> If only so that there is another alternative if a page renders poorly in webkit
I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari. Nobody in a suit can make a business case for not supporting iOS Safari, given its market share, and also given the fact that the entire C-Suite and senior management team at any given company are using Safari on their iPhone and iPad. A page not working on iOS Safari is a serious business problem that people will take seriously, today.
If it gets displaced by Chrome on iOS, with a tiny sliver of us using Firefox, I worry "works on Chrome" will be the only thing that gets solved for.
Well, Firefox users may never make up quite as much marketshare as it used to, but it does have one advantage: we're a lot louder and more annoying than Chrome users when stuff is broken. It's a feature! (Okay, I try not to be annoying. But I'm pretty sure absolutely nobody is thrilled when I report bugs about Librewolf not working. Shoutouts to SoundCloud for eventually fixing one of said issues.)
I doubt Safari will actually die on iOS. The truth is, Safari on iOS is kinda good. That said, honestly this whole line of thinking has gotten pretty tiring. I'm not really sure that an Apple/Google duopoly on browsers is really that much better than the seemingly inevitable Google monopoly. It's not like either of them are particularly good citizens, but Apple's relatively small influence has been very negative in a lot of ways. I'm not even a huge fan of using regulations to solve every problem, but even I must admit that EU regulations have done far more to start to reel in Google than Apple ever could, anyways. As for poor WebM support and pushing wgsl into the WebGPU spec, good riddance.
It's really sad that Google can't be trusted more. There's a lot of people there who are doing good work on Chromium and other web-related projects, and it's besmirched by greedy decisions at worst and optically blind decisions at best. When I was at Google, I did spend a bit of my time trying to make some intranet stuff work better in Firefox... It's probably a token gesture at best, but oh well.
You know we're at a weird point when the underdog competition in browsers is Apple, one of the richest and most resourceful companies of all time.
> the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari
It's not really a good argument. It should be about user choice. If Chrome is better than Safari, and I prefer it, I should be able to install it. OS locked down browsers is 1990s era MS anti-trust behaviour that significantly reduces overall competition.
Mobile is king - if Safari/webkit wasn't so locked down on iOS, we may have gotten even a completely different player who made a really good mobile browser. Apple's behaviour is nothing short of monopolistic and there is no good defence of it imo.
Tell the devs (any here on this thread? Please speak!) of _iPhone_ iOS Safari (which is somehow different than iPad) to support `MediaSource` and I'll sympathize. They are often behind the curve, and with the size of market share they have, I'd at least like a timeline of when very popular features will be exposed. Until then, they're the new IE to me. It's popular because it's the default and that's it.
Agreed. While being forced into a walled garden isn't a good thing, it has the current side effect giving iOS Safari a significant market share to keep Chrome from dominating to become the new IE and have all those "works in Internet Explorer 6 with 1024x768 screen" websites again but this time for Chrome.
> I worry "works on Chrome" will be the only thing that gets solved for
Firefox is my daily driver, and I use their WebKit wrapper on iOS, and I have to agree. I'm not looking forward to a Blink monopoly in the browser space. The upshot is that we might have closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS.
Why would Safari get displaced on iOS, though? Apple users tend to stick to first-party software even when options are available, unless third-party stuff has a significant feature gap (and keep in mind that we're talking about UX here, not how many APIs the browser supports etc). Did Chrome overtake Safari on macOS?
I’m less sure about that for a few reasons. Biggest among them is that (presumably?) in app webviews will still be WKWebView, powered by WebKit. So if you want your page to load inside Facebook’s browser (and you do) you’re still going to have to care about Safari.
It might make Apple work harder maybe? For instance on my m1 MacBook Air, safari is vastly better for my battery life than chrome or ff for my workload. It makes a huge difference. That would make me use it over the others if that’s the same on the iPhone or iPad where battery life is even more important.
Presumably, the people who care about web would only install firefox on their iOS devices, while the people who don't care would just keep safari.
in other words, the chrome share of the iOS market would remain small.
So a product manager cannot just say that it works on chrome and forget about safari. Unless, somehow, google manages to boost chrome's iOS marketshare up and above safaris'!
If your website only works on one of the browsers, you are probably doing something wrong. It is not like it was in the 90s, it can pretty much be expected your website will work on all browsers, if you are following the current HTML/CSS specs and best practices.
I'm not that optimistic that Mozilla is capable of building a good iOS browser. It's been a few months since I last used it, but the issues of Firefox on iPadOS were not because of the engine. Tabs would frequently lose order, closing a tab would close some other tab, broken keyboard shortcuts, cursor/selection issues in the address bar, random non-responsiveness and just janky UI. The issues were so obvious that it felt like it was built without any QA process, so I resorted to using Safari most of the time, which worked perfectly.
Firefox Focus on Android works much better, but it's also a simpler browser. I haven't used the full Firefox on Android, so can't comment on that.
Firefox is my default browser on Android for couple of years now. It supports uBlock Origin, and I cannot browse internet without it anymore. I don't have major trouble with it, except 1-2 cases per quarter, when it is faster to open Chrome than turn the ad blocking off and then back on.
Another case for Chrome for me is full page translation. It is very neat and mostly of decent quality.
Being able to use Fennec F-Droid was my primary motivator to switch off of iPhone. It's not perfect, but there are things it offers that iOS Safari does not that I consider to be absolute necessities for browsing the web. (uBlock Origin is certainly one of them, also WebM support.)
> It's been a few months since I last used it, but the issues of Firefox on iPadOS were not because of the engine.
You don't actually know that, though, it's entirely possible that these issues are caused by having purposely limited ways to hook into the engine and system as 3rd party browser.
Once the native engine is available to the general public, there will be more users. When there are more users, there will likely be more resources thrown at development.
Unfortunately, I had the same experience with iOS and iPadOS versions of Firefox. Very janky, lots of bugs that went on unfixed for months and years, and general lack of polish and thoughtfulness in the UI. Despite using Firefox on every other platform, I had much better experience with Safari, and kept Firefox installed only for an occasional password lookup.
FWIW, I noticed all of the same issues when using FF on my iPad, but I stuck with it, and it actually got much better, and I haven't noticed a UI/UX bug in months now. It's been rock solid once they got the kinks worked out, and I've loved running FF on all of my devices and having everything synced between them appropriately.
I use firefox on iOS. I like it because it has integrations with firefox's password management, and it feels somewhat fire-foxy.
But it is a bit janky and it is strictly worse than the android version, and that's because it's layered on top of the wrong engine and there's only so much customisation they can do to make it more firefoxy.
I really welcome a full-fat fox on iOS, not least because it implies extensions like ublock origin, and adblocking on iOS is just not as good compared to UBO on android or the desktop.
I couldn't link to any websites that render incorrectly under Safari on iOS (WebKit) off the top of my head, but I think that's rather a side effect of WebKit being the only engine available on iOS: I don't want my site to be unusable on iOS devices, so I end up spending a lot of time trying to work around bugs that only happen on Apple devices.
Sure, this ultimately means that everything Just Works on Apple devices... but it's not because their browser is up to standards. It's just that I'm forced to make it work.
To me, this is very reminiscent of the Internet Explorer situation, where I end up baking a bunch of hacks into my code just to ensure it works for the majority.
Web devs have to deal with Safari bugs all the time, that's why you don't tend to see them. Maybe now that there's going to be other browser engines on iOS, we can show nice "please open this page in Firefox" banners and force Apple to stop undermining their browser to push native apps.
Brilliant move. Show what is possible. Let individual developers download the source & build themselves, and run it. Make it real, make the only obstruction a legal one, one that is increasingly full of holes as a small exterior/outside hobbyist community bypasses the longstanding trenchancy Apple has dug, has moated themselves in with. Give people that first whiff of freedom.
And if someday hopefully some of the anti-trust anti-competitive legal moats do get torn down, Google will be ready.
As far as I know, JIT is disabled on iOS at the moment, so one thing developers would notice right away is abysmal JavaScript performance. (Early versions of V8 didn't even have an interpreting or bytecode path, to my knowledge, so it wouldn't even run without major modifications!)
Even if Firefox and Chrome used Gecko and Blink with JSC, that's still a marked improvement from the state of things today. Most of what I dislike about Safari are its weird rendering issues, which would be solved.
>so one thing developers would notice right away is abysmal JavaScript performance
That's actually a good thing! If a substantial chunk of iOS users would use third-party browsers without JS JIT, then webdevs would be forced to better optimize their sites, because the perf ceiling would be lower on these browsers. This then would lead to stellar performance for those who stick with Safari which does have JIT! Kind of how using an M1 is so good today, because there's still a large number of Intel machines out there, so devs can't yet afford releasing software that's only usable on M1 from a cpu/energy point of view.
This has already happened. The walls have already been torn down. The EU's Digital Markets Act has made it mandatory for Apple to implement those changes by Q1 2024
Anyone care to speculate as to whether Apple will take that opportunity to permit users in other regions that same liberty? Personally, I would not bet on that outcome without similar legislation forcing the issue.
I don't think Mozilla & Google both start working on iOS browser engines just to show what's possible. They might be speculatively developing these, but I think it's definitely based on an expectation that they have a really good chance of shipping these browser engines.
Oh yeah, bye bye Accessibility! Firefox has become mostly unusable under Windows if you are using a screen reader, in the past 2 years. And Android took almost a decade to catch up to what Apple did with iOS. So I am guessing, this new browser will need at least 5 years to be looked at by blind users :-)
This is one thing that the big dogs, Microsoft, and Apple have been good at since the early '90s. For all their faults, they take accessibility seriously.
I know a blind guy who uses iPhones exclusively. How he manages to understand speech that fast is beyond me, but dedicating resources to accessibility when it's such a tiny market share is nice of them. But now that I think about it, are they being mandated under ADA? I honestly don't know.
No, they are not being mandated. It basically boils down to Jobs declaring that accessibility is an exceiption to ROI. IOW, realising its a kind of social responsibility. Besides, Microsoft took a long time to provide something by default, they let other third parties sell screen readers for big money to poor people. Apple always did both built-in, the API and the screen reader (frontend). Microsoft created Narrator, their own front-end, just a few years ago.
That's unfortunate, but you don't have to use Firefox. I don't understand why some people think more options are bad. You can still use Safari or Chrome.
Chrome is spyware under a different name and they won the desktop market by sabotaging Firefox and taking advantage of their search monopoly by blatantly advertising their browser. Most developers focus on the technical features and miss what giving such a bad actor a chance to monopolize another device category means.
Firefox is barely alive because of mismanagement and Google’s dirty tactics. If one could give access to Firefox while blocking Chrome that would be ideal.
> Oh yeah, bye bye Accessibility! Firefox has become mostly unusable under Windows
Same on macos. Cannot use Firefox, because it does not work with Macpass.app [0] autotype - to my understanding because Firefox does not support (some) macos accessibility settings/features. For me the UX with Firefox is just the worst compared to competition. It's noticeably slower, uses much more CPU - thus makes the laptop hot, fans constantly kick in and drains battery. A lot of (all of it?) non-native GUI components makes the experience not good.
Arguably this could be old information, because my gripes are from many years ago, though I try it every year or so - but the situation is still way behind everyone else.
I support the Firefox's message, even donated to them couple of times, even though don't use their product, but at least on macos - experience is too bad for me to use it.
I'm writing this comment with a screen reader on firefox. Not sure what your issues are, but the accessibility has been rather stable for me after they fixed the quantum disaster.
Interesting. For me, moving with the cursor in most webpages has become extremely slow around half a year ago. I hit cursor down, and braille and speech update after about 1 second. I am on Win10 with JAWS 2022/2023.
Mozilla is going to have to pull off some crazy marketing genius to have any chance against the coming onslaught from Google and Microsoft. Both companies are likely willing to do just about whatever it takes to convert that chunk of previously inaccessible users… growth opportunities like that don't appear in the browser space very often.
A few weeks, at least. By that point, nearly every user should have gotten a notification that YouTube, GMail or Google Search is 100000% better with Chrome.
A browser from an Ad company and … I don’t know what Mozilla is these days. Doesn’t sound very reassuring. I hope they’d at least try to address memory and performance issues from their desktop counterparts. One amazing (and unmatched) feature of Safari on any platform it runs on is how smooth and battery friendly it is.
I browse the web most of the day on my Pixel 6 Pro, and battery usage indicates Chrome has taken 3% of my battery since last full charge. I'm sure iOS has a similar battery usage monitoring feature, I'm curious what percent Safari shows for you?
edit: and I'm at 13% remaining (blame TikTok), so not like I just woke up with a full charge.
It'd be cool if the Android version of Firefox got some UI love to bring it back to where it was before they force-updated folks to the "phone only" UI.
>It'd be cool if the Android version of Firefox got some UI love to bring it back to where it was before they force-updated folks to the "phone only" UI.
Since this is open source, everybody should be able to adjust the UI to their liking. However, there are too many obstacles for this to be a valid option. What would be needed to make this possible? I think Firefox could become much more popular if the users could collaborate easily on designing the interface.
Is there a way to have tabs at the top of the browser? I like that about Chrome on my tablet, I can just hit the tabs at the top to swap, whereas on Firefox you need to hit the Tabs icon at the top right that brings up the switcher, then find the one you want and click that.
Did you even try looking? Settings > Customize > Toolbar. The settings list is not long on Fx mobile and the ability to change the position has been there since the day of the UI refresh.
Most likely, yes. The entire iOS GPL ban to my understanding only exists due to a combination of an iOS App Store policy that's weirdly enforced (who is surprised...) and the fact that Apple's own code signer is required to be able to distribute an iOS app, and that one is proprietary because Apple, which means you can't use other people's GPL libraries in your apps.
It's highly likely that apps will still required to be signed by Apple, even if distributed outside the Apple App Store, just like Gatekeeper on the Mac.
I don't think the license matters at all, but you may not be able to upload something you can't prove ownership of, and there is still the notary requirement to run, it only changes the distribution channel after all.
What you could maybe do is do reproducible builds, staple the notarised x509 on it afterwards. Then you can 'prove' it is the same app, but still have the signed version in distribution.
I am deeply interested in Orion [0], the browser developed by the team behind Kagi search.
It is not widely used, but it's quite impressive. I feel this is the time for a better browser for the masses. I am not sure Google + Mozilla are the right actors to bring it alive.
The minute that browser has a Linux build I'm going to try to make it my default browser. I have not been this excited for an unreleased software package since KSP 2.
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I have a less optimistic take. At the moment, the only thing standing between the world and a Chrome-only monoculture is iOS Safari. Nobody in a suit can make a business case for not supporting iOS Safari, given its market share, and also given the fact that the entire C-Suite and senior management team at any given company are using Safari on their iPhone and iPad. A page not working on iOS Safari is a serious business problem that people will take seriously, today.
If it gets displaced by Chrome on iOS, with a tiny sliver of us using Firefox, I worry "works on Chrome" will be the only thing that gets solved for.
I doubt Safari will actually die on iOS. The truth is, Safari on iOS is kinda good. That said, honestly this whole line of thinking has gotten pretty tiring. I'm not really sure that an Apple/Google duopoly on browsers is really that much better than the seemingly inevitable Google monopoly. It's not like either of them are particularly good citizens, but Apple's relatively small influence has been very negative in a lot of ways. I'm not even a huge fan of using regulations to solve every problem, but even I must admit that EU regulations have done far more to start to reel in Google than Apple ever could, anyways. As for poor WebM support and pushing wgsl into the WebGPU spec, good riddance.
It's really sad that Google can't be trusted more. There's a lot of people there who are doing good work on Chromium and other web-related projects, and it's besmirched by greedy decisions at worst and optically blind decisions at best. When I was at Google, I did spend a bit of my time trying to make some intranet stuff work better in Firefox... It's probably a token gesture at best, but oh well.
You know we're at a weird point when the underdog competition in browsers is Apple, one of the richest and most resourceful companies of all time.
It's not really a good argument. It should be about user choice. If Chrome is better than Safari, and I prefer it, I should be able to install it. OS locked down browsers is 1990s era MS anti-trust behaviour that significantly reduces overall competition.
Mobile is king - if Safari/webkit wasn't so locked down on iOS, we may have gotten even a completely different player who made a really good mobile browser. Apple's behaviour is nothing short of monopolistic and there is no good defence of it imo.
Firefox is my daily driver, and I use their WebKit wrapper on iOS, and I have to agree. I'm not looking forward to a Blink monopoly in the browser space. The upshot is that we might have closer-to-native experiences for websites on iOS.
in other words, the chrome share of the iOS market would remain small.
So a product manager cannot just say that it works on chrome and forget about safari. Unless, somehow, google manages to boost chrome's iOS marketshare up and above safaris'!
Unless web admins take action and e.g. show an annoying popup about web freedom on iOS and Chrome.
Dead Comment
Firefox Focus on Android works much better, but it's also a simpler browser. I haven't used the full Firefox on Android, so can't comment on that.
Another case for Chrome for me is full page translation. It is very neat and mostly of decent quality.
You don't actually know that, though, it's entirely possible that these issues are caused by having purposely limited ways to hook into the engine and system as 3rd party browser.
Android is a very different thing.
Like, maybe they had to "start from scratch" there with new code and couldn't use all their previous magic (UI, UX) from the Desktop codebase.
But it is a bit janky and it is strictly worse than the android version, and that's because it's layered on top of the wrong engine and there's only so much customisation they can do to make it more firefoxy.
I really welcome a full-fat fox on iOS, not least because it implies extensions like ublock origin, and adblocking on iOS is just not as good compared to UBO on android or the desktop.
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what's a URL of a page that renders poorly in webkit?
Sure, this ultimately means that everything Just Works on Apple devices... but it's not because their browser is up to standards. It's just that I'm forced to make it work.
To me, this is very reminiscent of the Internet Explorer situation, where I end up baking a bunch of hacks into my code just to ensure it works for the majority.
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WebKit just has too many issues these days…
But you know what? Having AdBlock makes up for it 10 fold because I never have to see ads on mobile FF.
And if someday hopefully some of the anti-trust anti-competitive legal moats do get torn down, Google will be ready.
That's actually a good thing! If a substantial chunk of iOS users would use third-party browsers without JS JIT, then webdevs would be forced to better optimize their sites, because the perf ceiling would be lower on these browsers. This then would lead to stellar performance for those who stick with Safari which does have JIT! Kind of how using an M1 is so good today, because there's still a large number of Intel machines out there, so devs can't yet afford releasing software that's only usable on M1 from a cpu/energy point of view.
I know a blind guy who uses iPhones exclusively. How he manages to understand speech that fast is beyond me, but dedicating resources to accessibility when it's such a tiny market share is nice of them. But now that I think about it, are they being mandated under ADA? I honestly don't know.
Firefox is barely alive because of mismanagement and Google’s dirty tactics. If one could give access to Firefox while blocking Chrome that would be ideal.
Same on macos. Cannot use Firefox, because it does not work with Macpass.app [0] autotype - to my understanding because Firefox does not support (some) macos accessibility settings/features. For me the UX with Firefox is just the worst compared to competition. It's noticeably slower, uses much more CPU - thus makes the laptop hot, fans constantly kick in and drains battery. A lot of (all of it?) non-native GUI components makes the experience not good.
Arguably this could be old information, because my gripes are from many years ago, though I try it every year or so - but the situation is still way behind everyone else.
I support the Firefox's message, even donated to them couple of times, even though don't use their product, but at least on macos - experience is too bad for me to use it.
[0] https://macpassapp.org/
Personally, I am really happy with Safari but I am not convinced Firefox make a big dent.
I think that within a more tech-aware demographic, they'll see more people use Chrome.
edit: and I'm at 13% remaining (blame TikTok), so not like I just woke up with a full charge.
I can't count how many times I just wanted to scroll up and ended up refreshing the page.
Since this is open source, everybody should be able to adjust the UI to their liking. However, there are too many obstacles for this to be a valid option. What would be needed to make this possible? I think Firefox could become much more popular if the users could collaborate easily on designing the interface.
What you could maybe do is do reproducible builds, staple the notarised x509 on it afterwards. Then you can 'prove' it is the same app, but still have the signed version in distribution.
It is not widely used, but it's quite impressive. I feel this is the time for a better browser for the masses. I am not sure Google + Mozilla are the right actors to bring it alive.
[0]: https://browser.kagi.com/