"This change is a result of the DMA’s requirements, and means that EU users will be confronted with a list of default browsers before they have the opportunity to understand the options available to them,” the company says. “The screen also interrupts EU users’ experience the first time they open Safari intending to navigate to a webpage.”
That was always a bullshit move by Apple and crippled the Firefox product in an unacceptable and cartel law questionable dimension. MS had a Monopoly on IE, by giving advantages binding it to the OS? Apple did the exact same thing on iOS with Safari.
The problem is that the US doesn't necessarily regulate anticompetitive behavior if the company has not achieved a monopoly. Microsoft pretty much had one at the time so they were exposed. Our regulatory regime is not designed to protect us from the tech oligopoly
*if you ignore the shitfest it is with mandating play store/play services, bricking phones, google screwing up Pixel updates, a fiasco of some sort with each Pixel iteration, Samsung literally adding shit to macro shots and calling it “AI”.
Android isn’t a silver bullet it’s made out to be.
We slowly fix problems below and above the OS. But there is very much left to do in the OS itself, like no access to drivers or any low-level interfaces.
Pray it just works? Get consumer-friendly legislation to pass in the US somehow? Maybe a genie wish or an infinity gauntlet could be used for this purpose.
Apple has never been great at enabling developer testing. I certainly don't see why they'd care if shit works on third party browsers. The more broken apps are just means the more users who will give up and use Safari.
I guess the best you could realistically do would be to adhere to web standards (not Chrome standards) and use desktop Firefox or Firefox on Android for testing as they should be the same internally as the hypothetical iOS port.
Same way you test on Safari if you don't have a Mac, I guess. (i.e. not at all, or with the same rendering engine on a different device and hoping it is similar enough, or via a service like Browserstack.)
Interesting question. If a binary is available you can sideload already, you'd have to put the phone in Developer Mode and use either XCode or one of the 3rd party tools for macos or Windows to install it. Main question is how easy it'd be to find a trustable official Mozilla binary.
Article talks about how Chrome will be happening almost immediately and I'm like… why? Why would you switch to Chrome when you know it's going to reduce your ability to keep things private. Firefox will be a different story hopefully, but even then it will be interesting to see if it can pass the fingerprint test finally on an iPhone. (Currently nothing can.)
People use chrome because they’re used to chrome (and because it has the best website compatibility thanks to its near monopoly). And most people sadly don’t care about their privacy.
I personally try to use as little Google products as I can and am happy using a mixture of Safari and Firefox (depending on the platform)
As soon as I get that visa, I'm running to the EU. I don't feel like dealing with more freedom that only the EU can get, I don't feel like being jealous at them anymore, I might as well join them.
In their defense, though, some immigrants are straight up weird (keyword: SOME).
Honestly, I'm the kind of future immigrant who hates his country with an absolute passion and refuses to be patriotic or nationalistic. I literally cannot integrate into my own society. Also, criminalization of LGBT rights. I just gotta mention that.
The EU really does feel like a great place to be in.
Come to the dark side! We have GDPR and we'll get browser choice in iOS soon (because as much as I hate having my software freedom being taken away, iOS is the superior experience if you don't have time to tweak everything. This is coming from someone who's had a custom ROM on every single one of their Android phones).
You also can't be fired without cause in I believe most EU countries, definitely not in mine (Estonia).
I have literally never used GDPR in my life because whenever my phone claims to use it (last time that happened was with my old iPhone 4), it basically means that there's no internet at all. I'm pretty sure that's just a weird thing with my country. We don't even have 5G yet.
Also, wait, you can actually get fired without cause outside of the EU? Why would anyone have the balls to do that??
I have literally never used GDPR in my life because whenever my phone claims to use it (last time that happened was with my old iPhone 4), it basically means that there's no internet at all. I'm pretty sure that's just a weird thing with my country. We don't even have 5G yet.
Also, wait, you can actually get fired without cause outside of the EU? Why would anyone have the balls to do that??
Honestly, it’s possible. A lack of incentive is half of the issue, the other half is the lack of talent working on a jailbreak because the community is full of the most maddeningly annoying children to have ever been birthed. It’s much more profitable to sell the increasingly complex bugs than to use them. If the jailbreak community manages to avoid doxxing, threatening, or disparaging a major dev for a few months, something might eventually come out.
With iOS 17.4, Apple is making a number of huge changes to the way its mobile operating system works in order to comply with new regulations in the EU.
One of them is an important product shift: for the first time, Apple is going to allow alternative browser engines to run on iOS — but only for users in the EU.
Apple is clearly only doing this because it is required to by the EU’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA), which stipulates, among other things, that users should be allowed to uninstall preinstalled apps — including web browsers — that “steer them to the products and services of the gatekeeper.” In this case, iOS is the gatekeeper, and WebKit and Safari are Apple’s products and services.
Even in its release announcing the new features, Apple makes clear that it’s mad about them: “This change is a result of the DMA’s requirements, and means that EU users will be confronted with a list of default browsers before they have the opportunity to understand the options available to them,” the company says.
Apple argues (without any particular merit or evidence) that these other engines are a security and performance risk and that only WebKit is truly optimized and safe for iPhone users.
But in the EU, we’re likely to see these revamped browsers in the App Store as soon as iOS 17.4 drops in March: Google, for one, has been working on a non-WebKit version of Chrome for at least a year.
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@[email protected]@[email protected] It also means more chrome based browsers. Apple was the last stand before google hegemony. That's not a good news.