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Opera Touch is a solid alternative to Safari on the iPhone

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Re: Opera Touch is a solid alternative to Safari on the iPhone

#31
post #14

On iOS, there can’t really be an alternative to Safari because there is no way to change the default browser system wide. No matter how careful you are, eventually some app somewhere will open an URL, causing Safari to open, but now that it’s not your default browser, all your login state, your favorites and, heck, even just the familiar UI will be missing. No. Until iOS allows setting a default browser, there is no…

Also Apple doesn't allow any 3rd party browser engine in the App Store

And the javascript engine that they provide is 4x slower than the one in Safari. Due to security I think. Maybe it's not like that anymore....anyone know?

Re: Opera Touch is a solid alternative to Safari on the iPhone

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Apple doesn't allow any 3rd party browser engine in the App Store

And the javascript engine that they provide is 4x slower than the one in Safari. Due to security I think. Maybe it's not like that anymore....anyone know?

This changed in iOS 8.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/new-chrome-for-ios-i...

Re: Opera Touch is a solid alternative to Safari on the iPhone

#34

I feel it's safer these days to assume any digital product that's owned by a Chinese parent company is compromised, than assuming it isn't.

But for many of us, the aspect of having a NSA backdoored US product is probably more scary.

Re: Opera Touch is a solid alternative to Safari on the iPhone

#35
post #14

On iOS, there can’t really be an alternative to Safari because there is no way to change the default browser system wide. No matter how careful you are, eventually some app somewhere will open an URL, causing Safari to open, but now that it’s not your default browser, all your login state, your favorites and, heck, even just the familiar UI will be missing. No. Until iOS allows setting a default browser, there is no…

All of my history is in Firefox, so I use Firefox on iOS as well, since it syncs with the desktop. I use Firefox for other reasons too, e.g. I like its UI for being friendly to multiple search engines.

And I use apps that behave well. For example I use an email reader that can open links in Firefox.

That apps open links in Safary is not true. From this point of view the iOS ecosystem is a clusterfuck as most apps, most notably Facebook, Twitter and Gmail, open links in their own shitty webview.

Gmail on iOS is even disingenuous about it. It has a configuration option allowing you to choose Chrome as an alternative (no Firefox of course), but what they call "Safari" is their own webview, not actual Safari and this matters because it doesn't share session data of course.

Re: Opera Touch is a solid alternative to Safari on the iPhone

#36
post #14

On iOS, there can’t really be an alternative to Safari because there is no way to change the default browser system wide. No matter how careful you are, eventually some app somewhere will open an URL, causing Safari to open, but now that it’s not your default browser, all your login state, your favorites and, heck, even just the familiar UI will be missing. No. Until iOS allows setting a default browser, there is no…

Also Apple doesn't allow any 3rd party browser engine in the App Store

Apple doesn't allow third party JIT. They allow third party rendering engines. Blink+JSC would be acceptable but I doubt anybody wants to put the work in to make that a reality.

Re: Opera Touch is a solid alternative to Safari on the iPhone

#39
post #37

Anybody else trying Firefox Focus on iPhone? It seems pretty nice but I haven't used it much yet.

I've used it for a couple months now. It's great, and I can't remember any sites that plain didn't work, though some were pretty ugly.

The one thing I miss is tabs, which FFF doesn't seem to have.

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