You're telling me that anticompetitive practices stifle competition?
For real though, this is great news. Glad the EU finally got apple to open things up a bit, even if it's only in the EU.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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after Apple started letting users choose their default browsers on iOS 17.4 in the EU last week.
Lol, srsly, why does anyone use apple devices willingly. Like for work I sorta get it if there's no alternative but it really took government action to compell this extremely basic customisation.
In the US at least, sadly, it’s imessage. It’s a weird social thing - if you have “green bubbles” people really look down on you.
It’s dumb and superficial, but it works.
In the US
It’s dumb and superficial
So they hook you while you're an insecure teen and by the time you grow up you're too entrenched in their ecosystem?
They hook you into an ecosystem. That's it, thats the game. I don't think it has too much to do with insecurity. Group chats and video chats with people outside of imessage is awful. Group chats lose a lot of features because SMS was all there was for a long time. Standard (not Google-ified) RCS is still too bare at the moment so I don't think the looming rcs fixes that aspect of it.
Yep. Damn near every tween with a phone just HAS to have an iPhone. If you offered a kid a used regular iPhone 12 with a Crack in the screen, or a new Samsung s24 ultra, they're taking the iPhone.
The solution to green bubbles? Use Signal, which has blue bubbles across all platforms.
Signal lets me customize the bubble (and background) colors. I can still make everyone green if I wanted.
Copying my comment from a month ago -
“Finally!
… being able to send longer messages, sending high quality pictures, read receipts, typing indicators, GIFs, location sharing, the ability to send and receive messages over Wi-Fi, and improved group messaging.
And you still see folks thinking color is what’s important.”
Honestly, it's the first thing to come out of iPhone users mouths, and when you tell them about Signal, more often than not they say "eww I'm not installing another app".
They'd rather an Android user spend another $1200 than install a free app. It's not features, it's elitism.
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Their integration is the best you can get.
You need to buy an expensive phone, watch, computer (would you like to spend another thousand bucks for a monitorstand?) to take advantage of it, which is why I don't have and don't want anything apple. But if you have that, their software stack is superb.
The software is pretty overrated. Especially safari, which is a legitimately terrible browser and has been for a long time.
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I'm on iOS and had Firefox as my default for several years. Probably shit journo meant browsing engine.
No, third-party browsing engines are not a thing that's been implemented yet, and might never be by Firefox. This is about a screen that prompts EU users to pick a browser rather than defaulting to Safari and leaving it up to them to install another.
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I believe they meant prompting users to choose a default browser.
Everybody sticks to the default defaults. It’s such a truism that fairness dictated legislators got involved.
The order seems sketchy, that's not A-z. And if they chose to order by application name, safari would be burried way down the list xD.
It’s randomized
Is it actually thats funny as fuck. But a bit sus that safari is still at the top
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The only thing new is that the first time it prompts you to pick which app to pick as your default (and installs it). Only the prompt is new, manually installing something and making it default has been an option for a while.
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Now apply the DMA to Microsoft and Windows so they stop changing the default to Edge every 2 days
Apparently, Microsoft now allows uninstalling Edge, to comply with the DMA. What that means in practice, I have no idea.
Not in the US. In EEA* as pointed out by BaardFigur
Has that actually happened? You sure you didn't click some "I agree" button after an update?
Windows has never set a new default browser for me without asking. Sure, it asked a few times, but unless I agreed, no settings were changed.
I believe, the behaviour is different, depending on where you're from. In the EU, Microsoft is comparatively well-behaved. In the US, they're extra icky.
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DMA applies to Microsoft as well. They have been making changes.
Yeah, as the majority of the time, regulations work!
good regulations work. there are also lots of bad ones.
It's the point of "majority of". It doesn't include all of them.
Historically, we experienced the last 50 years disregulation. We should not confuse disregulation and regulation. What is also the point of "majority of". It only include the regulations.
See: GDPR with massive fines for small companies but almost nothing for tech giants, and the complete lack of any action against non-compliant or maliciously compliant cookie banners.
Most tech giants are compliant now (which is the actual goal of regulation, not fines). Although they've had fines too.
90 million € for Google? I'm sure they learned their lesson.
Go, firefox!
Very nice. Nobody wants to use Safari anyway, they were forced by Apple.
Thank you EU!
Now just finish off iMessage and we're done (I'm talking about categorising it as a gatekeeper, since what I've recently noticed is the amount of people who are close to me (classmates, old friends) that switched to apple is growing rapidly, and I'm now waiting for a day someone will be confused as to why I can't use iMessage (mark my words at least here in Czechia iPhone users are going to be a problem, I hope that the situation doesn't end up like in the US)
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That's cool and all, but doesn't the iOS version of Firefox use the same engine as Safari? If so, does changing browsers on iOS amount to anything else than a skin change?
There is a work-in-progress version of Firefox for iOS with Gecko engine.
But, there is also a challenge that Mozilla is facing as Apple is still trying to make life of developers of other browsers as difficult as possible.
So, not sure how the whole thing will turn out.
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The appearance and how you use it is a very important part of a browser, also there are things like sync of history/bookmarks/etc. and "send a tab to Firefox on another device" functionality.
I’m confused - does it explicitly ask you now?
I’ve had firefox as default for a while now
Yes. Probably if you already changed the default it didn't ask you again
I'm hoping, the same isn't true for Chrome. Safari on iOS was the only other browser that still had relevance, because of this somewhat shitty tactic from Apple.
But I was told firefox was doomed because safari is superior to everything????
love to see it!
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