A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.
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.
https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser
Real Gecko on iOS
Chromium on iOS can also be compiled with blink, using the ‘use_blink’ flag.
This isn't browser diversity, iOS is a browser monoculture, it's all Safari under the hood. How can you not understand this??
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.
Says who? I certainly don't agree with that statement, the "web as an open platform" was unrecognizable when proprietary clients were the norm.
(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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.