Kevin Bostic
Apple is too unfriendly to third-party browsers, says Mozilla vice president Jay Sullivan, and Firefox will not be coming to iPads and iPhones until Apple decides to loosen the restrictions governing browsers iOS.
CNet reported Sullivan's comments, which came at a South by Southwest Interactive panel on Saturday. Sullivan says Apple's current rules — which forbid browsers that do not use Apple's version of WebKit — make it so that Firefox cannot build the browser it wants to for Apple's platform.
In addition to the WebKit requirement, iOS prevents users from setting any non-Safari app as the default means of handling browsing. Apple's Mobile Safari is the top mobile browser according to industry reports, with about 60 percent share of all mobile browser usage.
Mozilla pulled its Firefox Home app from Apple's App Store in September of 2012. The company isn't working on an iOS version of Firefox and, according to Sullivan, doesn't have any plans to do so.
Another member of the panel, Dolphin Browser's David Dehgahn, lamented Apple's policy as inhibiting competition.
"Competition is critical to our survival," Dehgahn said. Sullivan and Mike Taylor from Opera Software — which recently released a WebKit-based version of Opera for iOS — agreed, saying that giving consumers browser choice was necessary in order to move the mobile web forward. Users suffer, they said, under Apple's closed system.
CNet's report says that the panel's moderator then performed a quick poll of the audience, asking how many of them were suffering being largely limited to Safari. Very few hands were raised.
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72 Comments
No love lost there. Last thing I want on my iPhone is the irritating PC messages of why a site does not support Browser A vs. Browser B and I don't want to deal with a 3rd-party browser hijacking my default browser settings. It's bad enough on a PC, I don't want it on my iPhone. Mozilla should quit their whining and get on the Webkit bandwagon. The same crybabies were harping on Apple for not supporting Flash so does Mozilla think Apple is really going to bend-over to their demands? Not going to happen.
Mozilla Firefox not coming to iPhone, iPad
So… that, basically.
Ten years ago I would have said so, back when Microsoft controlled everything and decided to make proprietary versions of everything else.
But WebKit doesn't have that problem. And if anything, Safari's slow to adopt rather than quick. If everyone uses WebKit, that will only give more incentive to make Safari a better browser.
And throw away the whole damn reason that makes Apple devices the success that they are?
See ya later Mozilla. Your browser wasn't on iOS devices up until now, I see no reason why users will care whether Apple moves full steam ahead *without* your non-Webkit (why??) browser. We already have a wide selection of browsers to choose from.
Or is Mozilla just smarting like all hell from the rise of Chrome? (which is doing very well with Webkit.)
"CNet's report says that the panel's moderator then performed a quick poll of the audience, asking how many of them were suffering being largely limited to Safari. Very few hands were raised."
Bingo.
Good luck playing the waiting game on that one Mozilla. Apple don't care if you do or don't. They want you to use Webkit as they control it so know what it does and that it's safe.
The concern is that Webkit is coming close to having a monopoly in the browser market. It effectively already does in the mobile and tablet space.
When one rendering engine has a monopoly, that engine becomes the standard, complete with its bugs and foibles. That isn't good for an open, progressive internet. Webkit may have fewer bugs than IE6, but web standards are evolving all the time and the risk is that the Webkit way becomes the only way.