Well, forcing Safari onto users is a pretty terrible "solution" (and an abandoned cause on desktop). If Apple is going to fold halfway, they may as well just put their cards on the table. The web is already lost to Google: some 60% of all web traffic comes from Google Chrome, and that's not even counting the people using browsers based on Blink. If Apple, with 200 billion dollars in liquid cash, cannot create a browser that's good enough on it's own merits to compete with Chrome, then the battle is over. There was no war.
Correction, all of mobile users use Safari on iOS today. Webkit is your only option, everything else is just the same browser with a new interface added to it.
Maybe if there were actually multiple browsers to choose from on iOS, we could make that distinction and know for sure. Until then, I think it absolutely holds true.
> Correction, all of mobile users use Safari on iOS today. Webkit is your only option
When browser stats show X amount of people using Mobile Safari, those people are using Mobile Safari. Not a different web browser using WebKit.
> everything else is just the same browser with a new interface added to it.
There is more to a web browser than just its rendering engine. Chrome wasn’t “just Safari” up until they forked Blink. It used WebKit, sure, but it also had loads of development put in elsewhere.
Saying that an alternative web browser is “just Safari” because it uses WebKit is like the Hacker News cliché “I could do that in a weekend”. Sure, you might be able to knock out a proof of concept easily, but you are vastly underestimating the amount of work involved in the real product.
Nuker was basically apologizing for the poor phrasing in his parent comment; smoldesu understandably used the same phrasing in his correction to make his point, but, in doing so, his correction suffered from the poor phrasing too. The subjects of the sentences were "half/all of mobile users", which, in the latter case for example, implies that everyone uses iOS. Nuker's intention was to refer to "iOS mobile users" only, not mobile users in general. Kudos to him for rereading his original and going "Oops! :)".
