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Companies like Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft have versions of their web browsers on Apple’s iOS and iPadOS App Stores, but these versions come with a big caveat: The App Store rules require them to use Safari’s WebKit rendering engine rather than the engines those browsers use in other operating systems.
But that could be changing. According to The Register, Google and Mozilla have recently been spotted working on versions of Chromium and Firefox that use their normal Blink and Gecko rendering engines, respectively.
Apple hasn’t announced any rule changes. The correlated activity from Google and Mozilla could suggest that they’re expecting Apple to drop its restrictions on third-party browser engines in the near future, or the companies could simply be hedging their bets. Regulatory pressure from multiple governments is pushing Apple in the direction of loosening many of its App Store restrictions, including (begrudgingly) accepting third-party payment services and sideloading of apps and third-party app stores.
The iOS versions of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and others can currently sync with their desktop counterparts and present whatever user interface they want, but the WebKit requirement means their capabilities and shortcomings are mostly the same as Safari’s. No such restriction exists on macOS, where third-party browsers can use whatever rendering engine they please.
Apple could still conceivably impose limitations on the way these browsers work—the amount of storage they’re allowed to use for caching content, how much memory and CPU capacity they’re permitted to use while running in the background, how aggressively tabs must be unloaded from RAM to make room for other apps, what extensions they’re allowed to use, and plenty of other possibilities. But for the iPad in particular, opening the platform to third-party browser engines will hopefully mean more third-party browsers that look and act more like their macOS and Windows counterparts.
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