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A French Company is Suing Apple To Open the iPhone To Rival Browsing Engines (recode.net)

Posted by msmash on from the lawsuit-calling dept.

A French maker of open-source software said Friday it is suing Apple in an effort to get the company to make iOS more supportive of Web standards. Nexedi is suing Apple under French law in hopes it can force Apple to allow rival browsing engines onto the iPhone. From a report on Recode:Although Apple allows rival browser apps, such as Google's Chrome, on to the iPhone, the'y all have to use Apple's Web rendering engine. That means the ability to draw on the latest Web standards is is limited to whatever Apple decides to include. That means some newer technologies, like the WebM video standard and the WebRTC protocol for real-time communications, can't be made to work in an iOS browser even though they work in nearly all other browsers. "We hope [this lawsuit] will help Apple to sooner support the latest Web and HTML5 standards on its iOS platform -- the operating system used by all iPhones," Nexedi said in a blog post, which also explains the more granular details of how technology works and what needs to change, in their estimation.

6 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Why should they? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just because you want another poorly coded standard as a way to track people, and allow exploit code to run?

    No thanks.

    1. Re:Why should they? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Safari is holding the web back much like IE6 did when Microsoft refused to upgrade it.

    2. Re:Why should they? by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Then don't buy Apple. Buy Android, like I did.

      Dang, people. Freedom isn't hard to understand.

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  2. Security... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Apple has said time and time again the issue is security-- making a sandbox isn't fucking easy. Despite whether that's good or bad, it's hard to do right. There's very little chance with the exception of Mozilla or Google proper making a secure (not massive security hole of a) browser for iOS.

    Not gonna happen (for a few years at least). Not in France, not in the us, not anywhere.

    Well I could see Apple doing this but on the proviso if you have a security hole that compromises the phone-- you owe them a billion dollars.

    1. Re: Security... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Unix has had sandboxing since forever with chroot.

      BSD jails have existed for more than a decade.

      These days, Linux has both lxc and systemd application level sandboxing (which is attained via cgroups, I believe).

      This isn't the middle ages. How hard is it to sandbox a fucking browser, really?

  3. Because previous legislation against Microsoft.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well they should... or who doesn't remember the "N" SKU for Windows that prevented the instant bundling of Internet Explorer? Microsoft had to develop a separate version of Windows XP, etc. and beyond to meet this standard that stripped out the "preferred" browser that came with Windows in Europe and other regions. This allowed those users to choose and install the browser(/rendering engine) of their preference instead of being defaulted into the browser packaged with their operating system. Why should Apple be given a golden ticket and allowed to skip over such similar legislation? This is not that much different.

    Peace out.