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Google busted for paying Apple 36% of search revenue derived from Safari
The company has paid Apple to remain the default search engine in Safari
Google and Apple have been doing business together for years, but the details of their dealings have remained largely undisclosed — until now. An antitrust trial that began in September 2023 brought Google to court, stemming from allegations of anticompetitive practices brought on by the US Department of Justice. Now, more information on Google’s track record is coming to light, and it seems that Apple may be profiting more than originally speculated.
What Chrome for Android needs to learn from Safari
Apple’s iOS browser does some things better than Chrome for Android
Google Chrome is one of the best browsers on Android — and elsewhere. This makes sense, as Google puts a ton of resources into ensuring that it stays the top-dog in terms of market share. However, when you look at Chrome for Android, you might notice that it feels a little long in the tooth. Sure, the browser may have recently received a Material You theme overhaul, but other than that, the basic way that you interact with it has stayed the same for years. Things are different on iOS, and Apple keeps its pre-installed browser Safari feeling fresh with significantly improvements.
Apple joins forces with Google and Mozilla for a big upgrade to Speedometer
Coming together for version 3 of the browser benchmark
Google Chrome is the default browser on the best Android phones and is also a popular desktop web browser. It competes with Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Brave, and many open-source alternatives in addition to the web browser found on Apple products, Safari. While each browser has its positives and negatives, developers rely on metrics like browser benchmarks to determine the area where a particular offering shines. Speedometer is one such benchmark tool — it was set up by Apple's WebKit team back in 2014 — but it's only seen one major upgrade and that was way back in 2018. Well, the WebKit team is now joining up with folks on the Chrome and Firefox sides to develop the next big iteration of the benchmark service, unsurprisingly named Speedometer 3.
Safari is getting a new collaborative feature I desperately want Chrome to steal
Done right, it could work better in Google's ecosystem than Apple's
In the wake of Apple’s WWDC conference, I’m struck by a particular feature that the company announced: shared Tab Groups. Past all the new hardware, the revival of lock screen widgets, Apple’s new love with customization — beyond all of that, this one dumb little feature sticks out to me as something with the potential to be really impactful in a thousand tiny and unanticipated ways. With how minor but potentially far-reaching it feels, I can’t understand how Google didn’t think of it first for Chrome, and I hope we get it soon.
Apple steals not one, but two Chrome features for the iPhone's iOS 15 Safari redesign
Swipe to switch tabs plus a very familiar tab switcher
Apple claimed at WWDC this year that Safari is the "world's fastest browser" — note that not everyone agrees with that, and if the company's claim is true, it's at the cost of not supporting the modern internet and PWA-hostile policies, but you do you Apple. Separately from speed-ranking titles, Safari is also stealing two pretty handy features from Chrome on mobile platforms. As part of a cross-platform redesign that includes iOS 15, Safari will pick up Chrome's swipe-to-switch-tabs feature, plus Chrome's grid tab view. Safari is also getting tab grouping like Chrome, but it sounds like the iPhone will skip that party.
16 major iOS 14 features Apple 'borrowed' from Android and Google
Plus one bonus feature for Apple's HomePod
Unless you've been forcibly avoiding the news, you know iOS 14 is now a thing. But if you don't use an iPhone (or maybe even if you do), you might not have bothered checking out what was new in Apple's latest mobile operating system. But as fail to be basically every year we watch the WWDC keynote, no one on the Android Police was surprised to have one recurring thought: "hey, that feature looks familiar." Apple apparently felt very inspired by Android in the last year, and iOS 14 has a whole bunch of "world-first" innovations to show you that—very coincidentally!—also happen to be on Android. Here are 16 such features.
With no obvious cause, numerous subscribers to Google Play Music All Access have suddenly found that just about any non-Chrome browser cannot use the web app to stream songs. Starting on July 9th, reports started flooding in from users of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari about the Play Music web app not functioning correctly. Even more curiously, it will work for songs that a user has uploaded; only the songs that are accessed via the All Access subscription fail to stream.
The Pushbullet team has long impressed us with the creation of a solid product that works as advertised across multiple platforms, pushing files and syncing notifications with ease. Now you can add more names to the list: Mac OS X and the Safari web browser, which join the existing iOS app to flesh out Pushbullet's support for Apple's ecosystem.
The browser wars have seen a strange resurgence in the mobile world, as each platform brings its own-branded browser (Safari for iOS, Chrome for Android, IE for Windows Phone), and competitors see this as a new opportunity to gain more relevance after the desktop arena begins to settle. Mozilla certainly seems to think so as it starts to tease some new features it's currently working on for its Android-based Firefox app.