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Comment by azuanrb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

I push Firefox not chrome though

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