[jms18]

> and no competition is allowed in that space.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ios/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chrome-web-browser-by-google...

http://www.opera.com/mobile/mini/iphone

I cannot agree with "no competition is allowed in that space."

Edit: I just saw the remark for "mobile browser rendering engine" -- that is true.

[bad_user]

Not being allowed to run your own engine actually has deep ramifications. For example Firefox on iOS cannot support plugins, whereas on Android it does since the beginning. It also means that Firefox cannot compete in supported web standards or performance or whatever you can think of. And once upon a time these alternative browsers weren't even allowed to run the same JS engine as Safari, which meant they were forced to be slower. This changed fairly recently, somewhere around iOS 9.

Also other browsers on iOS are more restricted than Safari. For example those Safari content blockers don't work in Firefox. So given Firefox's inability to provide plugins, this means that in Firefox you are forced to load and see annoying ads, whereas in Safari you don't have to.

On Android, Firefox is actually a good alternative to Chrome, albeit less well integrated, but then I can't imagine using a mobile browser without uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, etc. But on iOS the alternative browsers like Firefox are nothing more than dumb shells around restricted functionality.

I'm using Firefox on all of my desktops (MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu), I'm using Firefox on my Android device. Guess which browser I'm using on my iPhone? ;-)

[shmerl]

> I cannot agree with "no competition is allowed in that space."

Since it uses Apple's engine underneath, you can't work around their ban on free codecs in the browser for example. Same goes for support for multiple HTML5 features (how about MSE for starters?). So it is clearly anti-competitive.

[Keats]

They still have to use Safari behind the scene.