this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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While Gecko should absolutely be made available for iPhone, it's worth noting there's nothing wrong with WebKit per se. It's open source (forked from KHTML), servers as the base for among others the GNOME Web browser, and is not a monopoly player (outside of iPhones).
In some messed up way, Apple's WebKit insistance has helped competition in the browser market by making sure there's at least one popular platform where Blink is not dominating...
Damn, I never saw it that way. In that regard the EU regulation could actually harm the browser market, because it lowers the incentive for service providers to support anything but Chrome. At the moment that would exclude all iPhone users (which hurts business, because that's a lot of users with large pockets). But then they could simply shrug and tell their users to install Chrome. ποΈ
In the other way, there are multiple hacky workarounds needed for bugs Apple is too lazy to fix, since everyone has implemented workarounds on their end. I guess the pendulum swings in both ways.. luckily, there are enough people using firefox on desktop , so that at least gecko is supported basically anywhere (this would still apply to webkit since most iPhone user just use the standard and donβt bother installing alternative browsers, except if their business uses Microsoft which forces you to have edge installed to open links from teams)
Blink is open source, but it's more in a look-but-don't-touch sort of way. Google uses their position to push their own standards without consulting others. This has the effect of making the web less open, since it is more closely tied to a single implementation.
It doesn't really compare to Linux very well, as it's very rare for an application to only support linux unless it's very niche or for some reason tied to Linux. You don't go to some government service site and have it show a banner "sorry, we only tested this on Linux, everyone else use that."