I just noticed that your stance on iOS browsers is sort of “it doesn’t matter, they’re all WebKit based”.
Well doesn’t it matter in regards of cookies, cache, history and other privacy related item’s management?
Today I bounced into this article for example:
And I know that Mullvad browser is available for iOS, but even if WebKit based shouldn’t it be way better than plain Safari? And I’m pretty sure also others must offer more trustworthy crumb trail management compared to Safari.
What has it to do with what I wrote?
I understand that having WebKit showed down your throat is a serious limitation but I’m guessing that browsing history and cookies must be detached from the web engine. Or is perhaps my guess too misinformed?
Thanks
It has to do with this specific line that you wrote:
I know that Mullvad browser is available for iOS
As for your other question, I’ll defer to the thoughts of other community members who are more versed in this department, as I do not use iOS as my main mobile OS.
I misunderstood that, thank you.
But why the iOS privacy guide browsers section doesn’t list Brave as an option at all, which has an integrated ad block?
I think the reason might be that you’re essentially trusting both Apple and Brave with your data if you choose to use a WebKit browser that is not Safari. There are also other options for ad blocking in Safari or through DNS, not sure if those are worth exploring.
I believe that both Mozilla and Google have already been working on iOS versions of their respective browsers based on their own browser engines.
I was (and am) excited to see Apple and others being pushed to open up their OS to alternative browser engines, however I am concerned about an unintended/unanticipated consequence. It seems possible this could backfire and instead of leading to more browser diversity, it could go the other way, and result in Chrome (or even just Chromium more broadly) getting even closer to a browser Monopoly than they already are, give Google more power than they already have to shape the direction of the web as a whole.
I am pretty sure there are 2 main reasons for this :
All browsers are, at the moment required to use the WebKit browser engine used by Safari. So all browsers are exactly rendering pages the same way under the hood on iOS. This is changing as far as I know as EU is forcing Apple to drop that requirement though.
Browser extensions are really only available with Safari on iOS. Even if Chromium comes to iOS I highly doubt they would support an extension store. Firefox seems more likely to support that (as they support extensions on their Android browser).