I am on Apples side here. I have been a macOS and iPhone user for over a decade now, but have had Android devices and I use Windows for games and work.
I think what the EU has done to Apple is unfair. It is unfortunate in my opinion that they can’t just tell them to get stuffed. They have had to build probably 100-million LOCs just so EU have the right to pick their own browser, and yet Safari works just fine. In fact the great thing about Safari (and Apple knew this) is that compatibility was really good precisely because everyone on mobile was using the same browser. Now I’m just waiting to get those stupid “only supported in Chrome” pop ups on my mobile phone too..
Their core strategy has always been to keep cost low by supporting one hardware, one browser engine, one App Store. That’s how they kept things lean and integrated. The EU has forced them to take an approach that is fundamentally different to what made them successful. Some might say - who cares? It only affects the EU right? That’s to be seen.. we all might be affected globally from the security bugs caused by the unhardening of the OS required to conform to EU standards. And this huge code base is going to cost something to maintain and I doubt we won’t pay for that either.
> In fact the great thing about Safari (and Apple knew this) is that compatibility was really good precisely because everyone on mobile was using the same browser.
What a weird take.
Safari is the minority browser that takes so much work because of its quirks. The largest mobile browser by far is Chrome (65% vs 25%) and while it might be different in your particular bubble (probably the US? it's the only market where Apple is dominant afaik) it's well known that Safari is the equivalent of Internet Explorer in the bad old days.
Have you seen the price of Apple devices?? They're anything but low. If Apple has to reduce a bit their margin because they lose their monopoly I won't be shedding tears for them.
No, it does not. It is the old Internet Explorer of our day. It is by far the worst of all the browsers. This is like saying "this car from Apple with square wheels work just fine" and not at all acknowledge that every single road in the world had to be made bumpy to allow for this and made them worse for everyone else. Try developing for it.
Safari is the IE10 of today. Every single feature we build out, we need to test it thoroughly on Safari because stuff that works in FF/Chromium just doesn't work the same in Safari. A sizeable chunk of our frontend codebase has a bunch of workarounds specifically for Safari because of its quirks.
> Their core strategy has always been to keep cost low...
You realize this is Apple we're talking about right, the company with the most outrageous pricing strategies?
There are literally 1000s of new APIs and I can only imagine what the web services, OS/kernel side and test infrastructure looks like, so I am thinking it’s in the 10-100mLOC ballpark.
Ahem, you do realize that Safari on iOS exists right? Only thing Apple is doing here is exposing the same APIs they used to implement Safari to non-Apple devs. Probably with some adjustments, but certainly not millions of lines of code.
I think what the EU has done to Apple is unfair. It is unfortunate in my opinion that they can’t just tell them to get stuffed. They have had to build probably 100-million LOCs just so EU have the right to pick their own browser, and yet Safari works just fine. In fact the great thing about Safari (and Apple knew this) is that compatibility was really good precisely because everyone on mobile was using the same browser. Now I’m just waiting to get those stupid “only supported in Chrome” pop ups on my mobile phone too..
Their core strategy has always been to keep cost low by supporting one hardware, one browser engine, one App Store. That’s how they kept things lean and integrated. The EU has forced them to take an approach that is fundamentally different to what made them successful. Some might say - who cares? It only affects the EU right? That’s to be seen.. we all might be affected globally from the security bugs caused by the unhardening of the OS required to conform to EU standards. And this huge code base is going to cost something to maintain and I doubt we won’t pay for that either.