The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) dedicated an appendix to browser engine choice in its recent Mobile ecosystems market study. Alex Russel has written a masterful multi– part series on why Apple’s restriction of browser engines to WebKit is problematic (this presentation of his summarizes his points in 30 minutes). Because all browsers on iOS are forced to use WebKit, they all mostly feature the same functionality and only substantively differ in terms of aesthetics and native connectivity to third-party services (eg. Note that until late 2020, with the release of iOS 14, Apple did not allow users to select a default browser other than Safari.īut the distinction between browsers on iOS is mostly illusory, anyway. A browser engine interprets HTML and other stylistic components of a website and renders them into user-accessible content a separate, JavaScript engine executes JavaScript code. WebKit is the browser engine on which Safari is built. Neither of these browsers would survive the current App Store review process because Apple’s developer guidelines prohibit browser apps, or “apps that browse the web,” from using any browser engine other than Apple’s WebKit. ![]() And yesterday, The Register ascertained from a GitHub commit that Firefox may be developing an iOS browser based on that company’s Gecko browser engine. Last week, The Register reported that Google’s Chromium team has begun developing an iOS browser based on the open-source Blink browser engine.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |