Apple's Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA

Apple knows that what they're doing is against the law, but every day, every month, every year they can get away with it, till the hammer of the law inevitably strikes, is more money in their pocket. So delaying it by every means necessary is what's in their best interest, it's what their lawyers are paid to do because each such decision of conforming to the law boils down to an accounting decision for them: "are the potential fines bigger than the profits".

You know a company has long lost the innovation race when the company is run by the lawyers and bean counters instead of the engineers, trying to milk their product lines form 10+ years ago. I wonder how long until they resort to becoming a patent troll ... oh wait. Their final form will be selling ads to their users.

Install "Choose Browser": https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ub0r.androi...

I have this installed and all links I can choose between Kiwi Browser or Firefox.

I have Chrome disabled, and every link that I open comes up in the standalone non-full-browser version of Firefox. I don't know if it would behave differently is Chrome was available, but I don't give it the chance.

Do you know of an example? I use a non-Chrome browser on Android and can't remember encountering this.

No Chrome, no problem. Just remove it or - better still - never install it. Use an AOSP-derived distribution like Lineage, use Cromite as system we view and all your browser engines are belong to you.

You can run Gnome Web for free. It's the open source version of WebKit so you won't be able to see all the tweaks Apple adds to their proprietary build, but it's close enough that obvious differences are visible, at least on desktop.

Safari on iOS cannot be tested without paying Apple so I generally don't for my personal stuff either.

All of that said, American developers often can't even be bothered to support characters like ñ or é, so I think it's quite reasonable to expect an EU browser to be a second class citizen for American developers. We can work around that pretty easily by simply not buying products and services that don't work well in the EU.

I develop on Firefox and it works on Chrome and Safari with no issues on all OSes (Windows, Mac and Linux). In the extremely rare case when there are some platform specific issues customers tunnel to my dev machine and check the web app (it's Vue) with their iPhones or Macs. I remember only two issues in about 3 years with this customer, all of them with the Apple ecosystem:

1. A form that could not find anymore a picture when they selected it from the Mac Photos app. Apparently Photos creates a temporary file that disappears before the browser submits the form, when probably reads it again from disk. No problems when the picture is loaded from a normal folder. We should read the picture into the memory of the browser and add it to the form from there, of transition to a JSON request. My customer decided that it's a niche case and it's not worth working on it.

2. A slight misalignment of an arrow and a checkbox, but that also happens in a different way with Chrome and Firefox, so there is some structural bug in the DOM/CSS of those UI elements. We're working on that.

Except those issues I can't remember any cross browser or cross OS problems in the last years. If it works in Firefox it works in Chrome and Safari too.

I mean, ideally you can choose to _not_ do so, tell your users "We only support Firefox and Chrome on iOS, and not Safari, because we do not own apple hardware", and then report bugs to mozilla/chrome if iOS users report differences.

Being able to run cross-platform browsers on iOS does in fact make the very thing you're complaining about better.

I would love it if the EU did in fact force apple to release a cross-platform iOS emulator to allow web developers to properly test iOS browsers, but presumably apple would argue that there are strong technical reasons there (and the DMA differentiates real technical reasons from monopolistic arbitrary roadblocks).

For making browsers available across regions, that's very obviously not driven by strong technical reasons. Making cross-platform code has real technical burden.

Not the most practical but you can rent a macOS VM.

It’s relatively easy to own Apple hardware when one lives outside the EU, but basically impossible to use that hardware to run their own browser engine on iPhones or iPads.

> How can I test my website on safari without owning Apple hardware?

Download the windows version from their website?

If Apple doesn't want to make their browser available for other hardware that's on them and they'll suffer the consequences. Blocking other entities from making their browser available on Apple's hardware is very different.

Remote debug on iOS is ass unless you are fully invested into their ecosystem.

And apple has some "nice" licencing nonsense around their software that makes VMs not the "obvious" solution.

I have a bit of experience with cloud mobile simulators (like Appetize). Ignoring the question of whether their simulators have EU builds that allow running alternative browser engines, the experience simply sucks for developing interactive apps.

You can't develop an app if you aren't able to test it like a real user would use it on a real device.

Testing mobile interactions such as scrolling and swiping, as well as animations' performance cannot be done through a VM.

Only real devices allow to test these aspects properly.

I'm not saying this is against the law, but it is clear that Apple only moves exactly as far as the EU forces it to, not a bit more. And within the limits the law allows, they're doing everything they can to make it tedious and difficult to actually get alternative apps stores or browser engines on their OS.

Security for who against what threat? It's hard to make the case this is possibly in the users' interest.

This is about securing the phone in Apple's interest against the desires of the user.

they want apple adhere to EU law for everyone outside the EU lol

how can people think like this

Chrome is the IE6 of the modern Web. Devs are building hacky sites that only work in Chrome.

It's the browser we're FORCED to have installed for the occasional shitty flight or hotel booking that doesn't work in Firefox.

Those popups I get multiple times a day about how this website works better on Chrome , which cover half my screen and which forward me to the App Store, are incredibly misleading. I have misclicked many times and then the App Store opens up. If you go back to the browser and hit the back button, it will again open the App Store. I have to press and hold the back button and skip multiple pages to get back to what I was doing.

They’re bringing up a valid point that has no indication of heavy support one way or another and you call it corporate boot licking.

How can you say this nonsense so uncritically?