I don’t expect most iPhone users to ever change their default settings, but it’s nice that it will be possible in a year.
Who knows, maybe one day you can run actual Firefox on them too? :p
Who knows, maybe one day you can run actual Firefox on them too? :p
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.
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Right. Like Apple’s webkit is just the reskinned KDE browser?
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?
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One could ask you the same thing and it would be a more appropriately directed question. Chrome hasn’t been WebKit for literally years.
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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
Ah… Yet another half-assed middle finger from Apple. What a truly dogshit company.
Every other company envies Apple’s position, and if they had the same power they’d build the same walled garden. Companies do whatever is most profitable. Believing otherwise shows a complete ignorance of capitalism.
Unregulated capitalism is guaranteed monopolistic tyranny.
AFAIK, browser choice is still limited (as usual with Apple) because every browser on iOS needs to use Apple’s WebKit engine. That means they only differ in UI.
Not in the EU.
Even though that’s true, I think no one has made their engine for iOS yet.
yeah, its such a small market that it isnt really viable.
My sarcasm detector isn’t going off, so I’ll bite.
A small market?! 450 million afluent consumers not enough for you?
I wonder what counted as “an EU iPhone”?
The serial number? GPS location of the phone? IP address?
How could one outside of EU region to have an “EU iphone”?
An European iPhone, aka an iPhone which will get these features, is identified by a background process named
countryd, introduced in iOS 16. Its only purpose is to compute and predict the most likely location of the user (as in country/region) and lock down features accordingly.These are only some of the factors taken into the equation:
- GPS location
- Wi-Fi location
- Wi-Fi hotspot country codes
- Cellular/GSM country codes
- IP address
- Home and roaming operator regions
- Apple Account region
- Device region
- Satellite reachability
countrydtakes in all of these and more as input to provide the most likely country of the user. If that country is in the EU, then 💥 Sideloading, Default Apps, etc etc etc goodiesdeleted by creator
It’s funny, because I’ve worked on and off in regulation for some of these companies. Leadership always wants a “scalable regulatory solution” and the answer is always “let’s be more open” and leadership is always like “no”
It’s actually not hard to be compliant with the laws of 220+ regions. It’s just being on the edge of each and every restriction is more profitable.
$$$$$$$$
I was in Corfu last week when the news of the Epic store came about, so tried to install it on my UK registered iPhone. All I got was a notification telling me that my phone isn’t eligible.
So yeah, no Fortnite in my phone for me. Not that I really care about that, I just like fiddling with shit.
Brexit means brexit
The gift that keeps on giving.
