Recently there has a been a lot of debate wether Safari is the new IE, or Apple simply is building a user-centric web, but I think that removes focus from the real problem.
The problem isn’t Safari. It’s a somewhat modern browser that in the eyes of some might lack some important features, but overall is still pretty good and modern.
The real problem is Apple’s lack of browser-choice in iOS, and that’s a problem for several reasons.
When Apple allows other browsers (not just wrappers!), email clients, mapping services, etc. to be set as default by iOS users, we’re going to see a whole bunch of Google iPhones. I’m pretty sure Apple is not looking forward to that as of yet.
Maybe later, when Apple Maps stops being a joke, Mail.app doesn’t choke when it’s displaying more than 3 emails, and Safari stops sucking.
By having chosen an Apple product, one has already made their choice; to accept whatever Apple decides to do with your (their) device. By buying the device, you are acquiring a limited, non-transferrable right to make use of (consume) the hardware in the form that Apple finds acceptable.
Despite the legalise, I am not a lawyer and none of this is representative of my personal opinion.
Edited 2015-07-03 19:30 UTC
I totally agree, when buying an apple product, you chose to have no choice as all apple products outside of the mac itself is appliances, and therefore “choice” is redundant.
Yes you can install linux on a iPhone and iPod to circumnavigate that model. But you can also install linux onto a potato as shown by MIT in 2003….. just sayin’.
Wish i could vote you up more than once.
That’s nonsense. They aren’t appliances any more than other portable computers. I.e. they are general purpose computing devices. But I agree that by buying devices from Apple one implicitly supports their sick lock-in practices. Not all people make this consciously however.
Edited 2015-07-03 20:27 UTC
And usually that’s fine if the device does everything you need it to do out of the box and/or 3rd party apps. For example, my anti-Apple friend goes on tirades about how you can’t run emulators on iOS without a jailbreak, but I’ve never wanted to do that anyway, so … *shrug*
Oh yes, otherwise iOS is full of choices…
Apple does allow alternate browsers, using alternate layout engines. Opera Mini, for example, does not use WebKit.
Apple does not allow any app to download and execute code. That’s really why alternate browsers are not practical, because without Javascript many pages would offer only limited functionality. More importantly, without Javascript, there would be no advertising on most sites ( including OSAlert ).
If Apple were to allow the downloading and executing of code it would essentially have to do away with the entire AppStore model because once you allow arbitrary code to execute AFTER an app store review what would be the point of that review, or age ratings, or what have you. ( There was just an article on OSAlert condemning Google for downloading and installing arbitrary code which happens to listen to your microphone; arbitrary code execution would allow any app to do that. )
All that said I think that even if Apple somehow made a special exception for browsers I doubt this would make any sort of impact. Just now, on the general interest ( but generally English speaking ) destinations I manage, less then 1% of traffic is from alternate browsers ( on any platform ). Ironically, iOS actually has more people using an alternate browser then Android does ( but still well below 1% ).
You are correct that when run in “mini” mode it does not use Webkit. Thing is that when in mini mode it is no longer a browser by any sane definition, it is a OBML document viewer.
Layout, rendering, javascript execution, all the things that people consider activities of a browser are done by proxy servers… All Opera mini does is display incoming documents (which are no longer HTML at all) and forward some very basic events back to the proxies.
It would be like saying that a Remote Desktop Client app is a browser because you happen to use it to run a browser on the remote desktop… That sounds like a silly analogy, but that is pretty much exactly what Opera Mini is. Clause 2.17 simply doesn’t apply to Opera Mini (at least when run in “mini” mode).
So no, Apple does not allow alternate browsers or alternate layout engines, and there are exactly zero in existence on iOS.
Edited 2015-07-04 00:33 UTC
But Android’s app-store seems to work ok, no?
Edit: nvm, this comment was supposed to be in reply to one of the above comments…
Edited 2015-07-04 10:46 UTC
But Android’s app-store seems to work ok, no?
Edit: and again my comment has failed to attach to the comment it was supposed to: