> By contrast Apple today is locking down their platform and explicitly decreeing that nobody is permitted to compete with them.
Microsoft got in trouble for anti-competitive practices with IE, because they were tightly integrating their OS with their browser in ways that meant that their browser was uniquely enabled by the OS to do things that third-party browsers couldn't do (not having access to the same APIs), thus using their position in the OS market to steal browser market-share away from third-party browser companies like Netscape, in ways those browser companies could do nothing to respond to.
In contrast, on iOS, there's nothing Safari can do that third-party browsers can't. Third-party browsers do exactly the same things Safari does, rendering-engine-wise — no more, no less. And meanwhile, they all do more than Safari does UI-wise. There's nothing Apple is doing to bias users of iOS in favor of Mobile Safari, such that it steals market-share away from competing browsers. Instead, their OS is just ruining the browser experience for everybody, equally. That's not anti-competitive — it's just dumb. :)
Apple blocks allocating executable memory which is necessary in order to create jit compilers, which are necessary for JavaScript engines to run at acceptable speeds. This restriction does not apply to safari’s js engine though.
I’ve implemented a WKWebView for a purely personal app with very specific but very minimal requirements and… “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. You can “just” use the API and you get a fully functional web browser without any UI, but you certainly aren’t going to attach any meaningful custom UI to it that way without digging deep not just into internals at the binding level but at the WebKit level. I’m not saying it’s a bad design either, but it’s definitely not a trivial investment.
Don't want to be snide, but you're talking about the high barrier-to-entry for implementing a nice, customized WKWebView in a project that isn't a web browser. In such a case, the WKWebView brings with it a bunch of complexity that wasn't already there otherwise.
If your project is itself a web browser, then all that complexity is already inherent to the project, whatever you choose to build it with. It's just that the "digging deep" would be in the docs for how to glue Apple's low-level DOM/JS/etc library frameworks together in mostly-undocumented ways; rather than in the docs for how to feed WKWebView the right delegate logic in just the right place to get it to do something that'd be easy if you were directly doing it yourself.
Didn’t take it as snide but even just the delegated logic isn’t so simple. Most of my personal project was just a specialized browser, and really basic functionality was much more complex than I’d hoped. I got it good enough to use and haven’t maintained it since because it was just for my own use, so maybe the APIs have become less complex since.
Microsoft got in trouble for anti-competitive practices with IE, because they were tightly integrating their OS with their browser in ways that meant that their browser was uniquely enabled by the OS to do things that third-party
It was actually worse than this--when Microsoft was ordered to separate IE from Windows, they lied and said IE was integral to Windows and that it could not operate without it.
Turned out Windows worked just fine without IE and Microsoft ended up settling with the government.
But Safari is the default. And if all the options are equal, then there’s no reason to switch from the default. It’s hard enough to convince people to switch browsers in the best of cases, let alone when the list of potential advantages or differentiators you can offer is severely cut down.
iOS supports changing the default browser to something that’s not Safari.
It’s not only about the rendering engines; Brave on iOS has other features and a UI/UX that I like that’s not present in Safari.
3rd party browsers on iOS have other ways of differentiating themselves, especially if you use those browsers on other platforms, like bookmark syncing, etc.
90% of end-users couldn’t care less what’s being used to render their websites on iOS.
The free and open web, to the extent we have it, only exists today because Microsoft wasn’t allowed to force IE, Active X, Silverlight and the rest of their technologies down everyone’s throat. Oh, and JScript [1], their proprietary version of JavaScript would have been the industry standard.
We wouldn’t have the W3C or WHATWG creating open standards for the web had Microsoft been allowed to essentially turn the web into another Microsoft runtime environment.
> The free and open web, to the extent we have it, only exists today because Microsoft wasn’t allowed to force IE, Active X, Silverlight and the rest of their technologies down everyone’s throat. Oh, and JScript [1], their proprietary version of JavaScript would have been the industry standard
The justice department at no point stopped Microsoft from bundling IE with Windows.
Besides that, up until 2008-2010, the “free and open web” was littered with proprietary Flash apps. It wasn’t until Apple refused to support Flash on iPhones that anyone started worrying about standards.
> Microsoft been allowed to essentially turn the web into another Microsoft runtime environment.
Nothing that the FTC did prevented that. No part of the consent decree caused MS to behave any differently with respect to IE.
And if you don’t remember, the “modern web” as it exists today with Ajax was actually a Microsoft addition that everyone else added.
JScript was no more or less proprietary than Netscape’s “LiveScript” before Netscape jumped on the Java bandwagon and called it Javascript. It’s not like JS came from a standards body.
JScript was no more or less proprietary than Netscape’s “LiveScript” before Netscape jumped on the Java bandwagon and called it Javascript. It’s not like JS came from a standards body.
Popular programming/markup languages don’t originate from standards bodies; it’s usually one person or a small group to start. Ruby, Python, Lisp, Pascal, Perl, PHP were created by a single person or a small group and (sometimes) would be submitted to a standards body.
Javascript was created for the Netscape Navigator browser in September 1995 and was submitted to Ecma International November 1996 [1] to start the standardization process. That was probably in response to Microsoft reverse engineering Javascript to create JScript in… 1996. Funny that.
So… yes, turns out JScript was significantly more proprietary than JavaScript and was only created to further Microsoft’s dominance of the web--“Best viewed in Internet Explorer”. JScript, like most of Microsoft’s tech at that time, probably relied on features that only existed on Windows and no where else.
> Javascript was created for the Netscape Navigator browser in September 1995 and was submitted to Ecma International November 1996 [1] to start the standardization process. That was probably in response to Microsoft reverse engineering Javascript to create JScript in… 1996. Funny that.
So it wasn’t “proprietary” when Netscape created it. But it became “proprietary” when Microsoft copied it?
> So… yes, turns out JScript was significantly more proprietary than JavaScript and was only created to further Microsoft’s dominance of the web--“Best viewed in Internet Explorer”
Were you around then when before IE, there were plenty of sites that had “Best viewed in Netscape Navigator”?
And don’t pretend that Navigator was a great product. In its heyday in the mid 90s, it was a point of nerd pride how well your operating system handled a Netscape crash.
IE3 was much better than Navigator on the Mac and Windows. In fact, the Max version of IE was one of the most standards compliant at the time.
The justice department at no point stopped Microsoft from bundling IE with Windows.
Nobody suggested otherwise; but that actually wasn’t the point. Microsoft made a deal with the government to stop most of its anticompetitive behavior. It was less about the bundling of IE with Windows than giving OEMs the choice to ship other browsers in addition to IE.
Besides that, up until 2008-2010, the “free and open web” was littered with proprietary Flash apps.
But that was a choice made by the market to adopt Flash instead of having of having all of the Microsoft stuff forced on them. Nobody forced developers to adopt Flash and there were other choices for audio/video, even if they weren’t as popular as Flash.
And if you don’t remember, the “modern web” as it exists today with Ajax was actually a Microsoft addition that everyone else added.
Well, to be accurate, Microsoft shipped XMLHttpRequest in IE 5.0 in 1999, as a proprietary Active X component for their products; it was never intended to be a web standard. But it was a cool idea so the other browser makers implemented it.
The term AJAX was coined by a Google employee in 2005 and was standardized by the W3C in 2006 [1].
It’s no different than Apple developing the canvas [2] element, which became a web standard, except they were more intentional than Microsoft was about XMLHttpRequest which would be renamed as AJAX.
Things would have been very different if the FTC and European regulators (who did make Microsoft ship a version of Windows without IE [3] hadn’t gotten involved.
> But that was a choice made by the market to adopt Flash instead of having of having all of the Microsoft stuff forced on them. Nobody forced developers to adopt Flash and there were other choices for audio/video, even if they weren’t as popular as Flash.
The comment I replied to gave credit to the FTC. Which is not true.
> Microsoft made a deal with the government to stop most of its anticompetitive behavior. It was less about the bundling of IE with Windows than giving OEMs the choice to ship other browsers in addition to IE
Microsoft didn’t just promise “we will be good little boys”. The parent poster gave the credit to the FTC. Firefox didn’t become popular for awhile because it was bundled by OEMs. MS basically just stopped development on IE. Then Chrome took off because it was heavily advertised on the Google home page and bundled with third party downloads.
As far as IE not being bundled with windows 7 because of the EU. This is an example of government ineffectiveness. Windows 7 came out in 2009. Web browsing on the desktop was starting Gibbs yesterdays news by then. The iPhone had been out for two years and Chrome was already ascendant.
And that’s about as useless as the EU caring to protect users privacy and writing a 99 section 11 chapter law and the only thing users got were cookie pop ups.
Depends how you see the relevant market. You could define the market as browsers for iPhones, instead of browsers for all phones. After all, it’s not like users switch readily between different phones for different apps. There’s a whole body of case law on what the relevant market is. The gist is that it turns on substitutability, but it’s more complex and flexible. Easy knob to turn to account for tech platform dynamics.
If the friction is high enough, antitrust law has always seen that as bearing on the definition of the relevant market. You can’t lock people in and then start charging monopoly prices with impunity. One issue is what happens when the stickiness is mostly psychological friction instead of something that an economist analyzing rational action would see as a barrier. These are laws for people, after all, not for hypothetical rational beings.
it is anti-competative by denying 3rd parties from provinding more.
Imagine a truck maker who could somehow prevent other truck makers from making a truck that caries more or runs faster or is more fuel efficient. Of course that would be anti-competative.
Microsoft got in trouble for anti-competitive practices with IE, because they were tightly integrating their OS with their browser in ways that meant that their browser was uniquely enabled by the OS to do things that third-party browsers couldn't do (not having access to the same APIs), thus using their position in the OS market to steal browser market-share away from third-party browser companies like Netscape, in ways those browser companies could do nothing to respond to.
In contrast, on iOS, there's nothing Safari can do that third-party browsers can't. Third-party browsers do exactly the same things Safari does, rendering-engine-wise — no more, no less. And meanwhile, they all do more than Safari does UI-wise. There's nothing Apple is doing to bias users of iOS in favor of Mobile Safari, such that it steals market-share away from competing browsers. Instead, their OS is just ruining the browser experience for everybody, equally. That's not anti-competitive — it's just dumb. :)