Open Web Competition Platform is a repo for documenting and tracking issues related to browser and web competition. Its aim is to facilitate coordination between browser vendors, operating systems, developers, and industry to help document outstanding competition issues with an eye towards resolving them more quickly.
Apple's privacy requirements for using an alternate browser engine on iOS in the EU state that the browser must:
Block cross-site cookies (i.e., third-party cookies) by default unless the user expressly opts to allow such cookies with informed consent;
I appreciate the desire to ensure browsers aren't enabling cross-site tracking, this is a goal shared by Chrome. Unfortunately the tradeoff between enabling existing websites to work and impeding cross-site tracking is far too complex and nuanced to be defined by any such simple set of rules. All browsers which disable third-party cookies have a complex set of heuristics and user features for balancing the tradeoff with web compatibility. The Chrome team has worked hard to document an aspect of this here, as a step towards aligning browser-specific heuristics towards an evolving but predictable standard. Even WebKit has huge exceptions to this policy at written, such as their "temporary" pop-up heuristic. There are many login systems across the web which are unlikely to ever be modified to use the storage access API, and so I expect that some form of heuristic to keep such sites functional will always be required.
Outcome
Privacy protection is an active area of innovation and intense competition. iOS should promote, rather than stifle this competition by keeping anti-tracking rules to the minimum necessary to ensure user transparency and control, empowering users to choose the browser (and settings) which best meet their personal needs in the tradeoff between privacy and web functionality.
Description
Apple's privacy requirements for using an alternate browser engine on iOS in the EU state that the browser must:
I appreciate the desire to ensure browsers aren't enabling cross-site tracking, this is a goal shared by Chrome. Unfortunately the tradeoff between enabling existing websites to work and impeding cross-site tracking is far too complex and nuanced to be defined by any such simple set of rules. All browsers which disable third-party cookies have a complex set of heuristics and user features for balancing the tradeoff with web compatibility. The Chrome team has worked hard to document an aspect of this here, as a step towards aligning browser-specific heuristics towards an evolving but predictable standard. Even WebKit has huge exceptions to this policy at written, such as their "temporary" pop-up heuristic. There are many login systems across the web which are unlikely to ever be modified to use the storage access API, and so I expect that some form of heuristic to keep such sites functional will always be required.
Outcome
Privacy protection is an active area of innovation and intense competition. iOS should promote, rather than stifle this competition by keeping anti-tracking rules to the minimum necessary to ensure user transparency and control, empowering users to choose the browser (and settings) which best meet their personal needs in the tradeoff between privacy and web functionality.