How can Safari be a defender of the free web, when iOS explicitly prohibits any other engine? They are the new IE, in that they keep users hostage, but this time you can't even run a campaign to try to get users to use a new browser.
> How can Safari be a defender of the free web, when iOS explicitly prohibits any other engine?
If you look at my post above you'll see that I mentioned that this is more or less voluntarily :)
Maybe it is not their intention at all but as long as they exist it makes it harder for Google to pull the carpet underneath the free web and ad blockers in particular.
> They are the new IE, in that they keep users hostage, but this time you can't even run a campaign to try to get users to use a new browser.
No. Safari might be annoying in a number of ways, but the "new IE" title goes to Chrome.
IE became the old IE not because they lagged behind from the start but because they "innovated" new non-standard features until they had crushed competition, then stopped development until their market share was rapidly shrinking because of both Firefox and Chrome.
If you don't think Google will stop Chrome development as soon as they have crushed competition and "sadly" had to kill adblock then we have different views of Google.
(Please note: I don't think individual engineers at Google will push this agenda but I am fairly sure that "maximize shareholder profit" will over the course of a few months or a couple of years push this agenda with a weight that will easily crush even the most idealistic team. See WhatsApp for a case study of how a company and an engineering culture I loved was crushed.)
