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Mozilla just created a new bug tracker to list all of the ways the big platforms (Windows, IOS/OSX and Android) have used dishonest or disingenuous tactics to keep independent browsers at a disadvantage.
At first glance, fair enough. For anyone who has been in the open source or free software worlds for any length of time it should be mostly common knowledge, too. There is one aspect that I want to present a unique angle on in this post, the "thesis" I'd like to submit, as it were.
Yeah, that's right. I'm defending Apple here. Not because I agree with their policy. Their policy is the worst kind of protectionist crap and it definitely has some negative effects. That said, I think it's obvious at this point that Mozilla, and Firefox, are not going to be any impediment to Google throwing their weight around and just dictating policy to the w3c. They have no appreciable market share, they aren't actually a player anymore. I use Firefox and desperately want them to rise from the ashes, but let's face it - they're in ashes right now. So with that in mind, what is the last player besides Google and Chrome that has any significant market share (and therefore power) in the browser space? Well it's Apple, with their captive audience of IPhone and Macbook devotees, who are all using Safari. Even if they install another browser, if it's running on an Apple device then it's using WebKit to render pages. This means that Google can't take web standards in a direction that Apple won't go without fracturing the internet in two.
There is precedent here. This is not the first time that Apple, by doing the wrong thing with respect to freedom, has inadvertantly made the internet a better place. I'm sure that a lot of those reading this will remember the absolute horror that we all used to face any time some web dev wanted to make things more "interactive" or play media directly in the browser. I'm talking about Flash of course. At one point Flash was so entrenched in the fabric of the internet that it became a de-facto standard. Nobody actually liked it. Anyone who was using Linux, BSD or any other OS that wasn't Windows really hated it because they were either ignored entirely or treated like third class citizens. We jumped through crazy complicated hoops sometimes to install it anyway. There was a FreeBSD port which installed a full CentOS chroot and used binary emulation in order to run the Linux Flash plugin inside your browser. But even then, the official Linux version of the plugin was always several versions behind what was available on Windows, prone to crashing and liked to eat all of your memory for breakfast.
Then, when the original IPhone came out, Apple killed it.
Literally nobody saw it coming. Apple decided that due to the buggy nature of Flash, particularly on any platform other than Windows (the Flash plugin never worked well on Apple devices, either), that users of the new IPhone might think it a poor reflection on their new hardware when the Flash plugin inevitably misbehaved. Therefore Flash would never be allowed to run on an IPhone. Most people at the time thought this would make browsing the web on an IPhone a second class experience and hurt the platform. Instead, the new phone was a success so far beyond expectations that web developers had to make sure the sites they created worked well on the device, which meant that Flash literally went from being everywhere to being an abandoned technology practically overnight. I'm pretty sure even Richard Stallman liked the result, if not the means used to achieve it.
Hypothetically, what would happen if Apple bowed to all of us freedom loving folk who wanted them to open up their platform to different browser engines? I think, considering the way things sit currently, that we might all regret it. Even Apple fanboys generally think that Safari is lacking these days. I think that they would start jumping ship, in droves. Google would use the same tactics that they used everywhere else and put a nice big box at the top of the search results recommending apple users install this important browser update for enhanced security, quickly suckering a lot of the non-technical folks who didn't know or care that this was a completely different browser and not an official update. I think that within a year Safari would have about the same market share that Firefox has currently, and the w3c would become nothing but a rubber stamp for Google to do every nasty, privacy invading thing they wanted. They would take the current Appalatian sized mountain range of web standards and bloat it out to Himalayan proportions, making it so that 64 gigs of memory is absolutely required to run a browser in the first year, then 128 gigs the next, and so on ad infinitum. We could literally use the entire output of a star fuelling their relentless appettite.
Am I being ridiculous? Maybe a little. Just let it be a reminder is all I ask, that ecosystems are complex things, and even predators have an important place in them. In fact sometimes removing a predator can cause the entire ecosystem to crash. I'd like to avoid that.
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