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
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.
Even though that’s true, I think no one has made their engine for iOS yet.
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.
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.
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.
have iOS fall under Chrome domination too.
Huh? Chrome is just Apple’s WebKit.
This increase competition a lot. I like it. Sure people using iPhone may not like options, but at least some can now.
I’d love to be able to delete iTunes from the Apple TV OS. How long has that been?
