It’s war on browsers: Chrome and Firefox against Apple, EU rules are not enough

One of the many innovations foreseen by the DMA (Digital Markets Act), i.e. the new regulation for the digital markets of the European Union, concerns i browser on iPhone: starting from iOS 17.4, in fact, Apple will allow third-party browsers to use your own rendering engines, no longer forcing them to adopt WebKit, the engine behind Safari. Until now, in fact, all the browsers available on the iPhone were essentially little more than reskin of Safari, forced to use the same engine as Apple’s default browser.

From March, with the entry into force of the DMA, this will no longer be the case, but obviously the new rules apply only to the European Union. AND this is a problem for Google and Mozilla which, if they actually want to develop a browser for iPhone with their own engine, they will be forced to maintain development of two versions in parallelone for the EU and the other for the rest of the world.

A Mozilla spokesperson, Damiano DeMonte, commented on the news to TheVerge criticizing Apple a lot and the way it has chosen to implement European regulations:

“We are still reviewing the technical details, but we are extremely disappointed by Apple’s proposed plan to limit the newly announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific applications.

The effect would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations, a burden that Apple itself will not have to shoulder.

Apple’s proposals don’t give consumers a viable choice, making it as difficult as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari. This is another example of Apple creating barriers to prevent true browser competition on iOS.

After DeMonte’s statement, the vice president of Google’s Chrome division, Parisa Tabriz, commented on X that Apple is not taking seriously the possibility of offering a browser choice on iOS.

Speaking of Chrome, another limitation that Google certainly won’t like is the inability to “synchronize cookies and state between browsers and other appseven apps from the same developer,” as required by Apple’s privacy requirements.

This rule, which will certainly also protect the user’s privacy, will greatly limit the space for action for Google, which makes synchronization between its services one of its strong points.

At the moment we don’t know if and when Google and Mozilla will actually launch their browsers with proprietary engines in the European Union, but it is extremely unlikely that Apple will decide of its own accord to allow the same freedom in other markets.