Days after EU industry chief Thierry Breton told Apple CEO Tim Cook in no uncertain terms that the company will be forced to open its ecosystem to competition, European browser company Vivaldi introduced its first browser for iOS. So, I spoke with Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner to discuss the context around the release.
On the EU’s DMA law
To begin with, von Tetzchner supports European demands that “gatekeepers” such as Apple and Google open their ecosystems to rivals: “The Digital Markets Act is a big deal. For years, the gatekeepers, as the EU calls them, have done things to restrict competition. Remember the early days of iOS? You could not even install a competing browser.
“Now you can, but the browser needs to be based on WebKit,” von Tetzchner said. “Soon, I hope, you will be able to install browsers based on Chromium and Gecko. You can then make the choice [of] which browser you prefer to use, and it can run the code it believes will provide you with the best possible browser.”
On the risk of sideloading
He also believes that it will be possible to install software on iPhones sourced from outside the App Store.
These changes won’t be confined to Apple; Windows users will be able to install their choice of browser, too. And while many in the industry see this liberalization as posing risks to security and privacy on Apple’s platforms, the Vivaldi boss seemed somewhat sanguine: “The main risk is that you might get to use software and services that you will enjoy more,” he said. “The gatekeeper is no longer going to be able to dictate what you use or try to force you to use software you do not like, such as Edge.”
Von Tetzchner doesn’t agree with Apple’s claims that such sideloading will increase risk. “If the idea is that it is a lot safer to have software be downloaded from the App Store, I think the history of bad apps in the store tells a different story,” he said, before pointing the burden of protection on the user.
“It is always prudent to evaluate the software you install, independent from where you download it. It is always a good idea to download software from reliable sources, whether it is the company website or a quality download site or App Store.”
Getting a new browser to iOS
In part, because of Apple’s insistence that browser developers use WebKit, Vivaldi has only just arrived on iPhones. Why did it take so long?
There were some highly technical challenges that needed to be solved. At first, Vivaldi hoped to use the same codebase across all platforms. But it found that on both Android and iOS, additional work was required, and in iOS the company could not use the same core code and had to build a native user interface.
“This has required a lot of work,” von Tetzchner explained, “not just to build the UI, but also to make things work as well as possible with the underlying WebKit engine. Given that we are not able to modify it, like we can do with the Chromium code,…
2023-09-30 00:00:04
Link from www.computerworld.com