IDK if Firefox is better or worse to use, I just know I don't want to use a Google browser. So I use Firefox, like on my desktop.
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
428 points (99.8% liked)
Technology
66231 readers
4768 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Firefox, which has most of the desktop extensions also working on mobile.
Except for iOS
I believe that apple restricted other browser makers to using safari mobile as a base. Not sure if that's true/changed, but I'm too lazy to look it up. So maybe take that with a helping of salt.
They have.
Cool, rare instance of my memory not being completely shot 👍
This is true in America. In the EU, Apple was recently forced to allow third-party browsers. But even in the EU, developing those third-party browsers will take time and money.
Thanks! I knew about the EU rule, and I'd heard they're basically maliciously complying?
Also, off topic, funny that you replied to this at probably the exact same time I was reading one of your comments in a different thread. Was a really well thought out comment, and I appreciated your take. 👍
Hah yeah, Lemmy is a much smaller community than Reddit. I have started tagging users, and it’s surprising how often I see the same tags in the comments sections.
That is on Apple, unfortunately. Every browser on the App Store is a safari engine with whatever browsers skin on top, essentially.
I thought they lost the court battle about that and were told that they had to actually allow other engines, but I haven't heard anything else since then.
Orion browser on IOS is compatible with firefox AND chrome extensions
Been happily using Firefox and Firefox focus on Android for years. With unlock Origin on Firefox.
Libre wolf version is underway too!
Ironfox is the hardened FF/mobile librewolf
Recently moved to fennec, is ironfox better?
Yes, fennec is nowhere near as hardened/privacy/security focused
Thanks! I will swit h to ironfox.
Really? The FAQ on their page states otherwise :(
maybe? I read it was being worked on. I'm maybe a bit too optimistic
Only in that they are both particularly anti-competitive. Mobile Safari is, whatever all others may say, far better than chrome, and it’s a pretty awesome browser.
But it does have some limitations to it that a very vocal minority absolutely hates. And that’s fair, but let’s get real about what is “holding back” other browsers: market share in monopoly.
Apple only allowed browsers on ios to use webkit, so they quite literally were holding back browser development.
This has only recently been changed, and it appears you can only use an alternate browser engine in the EU, so they are still holding back mobile web browser development for people in most countries.
load more comments
(12 replies)
I get your point that it's not specifically Chrome or specifically Safari that are holding other browsers back, but Apple and Google own the vast majority of market share in mobile devices and by extension, browsers used in mobile devices. I think that's the crux of what the investigation is getting at
Although I may not have been as effective as seeing it, that’s pretty much what I was trying to say. Thank you, I suppose, for putting it into more understandable and relatable terms.
Safari definitely gets more hate than it deserves. I find it to be perfectly acceptable.
I would prefer more competition though, even though I know today it’ll be a ton of “cram some AI into it” slop.
Personally, I find Safari to be a goddamn amazing browser, especially considering a lot of its features. People here, the free and open source folk, absolutely hate it on the sole purpose that it is owned by a corporation. And, although it does share user data, anonymize’s that data to a great degree, and also prevents fingerprinting. Also, Apple does not sell it data that it collects, they only use it for internal purposes.
I find no problem with that. I think another huge issue is the difficulty in writing Safari extensions – – especially, that you have to pay for access to the developer store (although they may have changed that for Safari ext devs).
I’m a user experience, designer, so whenever gives the best experience to the end user is, obviously, the correct choice. There’s only so much the “experts” get to have a say in how any random individual uses the tools at the disposal.
That said, I absolutely love Safari as a web browser, but I definitely understand how a lot of people do not.
I hate Safari not because it's owned by Apple, but because it makes my life more difficult when doing web development. It's basically the modern Internet Explorer, though admittedly less extreme. It's not rare for it to be the last of the major browsers to implement new standards/features, and it's definitely the most common one to have an incomplete and/or buggy implementation. This sometimes goes on for years when Apple just doesn't care about a feature. There are some fairly widely-used standards today that it still has a buggy/incomplete implementation of.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I feel like mobile safari is more locked into mobile functionality, less capable of doing “real” browser stuff. I’ve only had an iPhone for a few months and I never felt this limited on android using chrome and Firefox.
From a web developer's standpoint, Safari is basically the modern Internet Explorer, though admittedly less extreme. It's not rare for it to be the last of the major browsers to implement new standards/features, and it's definitely the most common one to have an incomplete and/or buggy implementation. This sometimes goes on for years when Apple just doesn't care about a feature. There are some fairly widely-used standards today that it still has a buggy/incomplete implementation of.
Literally, none of this is true. Just because you don’t like Safari doesn’t mean you need to lie about it.
Does it still do that thing where it claims to support a feature but then when you actually try and use it it turns out that it doesn't work? I remember ut used to have a problem with masonry layouts, where it claimed to support them but if you actually used it, it just ignored you and used floats of all things for everything instead.
Maybe, maybe not -- but I'm discounting anything the UK government says on Internet-related issues, so long as they're trying to insert encryption backdoors into everything. For all we know, this is just an attempt to blackmail Apple and Google over the encryption thing.
Please learn some facts about how the CMA operates before discounting it.
The CMA is independent from the government - it does not have a minister calling the shots.
The encryption stuff is coming from the Home Office, which is directly government controlled.
The CMA and the Home Office aren't working together at all - they don't even share an office.
This is not "the government" saying this. It's the independent competition and markets regulator known as the CMA which, whilst publicly funded, isn't run by the government.
They want you to use “apps” even if said “apps” don’t need to be more than a website
That’s largely because the companies want to grab all of your telemetry data, which they can’t do in a browser. Putting it in an app allows them to gather whatever info they want, instead of being siloed inside of a browser.
Also because most phones have operational system's that are more secure than Windows, so a app is a easy way to block everybody that don't fit a profile of optimal users and avoid problems/hacking.
Companies dream of a closed internet accessible only from a controllable environment.
You can't datamine everyone and sell it off as completely as you can with an app running locally on the device. Browser apps are far less profitable across the board. It's all about money.
Oh, I didn't realize this was posted earlier. Thumbnail gave the wrong impression.
I remember reading an article in .net magazine (now apparently defunct) about IE6 and how it was holding back the web. This sort of thing has been going on for ages the problem isn't crap browsers the problem is crap browsers being dominant. Equally dominant browsers aren't a problem unless they're also bad.
So I'm not really all that bothered about Chrome, it's fairly feature complete and although there are other reasons to not like it, lack of support for the latest standards isn't one of them. Safari however has been truly awful for a very very long time now. They've been memes about how bad it is for well over a decade.
chrome can use their dominant market position to kill all other competing browsers, then they can use their monopoly to kill addons and extensions they don't like, slow down or break webpages which go against their interests, and so on.
google having a near-complete monopoly on the web scares me more than most issues in tech
view more: next ›