<story><title>Apple’s browser engine ban is holding back web app innovation</title><url>https://thenewstack.io/apples-browser-engine-ban-is-holding-back-web-app-innovation/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Shank</author><text>A decade ago, Java was derided for letting developers ship apps on multiple platforms while forgoing native controls, with a high memory and storage footprint with the JRE through the JVM. While JavaScript is not Java, it has essentially become Java: instead of shipping a JRE and Jars, it’s the entirety of Chromium, with its JS VM, and a relatively high memory and storage footprint.&lt;p&gt;It seems to me like we haven’t changed much here, resource wise.&lt;p&gt;Then, particularly on mobile devices, many apps recreate native controls with weird quirks or defects that don’t play nicely with the native conventions. Just like in the Java world, you can get “almost perfect” but if the OS updates or a convention changes, the non-native apps are stuck reinventing the wheel to accommodate change (or they ignore it entirely).&lt;p&gt;As a developer, I love writing the same app for multiple places. As a user, I find it infuriating to deal with. While Apple is assuredly being lame by preventing other browser engines (I want Firefox, with WebRequest in blocking mode), they’re not wrong if they think that more PWAs will bring problems.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple’s browser engine ban is holding back web app innovation</title><url>https://thenewstack.io/apples-browser-engine-ban-is-holding-back-web-app-innovation/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iosawwwaaayyy</author><text>I just want ublock origin on iOS.&lt;p&gt;I bought an iPhone after seeing that it had Firefox, but I should have done more research. It&amp;#x27;s not actually Firefox, just a rebranded WebKit. It doesn&amp;#x27;t support extensions.&lt;p&gt;So, after trying a few paid Safari &amp;quot;content blockers&amp;quot; and being dissatisfied, I gave the iPhone away.&lt;p&gt;How is this a different situation from the antitrust case which prevented Microsoft from bundling Internet Explorer and preventing competing browsers in Windows?</text></comment>