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

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.

Comments

This would destroy Apple's walled garden...

[Assmasher]

...because you could deploy apps without the App Store.

Let's hope this happens! :)

Re: Security...

[ls671]

Hmm, chroot needs to include its own OS or at least the parts you need to run said chrooted process unless compiled statically and still. This would make it more than sandbox lite according to your definition.

chroot is viewed as less secure as bsd jails because it wasn't designed for a security purpose in the first place.

I have a slackware pure 64 bits, no compat 32 what so ever. I chroot to a 32 bits full install and everything runs smoothly for legacy 32 bits apps.

Granted, only one kernel runs, 1 /sys /proc, etc., which is "less isolated" than a qemu vm but lets you run on bare metal for specific applications.

Anyway, even VMs can be victims of privilege escalation. BSD jail is less subject to it than chroot I hear. Good old unix chroot still has its usage nevertheless IMHO.