Yesterday after iOS upgrade i was pleasantly surprised by popup asking me what browser i would like to use. I picked Safari anyways, but it felt good. Thank you EU.
I know now that if i change my mind i can go to settings and pick any other browser.
And not thank you Apple because this is not the case in non EU countries and not the case for iPad, because EU did not classified ipads same way as iphones and Apple Inc took advantage of this instead of unifying user experience.
I don't think Apple has citizenship status of every user in EU. At least, my experiences didn't change when I was naturalised and gained EU citizenship.
Mate, it's one popup shown one time, to inform those not as technically competent as you and I that they can in fact use another browser if they want to...
This popup is shown immediately after "Hello" message after updating your iphone. Together with other popups asking for agreement to collect app usage stats and other apple related questions. I hear no one complaining or being pissed off about these other questions after first phone use.
I’ve heard loads of people complain about them. Asking for Siri to be switched on, and asking to sign into your iCloud account are the two biggest ones.
Personally, I find the multi-page terms and conditions to be the worst part. Nobody reads them and it would be considered entirely unacceptable UX if people really did read them. Their entire purpose is to hold people to terms they aren’t aware of.
Yes but, at least in the EU, there are strong consumer protections around what can and cannot be considered "usual" in TaC texts - the courts already gave credence to the idea that while people may not sensibly read the terms in full, there is an expectation that the contents cannot be too whacky when dealing with B2C such as apple.
We’ve probably become numb to it thanks to cookie warnings.
Whatever the intentions of that law where, and however against the spirit of it the companies implementing the ‘we care about your privacy’ popover whilst offering the option to opt out of data sharing with their 500 ‘partners’ - the law has failed in this regard. Perhaps even all these sites are breaking said law, in which case I am sure enforcement will be swift and firm.
I would not compare it to cookie popup, as this is a question that you get after starting using a phone. So basically one time. For new user it looks just like regular startup sequence after unboxing fresh device.
Of course if i was evil corporate drone and would like to piss of EU and had means for that, i would show this pop up to choose browser regularly and unexpectedly to piss off end users and then blame it on EU that they have "forced" to do this.
This just in: forcing a mandatory selection from a mandatory screen results in people making a mandatory selection to go about their day.
Even should users select at random, would this result in a market share increase for alternative browsers.
Celebrating this gain early is firmly “counting the chickens before they’ve hatched”. Let’s see if users actually stick to these alternative browsers or if the market merely reciprocates what we have on desktop: lots of Chrome users.
I’d eat my hat if it turns out any different, because I’m not so naive to believe that one mandatory click-through would stand against Google’s web properties constantly asking the user to switch to Chrome.
Last time I checked, moving even more of the market under a single vendor was the opposite of competition and the consumer’s interest.
There is also a significant distrust of Google (and other large tech companies) growing in Europe, and probably most other places outside of the US. Tie that with the fact that they are now charging people for using photos/email etc, there has never been a better time to cut ties with the company where possible. I'm sure Chrome will remain the most popular browser for now but the younger generations might be more inclined to use products with less "baggage".
Considering lots of states and countries in the EU are trying to move their public sector stuff (incl. schools, school-issued devices etc.) away from FAANG licenses, children will start to get more exposure to alternative solutions early on.
I think the current wave of absolute failure to respect or even understand European privacy needs coming from California is going to lead to generational knock-on effects.
There's a very good cultural reason why no-one here has even heard about green/blue/yellow chat messages, why Apple has no majority market share, why state and federal governments all over the EU have tried and are still trying to ditch Microsoft. Only now it's not just about the cultural difference in respect for the privacy of your fellow man, now it's also about strategic importance and even our own sovereignty.
Are they on FAANG stuff already? Our local schools use lots of Microsoft for everything, which is super annoying, when even Google can provide a better solution than that.
> This just in: forcing a mandatory selection from a mandatory screen results in people making a mandatory selection to go about their day. Even should users select at random, would this result in a market share increase for alternative browsers.
It doesn't make sense for an uptick in usage of smaller browsers to be just an artifact of forcing the decision, because the easiest and least cognitive overhead choice when forced to make that decision would be to just pick the default browser you would have used anyway, like Safari on iPhone or Chrome on Android. So the uptick must be the result of people actually wanting different browsers now that they have been made aware of the other options and presented with a convenient Choice up front. Which makes sense for the eu, considering as other commenters have said the recent distrust and resentment of American tech companies there.
I'm more hopeful. Just as most wouldn't bother digging through their settings to change their browser away from Safari, they also won't bother digging through their settings to change their browser _back_ to Safari. I think it'll make a small dent, which can hopefully be capitalised on later.
I've tried it on IOS a while back, but found the UI a bit clunky and either blocking too much screen real-estate or making tab-switching too cumbersome. But it's certainly a cool project, especially by providing ublock origin on IOS.
> Also small browsers, that are all chromium based
Why is that a problem? Implementing a browser from scratch is an insanely complicated task (bloody Microsoft abandoned it!), and Chromium is kind of the gold standard. It's unrealistic to expect anyone to develop a new browser entirely from scratch.
Because it gives companies with resources to direct the development of chromium de facto power to control web standards. Also, what makes chromium the gold standard compared to, say, Firefox?
Blink has overwhelming power over the web by this point. People are already mistaking Blink-only APIs for web standards and complaining that other browsers aren’t implementing them. We’re on the cusp of the bad old days of a browser monopoly and Safari is the only real hedge against it. Even Mozilla doesn’t care about Firefox any more.
This could have been fantastic, but has been bureaucratted to shitdom by the EU in the same way they "solved" daylight savings time.
Mozilla will now need to invest the limited resources they have to port Gecko to iPhones in the EU — read: _iPhones_ and iPhones only, not iPads, and not for any market other than the EU.
Meanwhile, everyone will install Chrome, and we're done with the second wave of the browser wars.
As far as I know there no browser yet on iOS in EU using a different engine than WebKit. The main issue seems to be that it has to be EU-only and companies would have to maintain two applications.
It's really a short sighted vision from Mozilla (and others).
No doubt that further regions will just copy/paste/modify the current EU framework and apply it locally, there's already discussions in Japan, South Korea and so on (1).
Saying "We have no plans to maintain two version of the browser just for the EU" is just ignoring what is likely to happen in the future: An extension of this specific EU legislative framework in several parts of the world.
Why 2 applications? You mean a webkit version and the real Firefox? What is even the benefit of using another browser on current iOS if it's the same as safari under the hood? Just a bit of UI?
I _really_ hope Mozilla will pull their thumb out on this, but the baffling omission of iPads, and the EU-exclusivity of the law, make this an unattractive endeavour in terms of investment.
I really can't understand how the EU let iPads off the hook. Can someone explain that?
Because the law defines a “gatekeeper” of a platform not by market power (which would actually make sense), but having more than a threshold number of users. iPad is not a popular enough platform to qualify.
I'm assuming that it's on its way. The path is now clear, but I assume that the engineering is not going to be as easy as dumping the code on a Mac and getting a working iOS/Gecko, lol.
There’s an old joke about the hotels in a beach town nearby that are owned by a Vegas casino owner and how he has them wired up and ready to go the day the state legalizes gambling.
Not having Firefox built on Gecko ready to go is an absolutely massive misstep from Mozilla. I’m having trouble understanding how their leadership didn’t prioritize this based purely on the timeline of public proceedings I had available to me. Presumably they had even more advanced knowledge. What has Mozilla been prioritizing?
> In iPhones, users can see the choice screen only when they click Safari, and then users are shown a list of browsers with no additional information, said Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, CEO of Norway's Vivaldi.
> "The process is just so convoluted that it's easiest for (users) to select Safari or potentially some other known name," he said.
> The complicated design has led European Commission to start a non-compliance investigation into whether Apple may be preventing users from truly exercising their choice of services.
It's very fun to see that the EU is refusing to give up and take Apple's passive aggressive compliance on any front!
Blatant a-holish behavior towards tens of millions of users should and will be punished. Plus its outright childish, exactly opposite direction Apple tries so hard via marketing to project itself into.
Maybe few hundred millions additional fine will cool some oversized egos in management. If not, add 0, and keep repeating, we are too sweet and rich market to ignore and continuously insult.
How anybody can buy products form this company and feel they are buying from somehow better and more moral vendor than rest of the market is beyond my understanding.
Just think, you and I are lucky enough to be on a website chock-full of iPhone apologists, $AAPL owners and enterprising madmen. The comments can only get better from here.
> How anybody can buy products form this company and feel they are buying from somehow better and more moral vendor than rest of the market is beyond my understanding
I can’t read the article, it just gives an opening paragraph with no actual statistics but based on other comments it appears that it’s the predictable result: a chrome only web.
But aren't a lot of people looking to move away from Chrome because they're going to break ad blockers and Edge and co are just going to keep that breaking change so people need to look for smaller browsers that will still allow them to block ads.
EU is not working for Firefox, I'm not sure why you'd expect that. Now people can choose, which includes the choice to stay in the same garden (less walled now).
What makes you think they expect the EU working for Firefox? It is not indicated at all in the comment. Is your world view already that there is only Webkit-, Blink- or Gecko based browsers?
We steered into a corner that is hard to get out of...
Who cares about the piping underneath? The only thing important about that is if they all display the same thing for the same HTML&JS.
Chrome has been becoming the new IE with the websites giving the best experience on Chrome - only. That's the risk.
What pipes the browser makers choose to rely on is between them and pipe makers I guess. Probably the pipe makers should focus on the developer experience.
It's all fun and games until the websites you need (bank, local government, etc) only support the pipes build by a tech corp in a faraway country. Diversity is good and healthy.
>until the websites you need (bank, local government, etc) only support the pipes build by a tech corp in a faraway country
they don't get to decide this if push comes to shove. Banks and governments in European jurisdictions obviously can be forced to comply with European laws and if there was some geopolitical question about security you can just force them to switch to a local fork of Chromium which given that it's open source is technically relatively trivial.
It's the same as Linux essentially. The overwhelming majority of commits comes from RedHat, Huawei and Samsung or other international corps which is fine because there's always the implicit option to fork it. We don't need fifty different kernels given that we're talking about open source software. In the olden days of Internet explorer and dependence on proprietary software this argument made sense because you could theoretically be squeezed without an ad-hoc alternative, but that's not the case any more.
Everyone should care. Chromium is built to further Google’s interests.
From the long lasting first party cookies to the ease of fingerprinting the engine is designed to make advertising more effective. But hey who cares about privacy.
U.S.-based DuckDuckGo Chrome (truly a disappointment)
Norway-based (actually Chinese-based) Opera Chrome
Hurray, "small" browsers are winning! Gud news everyone! :)
We need to establish some name for this bullshit. For example similar to "greenwashing" in the energy sector, we can call this disinformation campaign a "chromewashing".
PS: not that I expected a quality journalism from the unknown site forth,news, but not even mentioning Firefox as a true real alternative in the whole article is baffling. Sure, it gets a small mention in the end, but not on it's own merits, but as an example of some Apple's business process problem. Not a word that this is the only Chrome alternative left on some OSes.
If you follow the money it all leads back to Alphabet Inc. anyways, even in Mozilla's case - from that perspective it might be reasoned that a differentiation is unnecessary.
From a purely technical standpoint you are correct, of course.
Oh, we are using ad hominems now, great. My answer is 0 (zero).
Now the counter question - how much money did you personally contribute directly (taxes don't count) to any alternative to anything you were dissatisfied with? Name the issue and the amount. If you will not name at least one issue, I will consider that lie (deliberate or by omission).
And the second question to you - how the hell is YOUR question even relevant to the discussion of Google's browser monopoly?
I contribute every month to wikipedia, EFF, Gentoo and some others. The amount is 5 to 20$, depending on project. Issues: Wikipedia - obviously no good alternative. EFF - for fighting the idiot lawmakers and corporations. Gentoo because I hate systemd. There is no browser on the list, but I will correct that.
My question is relevant because (almost) nobody supports an alternative to the monopoly, yet you complained about it.
I’m pretty sure this makes Google happy too: I’ve been seeing a lot more ads about Google chrome with an iPhone on YouTube.
I guess gmail might not stop asking you to make sure you want to open a link with your default browser instead of chrome, even if you click “remember my choice”.
Thank you, I was wondering if that was just coincidence. Google has been pushing Chrome ever since Apple announced BrowserKit. And they do it on their own platforms (which is free for them) with features Safari also has.
Apple might need to start paying google for ads to counter-promote safari.
Google must be thrilled. The last hold out iOS will now be dominated by Chromium browsers.
Which means that Apple’s anti-tracking mechanisms will be rendered ineffective and we will see a new pro-advertising world where every advertiser will be able to track you with ease. Or did people forget how Google makes its money ?
All championed by the very developers who say they care about privacy and competition.
1. If you base your browser on Chromium you do not install Google tracking.
2. On iOS there were already multiple browsers , so Google could have already used their "Chrome = Safari skin" to track your browsing. So google always advertised and promoted their browser, now it will just have a better engine under the skin.
What I am referring to is (a) the maximum lifetime of first party cookies which is used by advertisers for retargeting and tracking and (b) the reckless way Google adds API e.g. MIDI without minimising fingerprinting.
These are what are embedded in the Chromium engine.
> last hold out iOS will now be dominated by Chromium browsers.
Only if Apple fails to ship a competitive default. Hell, if sideloading worked right I doubt most users would even feel the need for a different browser.
Apple just makes the whole web experience crappy. So that you install some app that tracks much more than a website could dream of. And they get their cut.
When harmful for competition: “We’ll say it’s good for user choice”.
When harmful to users: “We’ll say it’s good for competition.”
The act of writing a law that will result in Google’s Chrome total market dominance will of course fall under “user choice”.
Meanwhile music streaming market leader Spotify has announced a price increase of 9% in the UK (and assuredly others soon) and simultaneously demonetised all artists with less than 1000 streams per annum.
Naturally the EU has nothing to say about that because it’s one of their own this time.
> The act of writing a law that will result in Google’s Chrome total market dominance will of course fall under “user choice”.
I mean... yeah.
Users want stuff. They want emulators, YouTube song downloaders, game streaming and online games, the sorts of things Apple otherwise mediates on the App Store. The web can conditionally provide that to them if their browser has enough features, so these locked-down users then are driven to fringe featuresets.
In an ideal world, your phone just installs software like your computer and you don't need to use your browser to enable basic native functionality. Unfortunately, making software "just work" requires developers to pay an annual fee and arm-wrestle with a distributor that doesn't care about them. The web, in all it's mangled madness, becomes a more viable platform than a computer's native runtime. If you owned any other device that worked that way, you'd be rightfully furious.
And so, Apple dug their own grave. Their entire business theory revolves around getting developers to create high-quality native experiences, but the incentive to do so is lower on their platforms than anywhere else in the industry. The software people pay for today isn't native Mac apps, it's B2B cloud infrastructure and cross-platform Electron apps. Apple's philosophy has staunchly failed, and the longer they stick to their guns the more dissatisfied users will become.
If Apple wants to invest in a future where Chrome doesn't dominate, then they need to ship a competing browser. Keeping a userbase hostage does not qualify as maintaining a competitive market.
> I’m pretty sure this makes Google happy too: I’ve been seeing a lot more ads about Google chrome with an iPhone on YouTube.
I'm unsure if that's irony or not, but Google having to advertise Chrome instead of showing ads that other organisations have paid for is probably a loss for them (depends on how you quantify the revenue from the usage metrics of Chrome per user, which I don't know).
What a hypocrisy. At one hand they encourage free market, and on the other they do shit like this. This rent-seeking-from-US-corpos model isn't gonna work long for EU. Camel's back will be broken and everyone will regret, including this stupid policy makers.
When something gets too big, laws are necessary to allow competition. See USA breaking up Standard Oil and AT&T. Also USA almost breaking up Microsoft.
Otherwise you will ends up in Russia-style oligarchy.
What massive corporate breakup happened in past 2-3 decades? People keep referring those few cases but that was world and generations away, current politics (regardless who is at helm) are completely different and much more pro-megacorporations.
Free markets don't work. Corporations absolutely will abuse their position and power to establish monopolies wherever they can, blocking any new entrants to the market. I wonder how we (europeans) would ever regret regulation to stifle monopolistic behaviours from American behemoths.
As long as you don't interpret monopoly to have to mean 100% market share, but an overwhelming portion of the market, enough to be able to disrupt it, prevent any new entrants, and abuse the leading position without the fear of repercussions, plenty.
* Google in search, video, browser, email
* Meta in social media for massive age segments (what, 30-70?; younger than that may be on Snapchat/TikTok (too))
* Amazon in online retail, and specifically in online books and e-readers
* Microsoft in desktop OS and productivity suite, especially for business
If we go into oligopolies, where there are a very small amount of market players that can still abuse their position, we can also add video and audio streaming, mobile phones and tablets, CPU and GPU manufacturers, smart watches, etc.
you forgot to mention that free market does not exist anywhere. It's a 'free market bounded by laws' and each country, including US are free to design different laws for their market and companies are free to compete inside this bounded market. It's the same in EU. I'm certain there are no developed countries where marked isn't bounded by the laws/antitrusts/regulations/monopoly prevention and so on
I know now that if i change my mind i can go to settings and pick any other browser.
And not thank you Apple because this is not the case in non EU countries and not the case for iPad, because EU did not classified ipads same way as iphones and Apple Inc took advantage of this instead of unifying user experience.