That way Firefox has to submit a different app for Europe, splitting its userbase and making it more complicated for developers. They are pulling every trick they can...
This only in the EU thing is going to bite them in the ass hard. You’re going to get App developers pretending to operate in the EU or moving there just to have more creative freedom.
Users will also find ways of doing the exact same. You can’t have one rule for one group of people and different rules for everyone else.
Mozilla itself lashed out at this decision, as it means they have to maintain both Gecko (for EU) and WebKit (for everybody else) editions of the browser.
Apple. I live in the US. I'm thinking of replacing my current iPad with another tablet. If you let me have real Firefox, I'll probably buy a $750 iPad with a 1500% storage markup as my next tablet. If not, I'll choose an Android tablet. It's so simple, Apple. Huge profit or a lost customer. All because of something so easy to implement.
But I wonder what's Mozillas reaction will be, especially considering they're an american company. Is the GDPR region enough of a reason to port their engine, or will they just drop it.
I bet Apple is betting on them dropping it, but I hope not. Saying that as an Android user.
With iOS 17.4, Apple is making a number of huge changes to the way its mobile operating system works in order to comply with new regulations in the EU.
One of them is an important product shift: for the first time, Apple is going to allow alternative browser engines to run on iOS — but only for users in the EU.
Apple is clearly only doing this because it is required to by the EU’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA), which stipulates, among other things, that users should be allowed to uninstall preinstalled apps — including web browsers — that “steer them to the products and services of the gatekeeper.” In this case, iOS is the gatekeeper, and WebKit and Safari are Apple’s products and services.
Even in its release announcing the new features, Apple makes clear that it’s mad about them: “This change is a result of the DMA’s requirements, and means that EU users will be confronted with a list of default browsers before they have the opportunity to understand the options available to them,” the company says.
Apple argues (without any particular merit or evidence) that these other engines are a security and performance risk and that only WebKit is truly optimized and safe for iPhone users.
But in the EU, we’re likely to see these revamped browsers in the App Store as soon as iOS 17.4 drops in March: Google, for one, has been working on a non-WebKit version of Chrome for at least a year.
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I'm all for this change, but hopefully it means Mozilla will put some more energy into Gecko to make it competitive with WebKit in speed and multimedia capability (P3 colors, HDR images, JPEG-XL, etc)
Just wait till the first security vulnerability are discovered in the code that now will be able to run on iOS and which Apple can't control directly. Nobody will remember that the cause was forcing Apple to open up their system. They will just blame Apple.