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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.
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.
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.
I had to use firefox for a long time for it's the browser with the highest support across web pages and file formats, whereas chrome and edge will just stop working at times. Firefoxi is, as of 2024, one of the best choices.
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This change doesn't do anything that you couldn't do before. It's just a prompt forcing you to pick an option before you can access the web vs just having safari and needing to find an alternative. It's the same story as on a PC in Windows.
I use it because I'm tired of Androids shit. I have both an Android phone and an iPhone and I only use the android phone for things that I cannot do on the iPhone. And if I wasn't a massive computer nerd I'd just forgo the second phone entirely.
I use it because I'm tired of Androids shit
Care to explain further? Android and iOS do mostly the same BS, except android edges out iOS in side loading, customizability and root access. Even on Google's flagship Pixels, unlocking the bootloader and gaining root is no problem.
Android has zero browser engine restrictions. Every browser can use either WebView's engine or their own.
Oh yea I forgot about that lol, android also doesn't handicap the NFC chip for "reasons" lmao (Dunno if Apple is still doing that, I'm not 100% up to date on their shenanigans)
The UI and UX overall are so much nicer on iOS. Especially with gestures, Android's gesture system is half baked at best.
Sure you can't rice your phone, but I don't want to rice my phone. With Android I'm tempted to do stupid shit to my phone because I could, which then causes the phone to be unstable or just not work at all and I have to wipe and reload. With iOS that's not an option, and honestly I've grown past that shit. When Cyanogenmod died all interest I had left in Android died with it. And over the years I've found out I wasn't alone. Root is great, but have you ever just had a phone that works?
Even when I don't do stupid shit I've experienced so many bugs. My camera for example runs at 2fps on my Pixel 4, and I can't figure out why. UI and UX for apps aren't as rigidly followed on Android to the experience is a lot less consistent (insert Apple not following their own guidelines meme). And honestly I run into so many more bugs in various apps on Android. In the past year I've had maybe 5 app crashes on iOS using it as my main phone. On my Android phone I've had at least twice that + at least one full phone crash.
Also the SOCs available on Android phones are garbage. I haven't looked much into the SD 8 gen2/gen3, but I honestly doubt they'd be as efficient as Apple's silicon + deep hardware software tie in. (insert iPhone 15 overheating).
Ok so you hate android because you couldn't stop tinkering with it and it got unstable? And you love apple because they don't let you tinker with it?
You must the only one who is actually benefiting from apples anti-consumer practices. Keep using apple. It seems the right choice for you.
If you don't tinker with Android it is stable and has almost no bugs. Can't speak for apps because that is the developers responsibility.
And yes Android phones are usually more inefficient but as long as I can use it a whole day without charging I don't care.
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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
EEA**
thanks, ill change it
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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It never reset the setting for me either, but it definitely doesn't always respect your wishes. It just goes ahead and opens certain links in edge despite the setting.
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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.
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)
Huh? I fucking love Safari. Clean layout, integrates with iCloud passwords & OTP (while also cleaning up OTP codes from SMS and Mail.app afterwards), tons of extensions, doesn’t drain the battery on my aging MacBook Pro, supports Profiles, it’s perfect for my needs. I’m also just a huge fan of stock apps, tbh.
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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 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.
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
But I was told firefox was doomed because safari is superior to everything????
love to see it!
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this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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