mtomweb

We do talk to the browser vendors. The bundle ID one by itself ensures it's unviable project. That's why 15 months in, there are no alternative browser engines in the EU.

Thanks so much! it’s been a four-year journey just to get this far, and none of it would have been possible without the volunteers who donate their time just for the belief in a better future for the web! Will be passing this comment on!

1. If you use either "Safari" or "Chrome" on iOS, then Apple gets paid. That's 97% of the market on iOS.

2. Many of those games could be rewritten in WebGPU/WebGL2.. if it saved them 30% appstore tax, and the install process was decent and they had frictionless payments, they'd move.

3. Because Apple is the primary target market, and if you've already built native for iOS, what's the advantage of doing web for Android if your not making the cost savings of only having to build one app. 70% of Desktop usage is now the web/web apps... that tells you what's possible if browsers can compete.

And it can’t just be the woefully insufficient TestFlight 10k users because there are possible upwards of a million developers who need to test their websites/web apps in the EU.

I would also add: - Install Prompts / Discoverability - Bugs (like https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop/issues/84) which likely would only get fixed if Safari has heavy competition on iOS (it's a funding issue)

Apple hasn’t resolved any of the main issues.

Install and discoverability is still hidden. Push is gated behind install. Safari’s scroll bugs haven’t been fixed despite us extensively documenting them, emailing to Safari’s leadership and raising them every year as the number one bug.

The number one thing we’ve asked for is third party browser engines on iOS.

What goalposts do you think have moved?

Author here, this was supposed to be when the user installs a new browser it has the option to call an OS api to ask the user if they would like to set the newly installed browser as the default.

This could have reasonable anti-spam protections built in. We’re planning on expanding this in more detail.

Happy to answer questions about the report if anyone has any!

We use web apps to mean ones that act like apps, rather than websites.

Readers are not confused, and I don’t think you are. A distraction to try and defend Apple?

Apple has single-handedly killed off mobile web apps from being viable on both iOS and Android, have deprived Firefox billions of dollars of revenue and strangled every other browser out of the most valuable marketplace. They do this why taking 20b/year from Google.

Apple is the one that has cost Firefox. Otherwise they’d likely have a thriving mobile browser which would have taken off because of extensions years before the competition.

Apple is not the defender of the open web, they invested the bare minimum into Safari to the point it was full of bugs, completely unreliable to build anything but basic websites, and was lacking all the core features required to compete with native apps. They were not competing with chrome on any platform except for on MacOS.

The only reason they have increased investment recently is because of the threat of competition.

Are you on 17.4 beta 2? If so I’ll have more questions.

People have been saying it's working for them in the EU: the Apple's detection is complex and seem to take into account different parameters, like the ios region, but also the origin country of the sim card used.

But note this behavior only occurs if you are in the EU and you are using 17.4 beta 1 or beta 2

This person is incorrect and doesn’t know what he’s talking about. You need to look at the full video of it action to realize the difference in behavior from 17.3 and 17.4 beta 1 and beta 2

in Safari/webkit or more broadly?

That's a poor take. The issue is that because there is no browser competition on iOS, Apple doesn't need to fear losing market share. That in turn ensures they have no reason to invest in Safari or web apps.

Apple has the staff and the budget to make a decent browser and to ensure web apps work, they don't because they don't want anyone competing with their AppStore or their 20b/year google search revenue.

It was only as a result of regulatory pressure

I run https://open-web-advocacy.org and we’re the reason browser engines and web apps were included in the DMA. We know lots of developers in the EU.

We’ve had more than 10 people test it, and it completely breaks all PWAs. Why are you trusting some randoms tweet as a credible source?

They've had 2 years since the final text of the DMA was written. From memory I think we saw it in Feb/Mar 2022.

In the text of the DMA it says "When gatekeepers operate and impose web browser engines, they are in a position to determine the functionality and standards that will apply not only to their own web browsers, but also to competing web browsers and, in turn, to web software applications" which was written to show the intention of the browser engine change was to facilitate web apps.

We believe that third party browsers should be allowed to compete fairly on iOS using the same engines they safely deliver to every other platform. Further, that Web Apps enabled by the functionality, stability and security delivered via intense competition between browsers should allow developers to bypass and contest the gatekeepers App Store via the world's only truly interoperable platform, the Web.

With this in mind OWA has been looking over Apple’s proposals for compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act to determine whether Apple intends to genuinely comply with its legal obligations regarding browsers and web apps. As OWA has argued at length, true choice in browsers is the most important counterbalance to gatekeeper monopoly power, so the answer to this question matters enormously.

Unfortunately so far it appears that the answer is "no".

Our analysis digs into the following questions: - Will browser vendors be effectively able to bring their own engine to iOS? - Will browser vendors be able to implement proper web app support on iOS? - Will browser vendors be able to compete fairly with Safari?

Lets dig in

Safari does not compete on any OS other than MacOS. It was placing no competitive pressure on chrome, and Apple most certainly cost Firefox many billions in search revenue due to lost market share on iOS.

Also our main and primary goal is to ensure that web apps become viable. That was never going to happen, while Apple had no incentive whatsoever to invest in Safari to the level required to make a competitive browser.

OWA was only formed out of deep frustration with both the feature set and stability of Safari, born as a result of a lack of competition.

This paper is a couple of years old now, but it really describes the issues in a lot of detail: https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#introdu...

There's a ton to go through, we're working on a story for late next week that will go through all the detail. We wanted to make sure the story was out there, and that we posted all the links so that people could go through it.

+ the article is a bit of celebration of a milestone, it took us 3 years and collectively thousands of hours of work to force Apple to do this.

yeah sorry about that, we're all computer nerds, English is not our strong point.

Fixing the issues with In-app browsers is one of our highest priorities. It’s made complex by what’s possible within the scope of the Digital Markets Act. Your spot on that this is a really important issue.

If you’d like to help out with the effort please get in contact with us (open web advocacy)

The Australian government has agreed to new competition laws for digital platforms!

This is excellent news and will pave the way for fair and effective browser competition on all operating systems & allow Web Apps to compete on an equal footing with Native Apps.

The new laws will be based on the ACCC's recomendations in their Digital platform services inquiry - Interim report No. 5 which includes:

* The code of conduct for mobile OS services could require Designated Digital Platforms to allow third-party browser engines to be used on their mobile OS. This could allow third-party providers of browsers and web apps to compete on their merits.

* We also consider that the additional competition measures should include the ability to provide third-party providers of apps and services with reasonable and equivalent access to hardware, software and functionality through their mobile OS.

In a victory for consumers and developers, London's Court of Appeal has ruled against Apple and in favour of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), allowing the CMA to reopen their Browser and Cloud Gaming Market Investigation Reference.

This is important as, Apple has effectively banned third party browsers via their 2.5.6 rule.

Out of Edge/Firefox/Chrome/Safari, Safari is the furthest behind in functionality and still has the most bugs. How do we know? We develop for these browsers every day. As for "only works in Chrome", Safari was our primary target platform. We develop with a "Safari first" process (a device that live updates on changes). If the feature/functionality didn't work in Safari, for us it might as well not exist.

As a user, you are not the one that has to invest 100's of hours fixing platform bugs. If a website does break, you'd blame the website even if Safari was at fault.

It's also hard for any end-user to see the absence of functionality, or a useful application that never got built because it was too difficult or didn't have the underlying functionality required. It's hard to see an application that was only ever built for iOS because the costs of producing two native apps was too high, or the app that never got built at all. It's hard to see the increase in prices because of no competitive pressure on the native ecosystems, or a new mobile ecosystem that never got built because it didn't have access to apps users's wanted.

At the end of the day this all ends up harming the user.

These same issues would get fixed in Firefox and Chrome. Safari was the outlier. We couldn't ask our users to use another competitive browser, since they'd been banned (and we most certainly would have put up banners).

The 60 times a day crash (more specifically the app just froze), took 1 to 2 months to fix and it affected every web app. Users would have to force kill the app and restart.

I'd recommend reading through all the comments to get a really good idea on how severe all of the bugs were: https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#ios-saf...

https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#safari-...

In 2021, after 10 years of these issues, no progress on important web app features (like push/install prompts), no response from Apple or the Safari/Webkit team, we decided the only method by which Apple would fund Safari properly was to goto governments and regulators to reverse their ban on third party browsers.

Not long after we petitioned regulators Apple started working on push notifications, 12 years after they came out for native.

Given my experience on the team, I genuinely don't believe that lack of investment, or even team size, has ever been the issue.

How would explain the enormous numbers of serious bugs, or the fact the Safari had slipped well behind Firefox, a non-profit with a fraction of the resources?

I lost count of the number of times local storage or indexedDB was broken by updates. Not to mention countless, very obvious regressions. Web Apps that would randomly crash 60 times a day (with one time requiring us to wait 1-2 months for the patch to role out.

Also even in the code base, you'd have (exceptionally talented) engineers juggling complete disparate and unrelated areas of code.

One major issue with no competition, is Apple never responded to developer needs. There were literally many thousands of requests for Push API for years and since no other vendor could implement them (no other vendor could even install Web Apps), there was no competitive pressure.

I don't buy the "user experience" argument. A browser full of bugs does not lead to a good user experience and the expense it imposes on developers is enormous.

As a personal example, we had such serious issues with scroll, tap to focus and bounce that the only solution was to recode all scroll-logic including scroll-bars, momentum bounce in javascript while the same app could be built with only minor issues in both Firefox and Chrome despite the fact that iOS Safari was our primary target.

As for the bugs, they just didn't get fixed. So many for, years and years.

That all said, this is past history, and I'm very hopeful for the future. The fact Apple has hired a ton more staff (including significant numbers of QA/Testers staff), a ton of really excellent web OG's and are pumping through both the features and the bugs really bodes well for the future of browser competition.

ckj: The number one issue with Safari has always been lack of investment by Apple. It has always been plagued with serious application breaking bugs for the past decade. In comparison with both Firefox and the Chromium browsers bugs would just not get fixed. Most developers I knew gave up in lodging bugs.webkit tickets.

This is not the Safari/Webkit's teams fault, just far too small a team for such a complex project and Apple, without any competition on iOS and an adverse incentive to make the web a compelling platform was not going to fund it. This is in addition to the fact that Google was paying Apple not only for Safari search engine traffic but Chrome traffic as well.

Outside of the stability issues, the gaps in functionality especially for Web Apps became vast and it was not practical to build a viable Web App on iOS. No Install Prompts, no push, no orientation lock in addition to severe issues with scrolll (which haven't yet been fixed) meant the only way to build a working app was to go native.

The only thing that has changed, is that Apple realizes that competition is coming and they need to build a competitive browser. This is why they are investing now. Headcount and the development of Push Notifications was almost certainly related to this regulatory pressure.

This is a great outcome, and just with what's happened in the last year I'm really hopeful for the future.

That said, still quite a number of critical missing features and fixed are needed before Safari can truly be used as an application platform.

Yes, exactly like Google.