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Apple's claim is that it bans other browsers for security

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Re: Apple's claim is that it bans other browsers for security

#411

Post by kryptozinc »

echelon wrote: post #389
labcomputer wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a user the harms are invisible to you. Why would you post a document refuting your own point? I explicitly do. not. want. my web browser to have access to the bluetooth and NFC APIs. Nor the screen orientation lock and full screen APIs. I absolutely do not want website notifications. I don't know how to be more explicit. Those are things developers want. Those are not things users want. And no amount of gaslight…

In the world you're describing, the future of technology is owned by Apple and Google forever. They got there first, and they'll forever be the victors. They can tax it. They can starve the entire landscape of innovation capital and prevent other companies from ever growing large. They set the rules, and they have enough human and financial capital to keep the game going forever. That's not good for capitalism, the f…

> Easy enough to turn all of these things off. You're describing a setting.

Can you turn off all of these in Chrome?

Re: Apple's claim is that it bans other browsers for security

#412

Post by fastaguy88 »

What a misleading argument. Yes, Apple believes that restricting IOS browsers to Safari improves security. This is NOT the same as saying Safari has fewer bugs, or fixes bugs faster, than other browsers. I suspect Apple's argument is that by allowing other browsers, and their plugin management system, the other browsers (or their plug-ins/extensions) will be able to bypass the App store and do things that are insecure.

And it is hard to see how counting numbers of bugs has much to do with the severity of the bugs. Not every bug allows a jailbreak, but the ones that do are of much greater concern.

Re: Apple's claim is that it bans other browsers for security

#413

Post by [deleted] »

snowwrestler wrote: post #371
agust wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does, that's a totally different situation. Edge chose to use Chromium as its engine, Microsoft takes part in its development, they are free to remove or add any component from it, and if ever they wanted to they would be free to fork it and drop it for another engine at any time. None of that is true for WebKit skins on iOS.

Microsoft were were quite transparent about being forced to adopt Chromium because of the prevalence of Electron apps on Windows.

[deleted]

Re: Apple's claim is that it bans other browsers for security

#414

Post by dmitriid »

twism wrote: post #334
dmitriid wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is my primary browser day in day out. The only pages that don't work in it are developed by people who believe that Chrome-only APIs are standard.

web workers is an example of a standard api that only got implemented (partly) recently. they are more examples like ths

You mean Web Workers that were available in Safari since version 4?

Or Shared Web Workers that were originally implemented in Safari version 5? No idea why they got removed to re-appear later, and I honestly can't care: I prefer browsers to be careful with standards than just rush forward.

Why is it that these "examples" are never actual examples?

Re: Apple's claim is that it bans other browsers for security

#415

Post by migueldeicaza »

snowwrestler wrote: post #371
agust wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does, that's a totally different situation. Edge chose to use Chromium as its engine, Microsoft takes part in its development, they are free to remove or add any component from it, and if ever they wanted to they would be free to fork it and drop it for another engine at any time. None of that is true for WebKit skins on iOS.

Microsoft were were quite transparent about being forced to adopt Chromium because of the prevalence of Electron apps on Windows.

That wasn’t the reason.

Edge could just not compete with chrome, despite throwing hundreds of engineers at the problem. They tried, and tried, and tried.

In the end “edge doesn’t work” was just code for “edge is not chromium”

Electron was and is still a separate beast, Microsoft doesn’t even need to deal with that: third party developers do, they have to ship the binary.

Re: Apple's claim is that it bans other browsers for security

#416

Post by saratogacx »

toast0 wrote: post #208
Melatonic wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets face it - IE always just sucked. A lot. Whereas Chrome does not. Here on HN we might rail on it mainly for ideological reasons but the user experience is pretty solid. This is coming from a Firefox user.

IE 4 and 6 were decent to good compared to competitors when released (although, IIRC, neither had ftp support?). What sucked was that they stagnated at that point in time while also becoming dominant. IE 5 for mac was well regarded, but I don't have personal memories. None of the future IEs were very good though, IMHO.

At the time you didn't need to ship ftp with IE. You could load up an FTP site by opening up an FTP address in explorer. You didn't get the familiar html-netscape-like interface but you could navigate an FTP site like it was just a network folder.

Re: Apple's claim is that it bans other browsers for security

#417

Post by veilrap »

bad_good_guy wrote: post #50
MBCook wrote: post #14

I’m going to ignore the security angle and post my big fear. Chrome has dominance similar to IE at the height of its popularity. Whatever you think of their decisions, Apple is the only thing stopping a 90%+ Chrome web. (Note: not why they’re doing it, just a side effect) People keep arguing Apple is being anti-competitive. But no one seems to recon with the possible consequences of what they’re asking for. And I fea…

So, you are happy to have Apple provide no user choice, because you fear a future where there is no user choice?

Yes, I am happy with the Apple ecosystem in this regard. If I wanted to run a different browser engine, I could do so by buying an Android phone. I purchased an iOS phone specifically because I think the overall phone experience is better when certain aspects do not have a choice.

If android did not exist and Apple controlled the market it would be a different story, but that is far from the case.

Re: Apple's claim is that it bans other browsers for security

#418

Post by SheinhardtWigCo »

The claim is laughable because this policy makes it impossible for external developers to step in and address fundamental, inexcusable problems with WebKit, such as the fact it's written in C++ and therefore produces a consistent supply of memory corruption bugs year after year.

Also, I'm skeptical of the notion that every type of app except web browsers can be meaningfully screened for security. How can one not interpret this as a tacit admission that the screening process is close to worthless?

Re: Apple's claim is that it bans other browsers for security

#419

Post by veilrap »

adamius wrote: post #366
MBCook wrote: post #14

I’m going to ignore the security angle and post my big fear. Chrome has dominance similar to IE at the height of its popularity. Whatever you think of their decisions, Apple is the only thing stopping a 90%+ Chrome web. (Note: not why they’re doing it, just a side effect) People keep arguing Apple is being anti-competitive. But no one seems to recon with the possible consequences of what they’re asking for. And I fea…

Why does Apple get to choose how its competitor gets to compete? We give microsoft plenty of flak for anti-competitive behavior. It deserves it too. Its not hard to see why. But so does Apple. Now why can't I install my silly joke app? Oh that's right Apple won't let me install my joke app on my devices or friends for more than a week or so for reasons. Even though it can be easily tracked to me, its signed etc. Why…

No one is forced to use Apple products at all. Choosing an Apple product over non-apple products is a choice. There is extensive competition with Apple products. Choosing to buy an iPad, and being upset that they can't install linux on it, failed to do any product research before buying the product.

Many people, myself included, choose to use Apple products in part BECAUSE of how those products work and function, today. I don't want to install additional browsers, app stores, or other crap on my phone, I just want it to work well, out of the box with reasonably high security. For my needs Apple products provide that today.

If Apple's products don't fit your needs, the solution is trivial - don't buy Apple products.

Re: Apple's claim is that it bans other browsers for security

#420

Post by Cannabat »

tambourine_man wrote: post #273

A few random thoughts: • There's a place for closed platforms if open ones are a reasonable choice. A closed platform must not be the only choice available to the customer, but it should be allowed to exist given a healthy market. It's hard to argue that iOS is a monopoly, and if so, than a browser engine and JS interpreter with access to the open web is a very powerful thing that the owner of the platform may deem t…

> Chrome's dominance of the Web is very scary. Not as scary as IE's, since it's open source, but still, it's such a huge beast that it's almost proprietary through complexity. I don't know if there's an easy solution out of this.

I'd say that Chrome's dominance is much scarier than IE's. One reason has to do with user data.

When IE was dominant, user data was not nearly as valuable. Today, user data is how Google makes money, so they are strongly incentivised to harvest it. While I understand Chrome isn't exactly the source of the harvesting, it reinforces reliance on Google services for the vast majority of users.

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