That's ok, we don't want your browser.
Safari works perfectly fine on iOS.
Firefox won't land on Apple's iOS until the fruity company relaxes its rules about third party browsers, according to Jay Sullivan, vice president of product at Mozilla. Sullivan spoke on a panel at the SXSW music-and-tech-fest in Austin, Texas, over the weekend, and told the crowd Apple's refusal to allow the installation of …
It's always amazing to me to see the huge number of apps I use routinely that are not available on iOS.
What the fanboys won't tell you is that most of them are using Splashtop and Parallels to run their Windows apps on their iPads and Macs. They haven't really left Microsoft behind at all.
@Andy Prough
Perhaps most fanbois don't really need Microsoft. I run Debian and several Windows instances in Parallels on a couple of Macs. On these machines, I use Windows about once a fortnight for a few minutes to help maintain shrink wrapped (Windows) versions of software that I wrote. I find that OS X and Debian cover all of my needs, and that I don't use Windows for any other purpose.
Admittedly I have retired and am now spared the festering frustration that is SharePoint, Exchanges, Windows Server and Office - Although I do volunteer to maintain some Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 and 8 machines at a Council run over-50s centre (1200+ members), and am profoundly grateful that I no longer have to do this sort of thing for a crust...
Wait, what? You're surprised that Windows apps are not available for iOS? I assume you meant OS X? Because I'm not seeing a great clamor for people to run Quickbooks or Turbotax on their phone or tablet, whether it runs iOS, Android or WP8. There aren't any more Windows apps available on Android than on iOS, and aside from Office and other MS apps, I really doubt the situation is any better on WP8.
Setting aside your point about iOS and Splashtop, since there are more iPhone owners who don't own a Mac than do, I don't see why OS X owners booting Windows to run a few apps is a problem. They've left Windows behind as much as they can, but are currently unable to leave it behind entirely. You seem to see that a victory for Microsoft, but it is more likely a temporary situation they'll remedy over time.
If you own Office on Windows 7 and later buy a Mac, maybe you don't want to pay for it again on OS X? But if/when you ever decide to upgrade it, you might buy it on OS X next time, or decide that the not-quite-100% compatibility offered by iWork or LibreOffice is "good enough". I have an iPhone and run a Linux desktop, but my laptop dual boots Windows 7. Mostly I just boot it for iTunes (oh, the irony) I used to use Office on Windows often but LibreOffice is so good now it doesn't matter anymore. I have an old copy of Office that I didn't even bother to install on Windows 7 because I haven't had any reason to do so yet.
Don't overthink it - I was talking about lack of iOS apps like alternate keyboards, of which my Android device has about 50 billion different ones I could download if I wanted.
>"my laptop dual boots Windows 7. Mostly I just boot it for iTunes (oh, the irony)"
I think you just made my point for me. Meantime, I can interact with the Google Play music manager or the Amazon mp3 cloud on practically any device.
Did you ever read the article? Chrome isn't banned, it already has an iOS port. They just can't use V8, only JavaScriptCore. They already use Webkit anyways, so that's the same.
Firefox is also not banned, they just refuse to port because they want to use Gecko.
Oh I do apologise - theyre only banned from using their own rendering engine. Not a big deal at all, forcing them to be a deliberately slower re-skin of Safari. Nnnnnope. Nothing wrong with that. How could anyone cry foul?
And if you think all versions of Webkit are created equal, you're wrong.
By the way, I did know all that, but 'as far as I'm concerned Safari re-skins don't count as separate browsers, so the real, full-fat versions of Chrome and Firefox are indeed banned from iOS, no?
Hardly a fair comparison? Why?
iOS is a traditional operating system, and Safari runs on top of it. Gecko *could* run on it, but Apple won't let them.
B2G / Firefox OS is Firefox. The actual base of the OS you develop on is Gecko. Everything is rendered by it. It's like asking why you can't run Safari inside Firefox on the desktop.
So, yeah. That's why.
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Apple has the same monopoly on tablets, and Cook often says it himself - what better proof? Thereby why EU keeps on fining MS which no longer has any monopoly in the browser market is really beyond understanding. Moreover while Windows came with IE preinstalled, *it never forbade to install another one*. While Apple does that exactly, and EU doesn't complain - it's really strange....
Let me explain
See, Apple is the name of the company that produces iOS but it's also the name of a fruit.
Now pay attention as this is where it gets a bit botanical or what have you.
The thing about your basic apple (the fruit) is that it has a quality that could be described as "fruity" and the thing about Apple corp, your basic Apple corp thing, is that it's named after said, fruity fruit. So the writer of this article decided - and I hope you are prepared for this humdinger of a pun realization - to use the term to describe Apple.
I hope I have been able to put your mind at ease by explaining this clearly enough. If you need further assistance the El Reg news desk may be willing to borrow Anna on a consultancy basis so she may try her hand at explaining.
@Destroy All Monsters
"I hope we can fall back to "Foxconn rebadger"."
Yes, but ( according to Wikipedia), that could be:-
Acer Inc. (Taiwan); Amazon.com (United States); **Apple Inc. (United States)**; Cisco (United States); Dell (United States); Google (United States); Hewlett-Packard (United States); Microsoft (United States); Motorola Mobility (United States); Nintendo (Japan); Nokia (Finland); Sony (Japan); Toshiba (Japan); or Vizio (United States)
"I hope we can fall back to "Foxconn rebadger"."
Yes, but ( according to Wikipedia), that could be:- [nearly anyone]
That's why the only acceptable, precise alternative is "fruity Foxconn rebadger". That should make the OP happy.
("Your Honor, I object! Counsel is rebadgering the witness.")
@Nicho
I occasionally pop over to the Mac Daily News website to remind myself what true, unrestrained mac zealotry (bordering on a mental disorder) looks like. They always shove tons of 'trash talk' names in article tags and based on article comments the term you are looking for is "Samdung". High brow wit, as I am sure you will agree.
@GBL Initialiser
no explanation needed, I get the reference... my issue is that when you use it 100,000 times, article after article, it gets kinda boring.
It would be great to have writers with just a *tiny* bit more creativity in their slags.
it used never be this bad, there was a time, sniff sniff, i miss those days... witty writers, great one liners, titles WITHOUT random words capitalised...
Many people who read this web site have tendencies towards open source and although a little distorted sometimes, overall a sense of fairness - hence stories like this being popular.
I think it is very interesting to view Apple with their almost anti-opensouce approach and from a tech and a business point of view how Apple are managing with so much self censorship of other technologies.
Sure we can all manage without flash, but now we can't have adblock (because it runs a local proxy) ... oh and here goes firefox ... I already gave up trying to watch movies and tv shows on my ipad because I dont have the time or disk space to re-encode everything for iTunes.
Apple are just the grumpy rich kid in the playground who only lets you play with his power rangers if you promise not to like smelly steve balmer....
If you're wanting to just drop files onto your ipad try iFiles. Works great most of the time.
If you want to stream from a network share, try Air Video Server (which works brilliantly) or one of many others.
If you want to stream from a DLNA share try iMediaShare.
Lots to chose from, and the iMediashare thing works from android too.
OK... I'll bite.
1. Nothing to do with this article.
2. Most of that malware is circulating in China and is focused at non-google branded devices. So.. For example, a nexus 7 is fine, and finally if you stay on safe android stores such as the play store the worst problem you are likely to have is some adware. As compared to iOS app store were you are likely to contract a bad case of the up-yourself-itis or perhaps a severe case of infection from the closed-mindedness strain of the jerkwad disease.
Reality distortion field much?
I do not normally do grammar Nazi corrections but that one gets so far up my nose that I cannot help myself this time. "You're" is a contraction of "you are", it is not the fucking personal pronoun "your". Non-specific Deity on a prosthesis! That one really makes me feel as if someone is slowly scratching their finger nails down a blackboard.
I find the opposite version slightly more annoying. [ie. using "your" to mean you are]. But both pale into insignificance next to using "then" instead of "than" as a comparitive or saying you "could care less" about something when you mean the exact opposite.
The weird/annoying/puzzling thing is that, no matter how many times these retard errors are pointed out , people still continue to repeat them over and over and over again. I guess some people are just so monumentally thick that learning the correct spelling of a couple of very very commonly used 4- and 5-letter words is beyond their intellectual abilities
"The weird/annoying/puzzling thing is that, no matter how many times these retard errors are pointed out , people"
If there's one thing that really winds me up, it's adding a space between the end of a word and the following comma.
Touché —needless to say I only noticed that after I hit submit. However, I think it's pretty unsporting of you not to abide by the commandment "Thou shalt make a grammatical mistake thyself, in any post criticising other peoples' grammar", in your own post.
"Thou shalt make a grammatical mistake thyself, in any post criticising other peoples' grammar"
Yes, but your error was one of typography, not grammar.
(Conjecture: The series of English-usage pedantry corrections does not converge.)
Actually my error was caused by the fiddliness of trying to belatedly insert the comma into the text at the proof-reading stage, using my iPhones tiny screen and hence iOS's fuckwitted text-selection/insertion methods.
I don't really know* what that has to do with the argument in question but "So there!" anyway.
*[and yes, I split the fuck out of that infinitive too!]
"[Mozilla's] status as a not-for-profit also helps it to ignore iOS. Browser-makers all crave market share and make a little coin, if they are so inclined, by getting device-makers to bundle their products with their devices. Mozilla's exempt from the sales side of things, and while it is currently advertising a Sales Engineer's role that job is focussed on enthusing partners rather than bringing cash through the door."
So everyone who works at Mozilla works there on a volunteer basis, without pay? That Google contract brings in a lot of money. Are you under the impression that it all goes to UNICEF?
It's a sarcastic, but fair, point. "Not for profit" just means they don't (intentionally) attempt to earn more than they spend. It does not mean they aren't trying to pull in as much money as possible. There are lots of "Not for profit" organisations which are anything but charities and it's stunning how many people don't seem to realise the difference (the author of this article apparently being a pretty good case in point)
I certainly hope that FF on WP8 does *not* work like FF for Android.
I would hope, for your sake, that it works BETTER.
FF on Android is pitiful. As an FF desktop user, it was a massive disappointment. I really tried to like it, I really did. Sync was great but the rendering was so painfully slow that I was forced to abandon it for Opera Mobile.
Thank goodness. Salvation!
I switched from FF to Opera just under 2 months ago; FireFox's rendering was simply too painful to bear any longer.
I don't CARE if people believe that FF is better due to plugins and greater user controls (it does). The main function of a browser is to RENDER, and FF is a complete speed failure in that regard. Waiting twice as long as just about any other browser for a web page to appear gets old, no matter how much I wanted to support the project.
Sometimes, the wankers on this board lose sight of the forest through the trees.i
I don't CARE if people believe that FF is better due to plugins and greater user controls (it does). The main function of a browser is to RENDER
The main function of a browser is to please the user. Since there is a great variety of users, it is hardly surprising that there should be some difference of opinion as to which is the most pleasing.
Thus anyone insisting, here or elsewhere, that one browser is objectively superior to the others is clearly committing a fallacy.
I AM, thank you very much.
If you want to feel superior while waiting for FireFox to load a page, while I, running Opera, am already *reading* that same page, be my guest.
Yes, FF has extensions and more features but too bad using it simply sucks. Non-intuative bookmarks, manual scroll all the way back to the top on a long page (is Opera-style 'super jump to top/bottom' arrow really too much to ask?) and painful load times on complex pages made it simply too unpleasant to use every day.
> Any link in email or another app therefore opens in Safari, even when Chrome is present.
The Android approach is to present the user a choice every time a relevant link or file is tapped... ie, click a link, and asked which browser to use. Is there any way to set a 'default action' in Android?
"> Any link in email or another app therefore opens in Safari, even when Chrome is present.
The Android approach is to present the user a choice every time a relevant link or file is tapped... ie, click a link, and asked which browser to use. Is there any way to set a 'default action' in Android?"
Either click the checkbox for "always use" or click the "always use" or "this time only" button, depending on how old a verzion of Android you're using. IIRC the latter method is valid for ICS and later.
"Is there any way to set a 'default action' in Android?"
I was confused by this for a while. Every time I clicked the 'Always use' choice I got a popup telling me to clear default associations in some other menu. And next time I needed a browser it would give me the same choice, so it didn't seem to be working.
I think (ICBW) that you get the choice for every new file type - so .htm, .html, .php etc. all get the choice popup the first time you see them, although because it doesn't say what it's asking about you don't see that, it just seems to be asking every time.
I've taken to picking the same browser always and over a week or so it does seem to be setting them for most variants and I'm getting asked less.
It's a pity browsers don't come with a decent set already configured, or offer to take over a group of associations like IrfanView does for images instead of having to pick them one at a time...
"The Android approach is to present the user a choice every time a relevant link or file is tapped... ie, click a link, and asked which browser to use. Is there any way to set a 'default action' in Android?"
They're called "intents", and the requester that pops up offers you a list of handlers and buttons for "Always" and "Just Once". The "Always" thus is stored as a default action for that type of intent (and can be reset in system settings).
HTH
"Any link in email or another app therefore opens in Safari, even when Chrome is present."
// Open a link in Chrome, if it's installed
if([[UIApplication sharedApplication] canOpenURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"googlechrome:"]]) {
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"googlechrome://%@", theUrl]]];
} else {
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:theUrl]];
}
Also, here's a reasonable explanation as to why the Nitro JS engine isn't open to other apps: http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/nitro_ios_43
It's all about the malware.
Are you saying that every application must have a condition for every possible browser that the user has installed? Does this also handle the "default" browser if the user has multiple third-party browsers installed? Is the googlechrome:// schema an "application" schema or a hack Chrome has used to allow links to be launched?
I know, lots of questions, I'm genuinely curious, I'm an Android dev but not iOS, this seems almost clunky.
Android you just "open" the URL and the OS takes care of what applications can handle that URL and the default choice.
No, not all. Just correcting the story, as it said all email links and apps open in Safari.
My apps can check for the presence of a bunch of browsers, then allow the user to pick their desired browser to open links with. It's a few minutes of coding.
I do agree that Apple should have a default browser switch in the Settings though.
Isn't this similar M$ and IE, surely the inability to allow another browser to be made default could be classed as anti competitive under the EU law the same way as M$ has gotten done a few times.
With regards to not allowing other rendering engines surely so long as it isn't gaining access to anything that Webkit cannot access then again this could be classed as Anti Competitive.
I hate Safari on the ipad, did get momentarily excited when they announced fullscreen surfing in iOS6 but turned out to be solely for the iphone - no choices bruv. The back button on Safari is the only badly-designed-for-touch feature in the entire operating system - and the only way to go back a page...
I installed iCabMobile as a great replacement (downloads, full screen option, two finger tap to go back a page), but you're 'not allowed' (what am I, fucking 6?) to use it as your default browsing software, natch.
If I jailbreak (I did it once, I felt so naughty), I can setup my personal browser preference, or even install a trick that gives you Safari full screen and finger based back-a-page goodness, but losing the JB on every update got old. Fast.
I look at the time spent jailbreaking as an investment, once payed I don't get annoyed EVERY. SINGLE. TIME a link opens in Safari rather than my prefered AtomicWeb browser. That I can then enable the Nitro JS engine so the aforementioned browser isn't being run deliberately piss-slow.
Don't be so quick to run an update every time Apple forgot to test something, half the time you might find it won't affect you anyway.
Apple's choice is to hold constant the appearance and behavior of core features such as phone, email, web, and to prohibit arbitrary code execution except by the Apple JavaScript engine (thus minimizing the exploit attack surface). Whereas Android users must observe certain behaviors for matching benefits. Those behaviors may be natural for Reg readers, if not for the billions of ungeeky. It seems to me there are benefits in both approaches, but the chances are that millions of Android users will at some point in the coming decades be using an exploited smartphone, beyond Google's or their own control, even if that outcome is exceedingly unlikely for readers of the Reg.
Apple's approach has its place in the market.
Tough spot for Mozilla because iOS market share is still ramping up and can't be forced to offer browser-engine choice yet (outside of a cloud-based browser like Opera Mini -- which is fantastic for faster 3G browsing or saving 80% on your mobile data plan).
@Simon:
You should update your article because iOS *does* allow changing the default browser setting to Chrome or Opera Mini, if desired; i.e., see settings panel in Instapaper.
"The foundation is, however, happily producing an Android version of Firefox, so isn't missing out on the surge towards mobile entirely."
And... y'know, producing a competing operating system that actually _is_ Firefox. That might have some impact on their mobile footprint. Slightly. It reads like the author doesn't even know Firefox OS exists. That would be.... special.