Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

All web browsers on iOS are just Safari with different design

community.brave.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 56 posts

Re: All web browsers on iOS are just Safari with different design

#11

Post by Spivak »

It's kind of funny hearing this from Brave which is Chrome with a different design. I'm guessing Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, Opera GX, Orion, Sigma OS, Arc all consider themselves to have differentiated themselves from Chrome despite being Chrome under the hood.

If Webkit === Safari then is Blink === Chrome? Do people actually want alternative browser engines or do folks just want all iOS browsers to be backed by Chromium?

Re: All web browsers on iOS are just Safari with different design

#13

Post by SahAssar »

gnicholas wrote: post #4
smcleod wrote: post #3

Oh what I’d give for a real Firefox browser on iOS. I see lots of value in preventing chrome based browser from running through as they already dominate and shape the web too much as it is.

But iOS is WebKit, not chromium. Am I misunderstanding your concern?

Some people equate blink and webkit because of their shared heritage. I think it has definitely diverged enough to be considered separate engines (like how webkit is considered separate from khtml), but some disagree.

Re: All web browsers on iOS are just Safari with different design

#14

Post by frizlab »

anste wrote: post #5

Sad, but true. Unfortunately, Safari still has some ways to go in terms of feature support. https://ios404.com/ has a great list of stuff that's still missing.

In my opinion it is very fortunate that most of these APIs are not supported. I don’t want a webpage to make my phone vibrate for instance. Nor do I want to be able to give the permission for a webpage to do it by the way.

Re: All web browsers on iOS are just Safari with different design

#17

Post by cdata »

cjpearson wrote: post #8

This statement does seem a little ironic coming from a browser which is Chrome with a different design.

This elides an important detail: outside of iOS a browser implementer can choose the code to compile and link against. Even if they build on Chrome, they can patch it to their heart's content or even fork and carry on. On iOS the browser runtime is set by fiat.

Also worth observing that most web browsers in the history of the web (including Chrome and Safari) started out as a fork of some other browser.

Re: All web browsers on iOS are just Safari with different design

#18

Post by SahAssar »

smcleod wrote: post #6
gnicholas wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But iOS is WebKit, not chromium. Am I misunderstanding your concern?

Yes that’s correct. What I’m saying is I don’t think chrome based browsers should come to iOS (brave, chrome)

Why would you prevent others from choosing the browser they use?

Re: All web browsers on iOS are just Safari with different design

#20

Post by Aloisius »

anste wrote: post #5

Sad, but true. Unfortunately, Safari still has some ways to go in terms of feature support. https://ios404.com/ has a great list of stuff that's still missing.

It seems like most of the missing features aren't part of any standard.
Post reply on HN