Is there a browser that already switched to a new version because of ios sideloading? Until a few months ago every browser was Safari under the hood, but now they can use different engines. I really hoped that Firefox announces a new version but they made comments about it that do not sound promising. Is there any other browser that could be an alternative to Safari?
The first one will probably be Google Chrome.
Porting a browser engine to a new platform is a huge undertaking.
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I think it will be Chromium, then Chrome, and then Brave will release a Chromium variant of their browser too.
Honesly, who knows ?
Apple has banned USnon-EU-based engineers from testing it on actual physical devices outside EU.
I am not sure anyone is willing to maintain an additional OS to support ALONGSIDE the webkit implementation, just for 500m users.
Maybe, if when other countries follow suit then they will be some meaningful change…
Google also has development teams in Zurich so perhaps things will be ran from there. But I find it hard to believe it will be profitable for google to port Chromium to ios for only EU market.
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Zurich engineers will not have acess to this, as Switzerland isn’t in the EU. The german border isn’t that far, but I am not sure if just being in the EU is enough to access those benefits*. It likely is -at least for devs- but it remains to be seen as Apple is fighting tooth & nail against the DMA.
Do those workers work remotely ? If so I guess many are EU-based.
*Cause if the iPhone you are really in EU/ are a legit EU citizen then some benefits like 3rd party store stay for 30 days even if you leave EU. If that’s also the case, then it would be a piece of cake.
I was looking into it not that far ago but didn’t save any links. 
It seems it’s not trivial to do, even for Google, but there’s an effort under way.
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I know they already had a prototype before DMA, so you might be right.
I found the blog post about the work on adding blink browser engine to iOS:
https://blogs.igalia.com/gyuyoung/2024/08/08/chrome-ios-browser-on-blink/
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