Technology

59689 readers

2702 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

1339

Mozilla says Apple’s new browser rules are “as painful as possible” for Firefox (www.theverge.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

176 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Well, to be fair the EU can't force Apple to change outside of its territories, and it makes sense that Apple prefers to maintain the status-quo untill other countries will follow EU example with similar regulations.

I can see Mozilla's point there, but this scenario, even it it's not optimal, still seems me a better one compared to the All-WebKit-Everywhere one. If Mozilla struggles to maintain two versions of Firefox for iOS, I'd say they can drop the useless WebKit version and just maintain the real version for EU only market (untill other markets will follow).

How many people are currently choosing FF in favour of Safari on iOS after all?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The problem is that Firefox desperately needs more users and even those who use the WebKit version are better than nothing. The WebKit version at least gets the name of Firefox out there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I am a Firefox user both on desktop and on my android phone. And not only to support Mozilla in keeping the browser engine competition alive, but also because of some really good features that alternatives are missing (respectively Multi-Account containers on desktop and extensions on Android).

On my iPad, though, I tried using Firefox (even just to have bookmarks and history synced) but it’s really just a reskin of Safari with worse integration with the system and less features. Therefore I moved back to safari.

Why am I telling this? Because for any non tech-savvy user, if their first experience with FF is on their iPhone / iPad (with the WebKit version), they will probably not like it, and eventually associate in their mind “Firefox = bad browser”, preventing them to give it a try on their desktop. So, from a certain point of view, maybe getting rid of the WebKit version would help Mozilla gather some more users on the other platforms in the long term…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Fair point. Honestly had no idea as I've never owned any apple devices myself, but yeah that sucks and I'd probably also reluctantly stick to Safari in that case.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I used FF on my phone for a while, back when my old MacBook was stuck on a version of macOS that didn't offer iCloud syncing. Firefox on both devices worked perfectly, but I always slightly preferred to use Safari wherever possible.

These days I keep FF on my Mac for if ever I need a second browser, and it's the first thing I install if I ever need to setup a Windows VM.