19
points
slightlyoff
Joined 157 karma
- slightlyoffThat's the inspiring thing about the EU and UK regulatory frameworks: the penalties can be more than a slap on the wrist. Apple is playing a dangerous game by continuing to flout EU law and pursue a maximalist, scorched-earth strategy. Reputation matters, and they are not making friends by re-upping false arguments at every turn.
- "TL;DR: The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has officially designated Apple as having Strategic Market Status (SMS). After four years investigating Apple’s restrictions on browser engines and web apps, the CMA now has statutory authority to enforce remedies proposed in its Market Investigation Reference completed this year.
The most important outcomes being:
- Apple can be compelled to allow third-party browsers on iOS to use their own engines.
- Apple can be compelled to provide equivalent access to functionality for browsers using their own browser engines.
- Apple can be compelled to let third-party browsers install and manage web apps using their own engines.
- Apple can be compelled to remove barriers to web app adoption, such as implementing a web app equivalent to smart banners or install prompts in iOS Safari."
- It's not insane that you have to explain it to me, because your premise is _wrong_. Go look at the founding documents for web SDOs. Voluntary adoption is foundational to the entire effort, and as I keep pointing out, Apple is the only party that has undermined it:
https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-crimes-against-the-i...
- Let's try this again: was Apple wrong to ship Storage Access ahead of everyone else?
https://caniuse.com/mdn-api_document_requeststorageaccess
In the world you want, how should leadership in designs manifest when there isn't consensus? Should nothing ship? And who does that help?
- Author here. You seem to have missed the bleedingly obvious point that responsibilities are a function of scale.
Nothing you allege was missed, and indeed it was considered at length in the longer series on these topics:
- That's not how any of this works;
https://infrequently.org/2025/09/standards-and-the-fall-of-i...
- The author here.
It will seem odd to most, but my big concerns about Chrome relate to Android and ChromeOS. In neither environment did Chrome win share competitively. I think this has made them weaker and less useful, and that was mirrored in the tremendous difficulty we had in getting expansions of web capabilities done within the Chrome team, nevermind what I am documenting in this most recent post.
Sadly, the CrOS problem will be partially resolved when Google trashes it with Android rebasing in upcoming releases. On the Android side, Google is still withholding WebAPK support from competitors (suppressing PWAs on Android) and has failed to follow Apple's lead on hotseat browser replacement when choice screens are shown in the EU.
But neither of the bad effects are nearly as structural or impactful as Apple's out-and-out suppression of the web on mobile, because wealthy people carry iPhones and they have all the power:
https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-crimes-against-the-i...
- Original author of the article here; I went out on a limb to document a bit of this in a footnote to a post a few years ago. Saying that it is unusual to call this behaviour out is a drastic understatement:
https://infrequently.org/2023/02/safari-16-4-is-an-admission...
And it was only this year that I wrote up the broader thesis:
https://infrequently.org/2025/08/how-do-committees-fail-to-i...
Most of my current and former colleagues wouldn't dare for (legitimate) fear of reprisal in the form of even worse blockage in important design areas.
- I'm simply pointing out that Apple declined to try to constructively solve the problems developers expressed, demurred from engaging in design work in many areas, and did not ship alternatives instead (as it could have, and did in the past when Safari/WebKit were not on a starvation budget).
The downsides to this are not lost on me. Why do you think I'm making an issue of it publicly now? We tried literally everything else. This is last resort stuff. The goal is always more collaboration, and through it, better, better-funded, and more capable browsers. Apple is the unique obstacle to all of that today.
- That's simply a misunderstanding of how features come to the web. There is no immaculate conception for web APIs. No magical room in which they are dreamt up, or spring fully-formed from the head of Zeus.
Instead, they come from open, honest, iterative design (when done well), and shipping ahead of others is risky, but that's why we designed the Blink Launch Process to demand so much pre-work (specs, tests, origin trials, good faith attempts to include other vendors in design, etc.) in order to launch that way.
Some background on these points here:
https://infrequently.org/series/effective-standards-work/
https://youtu.be/1Z83L6xa1tw?si=939PBH4_idtZGI6Y
As to, "should Apple follow Chromium's lead", perhaps ask "how would that be different than today?"
See:
https://infrequently.org/2023/02/safari-16-4-is-an-admission...
And:
https://infrequently.org/2025/06/the-ghost-of-christmas-past...
- The author here. It wasn't addressed in this post because it was treated separately several years ago in the same series (linked at the top):
https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-brow...
TL;DR is that the premise of the argument is false, or at least almost entirely so, and deprives Apple of agency, when in fact it has all the power in the equation.
- 0 for 2. Impressive.
- Fixed.
- It's the new mobile UI, built on Web Components (via Lit), and it's much faster. Parts of it have apparently already migrated to the old experience.
- Author here.
So, if you read the post, you probably saw this:
https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/#fn-t...
The little model there helps us distinguish types of sites, and so the very first thing to do is to note that you probably aren't building one of these.
But let's say you are!
In that case, it might help you to know that I've consulted with 4 of the 5 teams you mention, and because they have high management maturity, they often make choices that look different than the stacks you're being pitched at JS conferences.
Outside the editing canvas itself (a 20+ year old codebase ported to WASM), Adobe realised they couldn't afford the overhead of using React the "usual" way and have moved to Lit-based Web Components for PS:
https://web.dev/ps-on-the-web/
YouTube is made of Polymer Web Components, and before that (for most of it's history) was a server-rendered Python frontend with progressive enhancement.
Maps is built on the usual Google frontend tech (Closure Library, Soy, etc.), and while that means it's still lugging around a lot of legacy cruft, it performs because the team both works hard to keep it in check and that the tools started in an era that (correctly) assumed that CPU and bandwidth are not plentiful on the client.
Figma uses React outside the canvas, but their team also includes former browser engineers. They don't use it naïvely. Nor does Excalidraw, as the author knows where the (latency) bodies are buried.
In all these cases, the reason these experiences work well is management maturity, not tech. Strong teams that need to have deep local interaction respect the problem and usually make choices that go against the "HN consensus" because better user experiences matter more than in-group signaling:
https://infrequently.org/2022/05/performance-management-matu...
- Most are from a world that is better, but which the complexity merchants have convinced (thanks to asymmetric information) all but their closest competitors to replace with unwieldy tech.
E.g.:
https://app.speedcurve.com/benchmarks/usa/retail/fast/fully-...
The fast sites on "legacy" stacks have 1/10th the COGS for the same performance versus the absolutely stupid costs invoked for React/NG/Ember/etc. SSR + hydration.
Which brings up the real issue: when the framework is both baseline-costly and runtime nasty, metrics like INP will suffer without extraordinary controls. When you see a React site in the list above, it's a fair guess that I've talked with their tech teams and they have felt trapped between unsubstantiated narratives and the reality that shipping React-based sites is losing them tons of money.
The antidote is a frank discussion of up-front cost vs. per-interaction latency. And we aren't having that debate right now. Presumptively the careers of the last decade's charlatans depends on us not levelling up. It's the only reason I can peep for why we haven't evolved past new ways to spell old ideas.
- Author of the article here.
TL;DR: your JS is probably worse than you think. Write HTML and CSS instead. It will go better for everyone. And feel free to ignore the most popular JS framework vendors; they have not known what they are talking about for at least a decade.