• brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    125·
    11 hours ago

    There are some good iOS browsers.

    At the moment, I use Orion (from Kagi) and Narrow32. Quiche Browser is good, DuckDuckGo is fine.

    Discoverability on iOS is awful though. The store is just packed with SEO spam and corporate slop on top of all the passion projects or “benevolent” ones.

    • 4am@lemmy.zipEnglish
      231·
      11 hours ago

      At the moment, iOS doesn’t not allow any other browser engines. Every browser on iOS is just reskinned Safari.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        83·
        10 hours ago

        That’s kind of a blessing in disguise; otherwise basically all web traffic would be Chrome.

        Apparenty this is softening some: https://www.techspot.com/news/108965-japan-gives-apple-december-deadline-drop-ios-browser.html

        And Safari is quite performant on iOS.

        Maybe I’m too cynical, but I wouldn’t mind if that continues, just so there’s some chunk of traffic that isn’t Chrome and that web development doesn’t turn into a complete monoculture. A smidge of Firefox and Safari alone isn’t enough for that.

        (EDIT: My assumption is that if Apple allows Chrome on iOS, you can bet they are going to funnel basically everyone into it).

        • pirateKaiser@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          41·
          10 hours ago

          That traffic only skews the graph like a false positive. While WebKit itself is oss, apple’s tendency to just separate itself from the rest of the world makes it largely irrelevant. There are very few alternative browsers based on webkit for other platforms and the expected benefit of developers having to cater to apple’s choices are thus negligible for the rest of us.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
            61·
            9 hours ago

            Still. I don’t want to be on an internet where Chrome is basically the only develoment target, and for most sites to work properly you have to be on Google’s browser. Safari’s mere existance forces at least some generalization, but that disappears if Google pushes most of those users to Chrome anyway.

            That’s the internet where Google has even more total control.

            • pirateKaiser@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              3·
              9 hours ago

              I agree, my point is that safari’s dominance on iOS is not the light at the end of the tunnel, it does very little to offer alternatives to chromium.