Firefox wraps its gums around the iPhone Mozilla has skinned the iPhone's safari browser with a Firefox-compatible wrapper that synchronises bookmarks and history, and integrates search. Once Firefox Home has been installed, searches can be typed directly into the address bar, with previous URLs and searches being offered as options just like on the desktop version …
I don't get this; Microsoft, in europe at least, got a ticking off from the courts, because it bundled IE with windows, giving it an unfair advantage against the other available browsers.
Not only do apple bundle their own browser with the Jesus phone, but the specifically ban any other browser?
How is that not getting stomped on?
"Not only do apple bundle their own browser with the Jesus phone, but the specifically ban any other browser?
How is that not getting stomped on?"
Firstly, see above, Apple is not a monopoly. If you don't understand why this is important then you don't understand EU vs MS or DOJ vs MS at all.
Secondly, they haven't actually "ban[ned] any other browser", just mandated that any other browser use the WebKit framework APIs that are already on the phone. Hence the quote from the developer agreement given in the article : ""Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework""
Apple don't have an abusive monopoly over smartphones. Don't like their product, there is an alternative that the fandroids love to tell us now has a greater market share. The don't "specifically ban any other browser" either, just the rendering engine. Opera have found a way around this that Apple are happy with too. What I want to know is why this has to be explained every fucking time...
It's simple, really. Microsoft was abusing their monopoly position in Operating Systems for Personal Computers, which at the time was the de facto standard OS for all personal computers. In fact, most computer manufacturers would not sell you a computer without a Microsoft OS. Purchasing a computer that did not had a Microsoft Operating System on it was impractical, and for some impossible.
What Microsoft was doing was leveraging this power to give themselves an advantage in the web browser market.
By contrast, Apple's iOS is not the de facto standard OS for all smartphones, only for Apple's own devices. Therefore, Apple is only leveraging the power they have over their own devices to maintain control of their entire system.
Microsoft did not design, build, or sold your PC, yet they attempted to control or influence which software was installed on top of the Operating System. This bundling was deemed illegal. Apple on the other hand, designed built and sold your iPhone, therefore they are offering a full product, which they control.
You are free to purchase a non-Apple smartphone, and doing so is fairly easy and commonplace.
-dZ.
To answer the questions about why Apple isn't getting hammered like Microsoft did, I believe (IANAL) that one of the pre-requisites to being charged with those types of anti-competitive behaviour is that you have to be in a dominant market position. Apple aren't dominant in either the smartphone or OS arenas, and so can't be behaving anti-competitively.
Why did Firefox bother?
Safari is a perfectly good browser, complete with bookmark sync (if you have mobileme). It's fast, works well. It's a good browser, as the article sez. It just has no competitors.
The real problem here is the Apple dictate on not allowing competing browsers at the code level.
C'mon Apple, lets have some choice, before the Anti-competition cronies force you to do it.
I see this complaint again and again about Apple not allowing another rendering engine on the iPhone.
Look, we now have WebOS, Android, iOS, and RIMM all using the same rendering engine for mobiles. It makes the work of web developers for mobile devices easy. There is a healthy aftermarket on the iPad for browsers with WAY better features than Safari, and there are some on the iPhone (not as many, grant you, due to the limited real estate, but certainly interesting feature wise).
Look, browser battle on mobiles is over. WebKit won. Deal with it everyone. It is NOT like it is not being rapidly advanced, which is one of the reasons people like competition. EVERYONE is contributing to it, and it gets better with each iteration.
I don't use Firefox because of its rendering engine, I use it because of its features, extensions, etc. I have no problem with them being a wrapper around WebKit, and I am happy that so many web sites are designed to work well on WebKit. As a developer, I hate having to have to deal with the quirks of one rendering engine over the other. I know HTML 5 is supposed to render this moot, but if that ends up being the case, and everyone's rendering engine is as adequate as the next, then the differentiator, again, are the features of the browser itself, not the rendering engine.
Can someone explain to me why that is a bad thing?
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