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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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You could, in the EU. But as the EU is only a small portion of the market (Apple did not succeed as much with brainwashing here), Mozilla said it would be too costly to literally recreate FF from scratch for iOS, only for the EU market.
You know, I hadn't realized this before. Thanks to Apple's decade-long policy, alternative browsers for iOS literally don't exist, they'll have to be ported. It will take years for that to happen, if anybody even bothers. Well, Google will.
And that's how Apple will have managed to shoot themselves in the foot and have iOS fall under Chrome domination too.
At this point if they were smart they would sponsor the ports of alternative browsers that are not Chrome, but I doubt they have it in them.
There is a new one, Orion. https://kagi.com/orion/
WebKit, isnt it though?
I think so. As someone said, safari with another gui.
It is, but it allows you to install many Firefox extensions. Not everything works, but it’s the best option out there I’ve found.
Right. Like Apple's webkit is just the reskinned KDE browser?
That was a longggg time ago. Also a good reason why you should chose GPL as your code license.
We will never forget!
Khtml was licensed as LGPL.
For now, but the EU will force Apple to allow non-WebKit engines on iOS. At which point only Google will have enough money to spare porting an entire engine to a small market.
What year do you think it is right now?
One could ask you the same thing and it would be a more appropriately directed question. Chrome hasn't been WebKit for literally years.
No shit Sherlock. If you made the same observation about Firefox it would be just as dumb. The whole point of this post is that other rendering engines van be ported to iOS now. It doesn't matter one little bit what Apple forced yesterday and it certainly doesn't mean Blink is WebKit today.
Oh look, a link from the quick Google search you didn't do:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)
In gonna go ahead and block you now though, have a nice day.
Is there something I’m missing? I have Firefox on my iPhone, I live in India. Is it not “proper” Firefox or is Firefox now available in US App Store?
Any browser on iOS/iPadOS etc. is just a reskin of Safari. It might add new features - VPN, closing-all-tabs-feature, sync - but the underlying browser engine is still webkit, including all its limitations. Those limitations are, for example, limited debugging and no plugin support. Whereas I can install almost all desktop addons on my FF nightly on Android, I can't even have adblock on "Firefox" iOS. And even after Apple opened up the browser stuff, so FF can now be based on gecko, Mozilla would need to create and maintain a whole new App - for the EU, because other countries won't get those possibilities ever.
So FF on my iPad is just a way for me to access website-only stuff. In my Android phone, I also use eg. youtube/piped, deepl, maps in FF. That would be a pain on iOS due to missing Addons.
Ah! I never knew that! Thanks for the detailed explanation
All browsers on iOS are basically reskinned versions of Safari since they all have to use WebKit