Another thing of interest in the Apple announcement is the ability to use our own browser core. We need to understand all the details there and clearly there is a concern that we would have to have two binaries, one for the EU and one for the rest of the world, but at least EU users will get a better browser! I hope the rest of the world will too!

#Apple #DMA #Regulation #Unity #AppStore #Linux

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-announces-changes-to-ios-safari-and-the-app-store-in-the-european-union/

@jon would it be rather straightforward to port the android version to iOS or is that a whole new development? And is Chromium ready to run on iOS in the first place? Trying to get a bit of a feel for the timeline here. It's OK to answer with the good old "WIR" (when it's ready)

@jon and what do you know, suddenly half of the world "are EU citizens" wherever there's an option 😄

@WildEnte , I think you will find that there is already work underway to make Chromium run natively on iOS and we do run on top of Chromium our selves as well, so I hope this will not be too bad.

Our UI code on iOS is native and should stay the same. The changes are under the hood.

@jon
I assume "our own browser core" means Chromium. How is that an improvement? The number one criticism of Vivaldi has always been that you use Chromium. Both the whole browser monoculture thing, and whether we can really trust that you managed to remove every piece of Google spyware. Who can afford the better engineers? Google engineers hiding the spyware or Vivaldi engineers finding and removing it?

We get it, Presto is not coming back, but Vivaldi on iOS using Safari makes it one of the few alternatives to the Google monoculture.

@leeloo , the difference is that we can change Chromium, but Webkit we cannot change. It is a black box.

It is also a lot easier for us to work with a single, better codebase, instead of two.

Note that Mozilla is very much agreeing with us here. They also want to run their own code in iOS instead of using the Webkit black box.

@jon
All fair points. Except Mozilla is not pushing Chromium, they have their own Gecko engine (like Presto).

Still, the monoculture is getting worse, and in the end you may not have the option to change Chromium either. Because once Google dominance is absolute, every web server will have some DRM-like code checking that you are running "unmodified genuine Google-authorized Chrome".

If you don't believe this dystopian future can become reality, then imagine explaining modern iOS and Android app stores to yourself 30 years ago. It would have sounded just as dystopian.

@leeloo , I think we have to make sure it does not go there. It would not help to use another code base. If you are blocked by a site, you are blocked by a site. This is something I know a lot about. Being on another codebase would just not make that particular problem go away.