The browser I currently use
On both my Mac and my iOS devices, I use Safari as my main browser. It’s fast, secure, prevents tracking, syncs across platforms and makes the best use of the underlying OS’s resources and hence helps with long battery life. And since it recently gained the ability to show favicons on each tab, there’s not much I’m missing.
Ideally though, I would use Mozilla’s Firefox. It’s just as good. And furthermore, it’s developed by a not-for-profit organisation and the only major browser – complete with its own rendering engine Gecko – that’s not maintained by one of the enormous global for-profit corporations. Which is good for the diversity of the browser landscape and the web as a platform.
What’s holding me back, though, is that I can’t specify a different default browser on iOS. Yes, I enjoy seemingly best battery life using Safari, but I would trade this for using an independent browser. But it’s pretty inconvenient to have links always open in Safari when my main browser is actually something else.
While it’s shitty enough1 that Apple doesn’t allow different rendering engines on iOS2, it seems deliberately anticompetitive they don’t allow you to specify another default browser.
Can’t someone force Apple to make this change, please?
And regarding Google’s Chrome (which is the browser with the biggest market share): I can’t think of a reason to use it as my main browser. For me, it doesn’t offer anything better than Safari or Firefox and it’s from a company I have low trust in.