so I can participate in the family group chat

RCS exists

Awesome, welcome to iPhone. You literally can do that today because the current versions of iOS have added support for RCS.

I looked up RCS, thanks! Correct me if I’m wrong but does it mean that if my kid turns it on, her texts will appear green, not blue, to her iMessage’d friends?

Due to App Store $99 per year compared to PlayStore one-time $25 and iPhone being unaffordable for most people in my country, there's too many niche and/or local apps I'm using in Android where they won't port to iOS.

> let you uninstall all the apple bloatware apps

Which apps can't be uninstalled on the latest iOS?

Siri

let you uninstall all the apple bloatware apps

Which Apple apps can't be removed?

Nope, you'll have to pry my headphone jack and IR blaster out of my cold dead hands.

Absolutely not.

Even if they did all of that and also allowed unrestricted sideloading, iOS is still awful overall, and iPhones themselves are terrible value. Even 16e and 17e start at €600/800. I can get a better android phone for €300, and I can't imagine spending more than €500 on a phone, let alone €1000 to get a basic feature like 120Hz refresh rate.

Very few

I would. I wish I had true choice in phone manufacturers. With the EU ruling and the Epic games court cases, I had hope that apple would be forced to open up in the US as well. I was planning my next device purchase decision around this.

I am not interested in jailbreaking or rooting my device to run my apps. I am not interested in the testflight process. I am an adult and can pick and choose what apps I want. And I would like to exercise the whole "voting with my wallet" thing when a company makes an anti-consumer decision.

Judging by outcomes, the EU legislation -- the DMA -- is intended to make life harder for successful US companies rather than to make life better for consumers. They need to scrap it and start over. It can't be used as a model elsewhere -- it just gets in the way.

The issue is that software vendors, esp the size and scale that produce browsers, have shown repeatedly that they are terrible for the consumer. All of a sudden, you get the largest attack surface, large instability, and giving them access to the same hardware/OS access is just downright dangerous.

It is so tiring to keep hearing of this whole sideloading/let us run other engines nonsense for a decade+ now. It's like watching all the nastiness that tech companies do and then asking for all that trash on iOS. This is tantamount to wanting Adobe Flash on iOS, and quite honestly, that's exactly what allowing 3rd party browser engines is going to do. First it maybe some extension, and then all of a sudden you find that the extension has full access to photos, location, and contacts because you granted 1 website access to those things.

No thanks.

Could they please make Safari for Windows again?

They likely discontinued because there was barely any interest. Likely the only reason Safari has any use is that it's the default on MacOS and monopolized on i*OS.

With what Google has been doing to Chrome, and given that I use iOS, I would definitely use Safari on Windows cause I trust Apple more with Privacy, plus the session/tabs/auth/bookmark/applepay etc integration between my phone and Windows laptop/desktop would be great!

I quite liked the old Safari for Windows. It felt like bringing over a slice of the Apple ecosystem to the common Windows XP or Vista desktop. You could run Safari and iTunes and have decent parity with (then) Mac OS X for the most common use cases.

I was probably the only household within the 200 km radius back in 2009 that was using Safari to browse the web and iTunes to listen to web radio from around the world, all on a Windows Vista machine

If they fix the devtools. Because Safari devtools are worse than junk.

Hot garbage bro.

Also trash video playback.

Devtools capturing the key combo for switching between windows (cmd+< on my keyboard) is driving me crazy! In my workflow I often have to switch between browser windows while having devtools open, and this annoyance has forced me to install Chrome.

Funnily, it's not a "Switch to Safari" campaign, but a "Stay on Safari" if you look at Apple's material.

I’m not going to use different browsers on different devices. I can’t use Safari on my gaming windows desktop.

Safari is the ultimate way to browse HN.

For everything else, I use some chromium derivative that can traverse pirate streaming sites and ChatGPT without disintegrating under their weird JS workloads.

If you work at Apple/Safari then my free suggestion is to have a "Chrome mode" where all the buttons and doohickeys that Chrome has are all in the same location for Safari. If I'm far to used to where the buttons are for things like "reload" so trying to switch to Safari is enough friction to make me stay with Chrome.

Maybe have an Edge mode as well to convince the Edge users to come over.

You don’t use keyboard shortcut for reloading??

I'll ditch Safari the day it starts to look or behave like Chrome

And to suggest a Mode tells me you're not a software maker

I ditched both to favor Firefox many many years ago.

Don’t know why I never thought about it but apparently using your competitor’s trademark. Chrome in this case, is okay for comparative advertising.

I only noticed now because recently I have been wanting to incorporate the logos of tech publications on my website that have genuinely reviewed my product but apparently doing so isn’t without risk.

This reeks of Microsoft Edge levels of desperation to be honest. I don't use Safari because it doesn't work on most of the devices I interact with. Why on earth would you switch to a browser from a company that uses ecosystem lock-in as a primary business strategy?

Last I looked at it Safari on iOS couldn't even do element.requestFullscreen(), so no, thanks.

Lots of stuff like this because they don't want web apps eating into their App Store money.

It’s crazy they act like this but then make a campaign to use their deliberately inferior thing

Gives off real "I'm a Mac, he's a PC" campaign vibes from 20 years ago.

Also... not sure all of those ads would still hold up today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYErwT-zRRI

While all my day to day browsing annoyance were all gone by Safari 18.x, there are still bugs or rendering issues that i had to use Chrome now and then. Safari needs to keep grinding for the next 2-3 years and not cut any resources. I am not even asking for Safari on Windows, but Apple needs to up or sustain its current development and give it more time. Especially memory resources usage and multi tab operations.

Interesting timing, considering https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49973221 (Apple may soon track when Google promotes Chrome inside Safari), 7 days ago

Reminds me of PC vs Mac campaign

We need alternatives, but I fail to see why we should replace one company with another here.

Instead, we should treat browsers like water in that everyone needs access to it at all times without any top-down control or restrictions.

I would consider Safari, if Apple open sourced it and it ran on Linux.

> I would consider Safari, if Apple open sourced it and it ran on Linux.

Yes, absolutely. But then they wouldn't be able to lock the flock in the barn, which is so contrary to Apple's DNA that you can't event talk about it in a 1 mile radius of 1, Infinite loop.

I recently downgraded one of my macs so i could use some 32 bit audio peripherals. You can’t update safari separately from the os i found out, and most websites now just won’t render with that os and if they do, barely work. I installed firefox and that was fine.

OTH, i use safari on my other mac, it’s fine most of the time, but i also have have chrome installed as some websites are so buggy otherwise, linkedin is a particular culprit, it barely works on chrome too.

> You can’t update safari separately from the os i found out

I was on Sequoia all throughout Tahoe and still updated Safari to the 26.x versions. There might be a limit to how far back they let you do that, though.

It was to Mojave, and downgrading was a whole task in itself, apple really did not want me to do it.

Oh yes. Start of this year...

I had an M1 MBP that I needed to re-pave with Monterey. Yes, it's end-of-support, but it's also only 4 years old. And runs on that Mac.

So, first step, I make a USB installer, and run it. Great. Reboots, and says "FYI, this is an unsupported OS. You can install a newer OS instead, or run Monterey in "Reduced Security" mode." That was fine for me.

"Installation of Reduced Security mode failed." Nothing else. Eventually my understanding of this was because the machine had been upgraded previously all the way to Tahoe, that somewhere along the line some firmware or something in the EFI had been upgraded and was too new for Monterey. No thanks to Apple. No info, debug logs, anything, just "Installation failed. Reboot?"

So what then?

Hmm, more research. "Do an IPSW image restore via DFU", i.e. pave it with a largely installed image. Could work, might have the same issue, but since I'm stuck right now, with a Mac I can't install anything on, a four year old $3,000 brick, why not?

Alright, I have a Mac Studio. I get the IPSW image, and Apple Configurator. Connect the two as per Apple's instructions and the MBP does indeed show up in Configurator as being "not booted, DFU mode".

Apple's instructions, "Drag the IPSW image onto the DFU 'box' for the target Mac". No. It doesn't light up like it's accepting a drag and drop, and indeed it doesn't. Nor does it accept a "restore..." or similar from the Configurator menu options. There's nothing in Configurator that seems to allow you to image the MBP. Again: no error, no instructions, just the error "bonk" noise.

So... off to ChatGPT, Reddit, etc., I go.

Much repeating of the same. However, ChatGPT pokes a little button. Near the very end of its answer, it says "Newer versions of macOS may have limitations on the age of the image they might restore. You may need a slightly older macOS to do this. Even an Intel MBP running Ventura could work."

As fortune has it, my fiance happens to still have her old i5 MBP with touchbar, and the latest version of Ventura... let's plug it in, let it catch a little charge and boot...

Alright, I need Configurator on this laptop.

No soup for you, says the App Store, "You need macOS Sequoia to install Configurator".

Back off to Reddit, where I find someone who has helpfully zipped up an older version of Configurator that runs on Ventura, and in the end, I'm able to re-pave via IPSW.

But Apple's docs absolutely are incorrect/incomplete about Configurator, and DFU restores.

"You can use Restore... in the Configurator menu to select the software image". No, you can't, even leaving aside the "old/unsupported". It actually means restoring from a "backup" (presumably Time Machine, though it doesn't specify) and you can't select any file or image.

"Drag the image onto DFU". Doesn't work in that situation, no error, no "hey, you're doing the right thing but I can't do this", just acting like a fool trying to drag the image onto DFU only to have it bounce off.

Like I said, I didn't have DFU port issues, but Apple's docs on how to make this happen were either non-existent, or incorrect about the process, or flat out told me I couldn't do it. But mostly non-existent and overly simplistic covering the most basic scenarios only - which I get for general support, but by the time you are "connect to a second mac in DFU mode and run Configurator" in their own words, we're way beyond simplistic "you can just install a newer macOS" type "instructions".

Ok, let me use it on Linux then.

I think there are many reasons to use Safari (in fact, it's my de facto personal browser) but I feel that being faster is not one of them.

How so? AFAIK performance is one of the main focuses of Safari and one of the main distinguishing factors that Apple strives for.

There's a whole chapter on it in Creative Selection (by Ken Kocienda who started the project) on how they were only allowed to release versions as fast or faster than the one before.

But why would I ditch Firefox?

I remember watching the presentation on V8 by the Google Swedish team I think. Everyone found it magical at that time. Chrome was very secure by introducing sandboxes for process separation. It introduced tabs when Microsoft said their customers didn’t need tabs.

How did Chrome go from being magical and aw inspiring to being viewed unfavorably by the HN community?

Why would i switch to a browser that only gets one update a year, and a minor one at that? They've lost the plot.

[citation needed]

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...

There's always Edge (increasingly favored by IT here). Our machines used to ship and favor Chrome, but Edge has been the new IT-gods blessed browser ever since we bumped to Windows 11. Apple seems to be the only tech-titan that is not interested in extending their browser onto other platforms. So be it.

They stopped that years ago. Safari for windows was a thing.

On iPhone, for the longest time, every browser has been forced to be Safari's engine underneath. Firefox, Chrome, etc are all forced to run Safari underneath.

This has caused many issues because Apple controls what can run in a web browser and that web browser (safari) is in no way up to date, or worse, selectively implements standards. I'm writing this in the hopes that it will publicly improve.

Since Safari is forced at an OS level on all Apple's iOS and iPadOS users, that's a place to start when it comes to choice.

On MacOS, Safari is actually pretty interesting - it can be much more efficient with battery usage than other browsers and unsurprisingly well integrated. It's nice to use on MacOS because there is choice.

I understand there maybe concerns about security, but also will come out is likely that safari enjoys some OS level integrations that other browsers probably won't be welcome to, similar to the Internet Explorer/Edge days.

The switch to safari is likely tied to something else, given Apple's growing advertising revenue. Meaning, move away from one advertisement engine (Chrome), and move to another (Safari).

> Apple is kicking off a new campaign today to promote Safari’s benefits over Chrome. With a new “Switch to Safari” page on its website and a pair of new YouTube videos.

The irony of using a Google platform to promote ditching another Google platform lol.

Anecdotally I see significant out of memory issues with chrome on a regular basis. I use chrome for work but safari for personal and rarely see the same issue with safari if almost never.

It would certainly help other browsers keep up in performance and battery life if Apple didn’t make all the APIs that allow Safari to stay so far ahead private and undocumented.

Put Safari on my Android and Linux devices and I'll consider it

I switched to Vivaldi for privacy, but the amount of control and customization was an unexpected surprise! Long has it been since such user choice has been made so easy

Apple forgot to mention Safari not being open source but rather tied to a proprietary platform not to mention Safari on mobile kept in a short leash to protect the AppStore.

The browser engine is WebKit[1] which is open source, so not any different than Chrome.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Apple_Safa...

How does one add a custom search engine to Safari? Even Google’s Chrome allows you to in Settings.

There's a "Search" tab in the settings. Although it doesn't seem like you can add Startpage for example or whatever else search engine. it only has Google, Bing, Yahoo and DDG.

I would like to add SearXNG or Kagi without installing an extension, like I can with any Chrome-based browser.

On iOS platform, it's only limited to apple's browser engine, with chrome I get long time of various bookmarks saved/synced and send page to various devices(not limited to apple ecosystem), those benefits still not give strong reason to let me switch to safari

One thing I do not like is no native dark mode on chrome, but that's okay, I just do not use phone when I preparing to sleep

For the adblock/tracker issue, recently just added builtin DNS-based adblock (backed by several public block list) to my VPN app, it seems works well, given same engine and same network filtered by the same VPN, i guess they are same to me

Its like when M$ was advertising IE11 on TV back in 2012~13

give me Split Tabs outside of Fullscreen you cowards. That's what is holding me back (and Safari occasionally losing all my tabs when I restart it)

Menubar -> History -> Reopen Last Closed Tabs

The distraction hiding feature is interesting. Does it work automatically or is it essentially just a way to create a custom adblock list?

It lets you point out a DOM element and it will display:none it for you

Wipr2 for adblocking in Safari - the best adblocker.

They should increase extension support and improve dev tools! And for UI, they can really take a leaf out of BCNY - Arc browser was good.

List of reasons to ditch chrome is very, very, very long, first among which it is becoming the prime enshitification tool for the internet.

But Safari is not the solution until they make it fully (FULLY) open-source, because all Apple trying to do is replace the king of enshitification hill by their own.

firefox ftw

at least IME, chrome was unusable on Mac because it would regularly use an absurd amount of memory and freeze everything up.

Adding WebSerial even if it's locked in a Developer tools menu would make Safari a more serious tool for me.

I almost lost my Google account because of Safari. I bought some official Google USB keys https://store.google.com/us/product/titan_security_key?hl=en...

I setup two of them for my Google account but I made them both in Safari. Only one of them worked. What if both of them failed? I would have been fucked.

I re-made them on Chrome and they both worked.

No thanks. We have seen multiple times now how it all starts with "good" stuff, then it gets more and more and more locked-down... to the point where you cannot even install apps on your own device, from wherever you want to.

No thanks.. I'd rather switch to Firefox, or even any other shitty browser, but not the one from any other gatekeeping monopoly.

Apples to oranges.

They're promoting their browser as an alternative to Chrome or Firefox.

You're companing about walled gardens.

Apples to apples actually. All the walled gardens of Apple had started with open gardens at first. They walled them gradually as they gained more control over market. This is no different.

We can already see it on IOS where no one is allowed to use any other browser engine than safari's own.. of course, the reasoning is always "security".

so this means they're putting more resources into the Webkit/Safari team...right?

I've always liked and preferred Safari. The only reason I moved away was that as a Mac gets older, there comes a point where you can't update the OS, and that means Safari falls behind. Even that's not a problem for me, but web standards were always changing and after a while certain things won't work.

I had to quit using desktop Safari because it essentially quit working. The problem had something to do with icloud. Apple assumes everyone is using icloud I imagine and does not handle corner cases for folks with full icloud disks or improper setups. I have an paid icloud subscription now, but I haven't looked back.

Vague.

I use Safari, and iCloud (or lack thereof) has never been a problem for me.

Great. Glad it worked for you.

Needs ublock and I would use it

adguard

There is uBlock Origin lite, works pretty well: https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...

Ya everyone replied with this and I have used it. It has been a year or so, so I will try it again, but I remember it missing some pretty big stuff.

ublock origin lite has a safari extension: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home

it's missing the element zapper and has some other limitations, but it works pretty well for the most part

combined with ublacklist and sponsorblock it's fairly good coverage for safari

could also use wblock for custom filter lists

> it's missing the element zapper

Support for element zapper was added more than 18 months ago in version 2025.3.23.1241.[1]

---

[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/releases/tag/uBOLi...

oh ty, I legitimately didn't know I usually hide extensions icons in safari

Wipr2 is amazing.

too much stuff works better in chrome than in safari ... it's just ie6 but far, far better. is it great? am i being tracked on every keystroke? probably, but i want the stuff i do on teh web to work idc really.

Safari's performance (both speed and power use) keep me on it vs. Chrome, but I do wish we could have some of the more power-user-friendly features. Chrome's omnibar history and bookmark suggestion algorithm is unparalleled, and I miss it.

I had never thought about it but why would i support Google?

They should have brought back Hodgeman for the ad campagin

No problems Apple. How about Safari and keychain for Linux?

Firefox provides a much better experience than Safari.

Given the state of affairs, anything and anyone pulling people away from Chrome is a good as long as they not more invasive than Chrome. 1 big bad actor is worse than multiple smaller bad actors imo.

I was hoping for a “I’m a Mac. I’m a PC”-level ad.

I would... if it <proper> had vertical tabs

Yeah. I'm typing this on my safari which shows both vertical tabs and the horizontal tabs - looks so weird. And I always end up clicking a tab and then typing away, and Safari starts switching me to tabs starting with whatever letter I type - very annoying.

This is the only thing that matters, why does nobody get it right?

I am like one more Microsoft / Chrome update away from switching entire company to Firefox.

The absurdity of every week another AI feature, another way for data to leak to their services, another crash report.

They are exhausting and abusing their positions of power.

> switching entire company to Firefox.

They just announced something which might be relevant to you.

https://www.firefox.com/enterprise/

interesting, i recently built a browser that is privacy and security orientated

www.github.com/jegly/iris

Talk to me when I can set custom search engines, when developer tools become sane enough and when ‘localhost’ starts resolving.

I want to use Safari on Mac Apple, I really do: no need to install spyware, fast, good bench for webdev but for the wrong reasons (if it works on Safari it works everywhere else). It's not the best looking browser, but I can get used to it.

But, every time I open it and my back and forward mouse buttons don't work, I get so infuriated that only thinking about Apple engineers being forced to use the Magic Mouse relieves the pain. Seriously, WTF? Just fix that and bake uBlock Origin in and I'm sold. Meanwhile, Firefox.

> Safari is a more powerful and private browser than Chrome.

Sorry what was that about your compliance with web standards?

> Chrome slurps

Nintendon't level of advertising is never a serious contender.

> Can I use Safari on Windows or Android?

I guess here's your problem, Apple: You are clearly marketing to Apple-Users to stop using Chrome on your MacBooks. Whatever is going on here, this campaign makes you look afraid. Especially with a weak hand like that.

...So what you're saying is: we should switch to Firefox?

sent from my Android Emulator inside OpenSuse inside Windows

Why don't they just say "c'mon, get us even more than $20B per year please". That's really whats going on here.

source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-dodged-a-20-billion-hit...

Fight back, e.g.:

Add a 1000ms delay to your website when the user agent is Safari.

Show popup to install Firefox.

Etc.

Fight back by punishing your users?

Nudging them ... like companies do too. Except you're nudging them towards a better place.

Brilliant way to not have any users. There has to be a better method. Maybe a little note explaining that your website really works best in Firefox.

I use Brave. All good and don't see any reason to switch

it's just not as good as Chrome

Bullshit.

First stop blocking iOS pwas from simply installing to the home screen, and don't clear out data in 7 days. Then we'll talk about your browser being better.

100% this. And in case you missed the Scooby Doo episode... Chrome on mobile iOS is just Safari in a ski mask!

Most other browsers on the market are just chrome in a ski mask. So what's your point?

Nearly every browser on the market and most desktop application are just Chrome in a ski mask. Safari and Firefox are the tiny holdouts that prevent web technology from being 100% controlled by Google.

This is a bit of a chicken and egg, but the number of iOS users who have saved a web app or PWA to their home screen is probably in the single-digits worldwide. Half-joking.

People are just not aware that this is a thing, and when they learn it's a thing, they don't want to do it.

Of course they are not aware it is a thing, it doesn't work. Every dev that tried to support it got burnt.

It doesn't work because Apple prevented it from working because it threatened to shrink revenue from their app store. And that's why there are so few PWA apps and users -- who wants to develop something that they know will be broken? Yes, a lot of devs got burnt and now resent Apple for what they pulled.

Well said - but the exactly same thing I wrote.

Funnily enough, I just found one and the experience is ... "not good". Sessionize, which the Linux Foundation is using for conferences like AGNTcon.

They forgot to mention they vibecoded too much in their latest release and it is of dogshit quality (frezes constantly, hide the top bar doesn’t work properly etc)

These kind of campaigns are just – find suckers who are willing to be our suckers. That too after they shtudown Safari for Windows and were never on Linux to begin with. And no, it's not fucking snappiest on the Mac either – even with all the special treatment it gets from the macOS (on iOS – there's literally no other option anyway, every browser essentially have to be Safari with none of the privileges Safari has). I think this company has become most the pathetic it can be. Utilised its full potential.

Though what stuck with me from that page is why the fuck they would have default browser setting inside something like "Desktop & Dock" (that combo!). That is just intellectually challenged UX/UI design.

And it seems they have fired everyone from their propaganda (or marketing?) dept.

tl;dr: Is Safari better than Chrome? Yes. How? Because this webpage is live.

Apple screwed the pooch too, they were the first one to prevent blocking content before downloading it if I recall. Then Chrome did the same thing. I'm not sure what their reasoning was publicly, but it was surely lying.

A browser should allow you to not download content by URL masks, and not silently load it and hide it. This is advertising/tracker shenanigans and frankly horrid tech.

There is some fundamental misunderstanding here because content blockers can block requests by url.

Interesting. Tell me what's the difference with content blockers before and now? Maybe I am. But the content blockers in the past had more control on what to block.

I think what you are discussing is the move to only supporting declarative block lists. Long ago in Safari, and until very recently in Chrome, you could have JavaScript run to check and modify/block requests. The modern block lists still function the same (preventing a Request from ever being sent) just without dynamic code in the loop.

I may hate Chrome in particular and Google in general with every atom of my being, but I would rather be forced to use IE6 than open fucking Safari.

Seriously, if you use anything besides firefox and ubo, I don’t even know what to say.

Safari is faster, uses less RAM and is more power-efficient. But people love leaving 2000 tabs open, and I guess Chrome's UX is better for that. I don't think people realize that you can go back to a website after you've visited. It's not strictly necessary to leave the tab open for the rest of your life.

> I don't think people realize that you can go back to a website after you've visited.

This is about as wrong as you can possibly get.

This would be true in a stateless world (assuming you can remember the site you want to visit).

Which the web hasn't been since a very long time.

Can you give me a concrete example? I close windows and tabs with ruthless abandon.

Unless you have a web app which is entirely local and doesn't save its state to local storage, what could you possibly be doing that requires a tab to remain in residence?

Crickets

> Safari is faster, uses less RAM and is more power-efficient.

I am really curious about data proving these.

I am not aware of any benchmarks proving or disproving.

People benchmark it from time to time [0]. It makes sense though—Apple has poured resources into making the Safari engine battery efficient on their phones, and the macOS version is a beneficiary.

[0]: https://tech-insider.org/safari-vs-chrome-2026/

Native Macos apps (mail, safari) are awesome… by the standards of 90s (when they were probably first designed).

I doubt people developing safari and mail app are actually using them outside of work.

Apple keeps holding a “hardware company” flag, despite some occasional wins.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com