Firefox spokesperson Christopher Hilton tells The Verge that the browser has seen a more than 50 percent jump in users in Germany and a nearly 30 percent increase in France.
Brave saw a similar increase in users after Apple started letting users choose their default browsers on iOS 17.4 in the EU last week.
I thought Firefox said that they were going to have to write two different browsers so they weren’t going to.
They are still exploring options. They’ve told the press that all the iOS gecko work is still being researched.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/07/mozilla_google_apple_webkit/
Why would they? They already have a Mac build, I can’t imagine it’d be that huge of a difference, but maybe iOS is a lot more different than I realize.
The APIs are similar but the hardware requires a different appraoch.
For example touch screen input is very different to mouse input - you need to decifer imprecise user input… and then provide precise input to webpages that are designed assuming the user has a mouse. There are touch APIs on the web, but developers tend not to use those APIs because dealing with imprecise input sucks. For example press a link with your thumb, it will highlight. Lift your thumb, it will go to the link. But if you press, then move your thumb, then release… instead of clicking the link it scrolls the page. Unless you move only a little bit - then it does click…
And the only way to get “all day” battery life out of a 10Wh battery is by keeping the CPU powered off most of the day. Figuring out how to maintain the current state of the webpage, so it can be restored if the CPU is powered off and back on again, without breaking things like JavaScript timers/etc.
FireFox has solved those issues (and others) on Android. But while Android has similar hardware, that operating system is nothing like iOS.
All the work to get Gecko working on Android made sense back int he day, when Android didn’t have a good rendering engine. It would have also made sense back in the early days of the iPhone when WebKit was nowhere near as good as it is now. But today, when someone else has already figured out solutions to every problem? Is it worth reinventing all those wheels?
The new browser option iOS exposed is a very strict and limiting custom API to make a browser engine. It’s purposefully obtuse to be terrible but compliant.
Despite Apple’s lies, iOS and macOS are still pretty different beasts with their own quirks. And iOS is way more tightly locked down and under Apple’s thumb than macs.
Uh, no they’re not. They have the core operating system.
The only real difference is the security model (as you say, tightly locked down), but MacOS has been gradually adopting a lot of that over time. For example / used to be an ordinary volume - these days it’s mounted read only and can’t be written to even with sudo. iOS has always been like that.
They are different operating systems, but only because it’s easier to make a change on one of them, then port that change to the other one later. Possibly years later. In general, they’re pretty close. The main difference is the hardware, not the operating system.
