> Only the iOS webview is allowed to render web content.
This is quite shocking. I wonder how a platform with such policies could be universally accepted and praised by the tech community. Microsoft didn't achieve this level of closedness but become universally hated.
There is actually a fair amount of people who do not accept such a policy and use Android instead. Apple's super locked-down ecosystem is why I use Android, despite iOS being (imo) a better OS. You tend not to hear from us because... we don't use iOS.
The sheer number of backlit white apple logos on display at most tech conferences I've ever visited (ones surrounding open source projects!) would seem to imply otherwise.
Mac laptops are useful for web developers as they offer a good blend between open-source development tools (GNU tools, etc...) and commercial tools (Photoshop, etc...).
However, if you've not seen any criticism of Apple in the tech community, then Google for it, it won't take long to find critical voices about Apple (and I'm not referring to trolling, well thought out criticism is easy to find too).
On one of the Debug[1] podcasts (I can't remember which one now), Don Melton[2] claims the decision to not allow other web rendering engines or Javascript implementations is because they don't know how to allow those and keep iOS secure, and that is the reason behind a lot of limitations enforced in iOS.
Apple is certainly more closed than Microsoft ever was. The difference in perception is likely because Apple has never had a monopoly. There are more Android phones than iOS.
I’d guess so. The original Chrome for iOS announcement [1] said:
it’s been challenging to re-use critical Chromium infrastructure components. That said, there is a lot of code we do leverage, such as the network layer, the sync and bookmarks infrastructure, omnibox, metrics and crash reporting, and a growing portion of content.
Precisely the reason I don't care that the other big browser engines can't be ported to iOS. Their concern for battery life/power drain is so low that there's zero chance I'd use them anyway. I don't even use them on the "desktop" (laptop) anymore, for that reason.
> Additionally only Apple's JavaScript engine is allowed to use a JIT compiler.
Can you elaborate? I was under the impression that as of iOS 8, if a developer implements WKWebView in place of UIWebView they would have access to Nitro.
This is true, but what pjmpl was saying is that Mozilla couldn’t port their JITted JS engine to iOS and expect it to get through the app store review – they have to use Apple’s.
All apps on iOS are forced to use the built-in webkit engine. Think of it as if every browser on Windows was forced to use the IE engine and Chrome, Firefox, et al never existed, just a ton of IE skins.
