Let's unfuck the mobile Web (together!)

• Open Web Advocacy
• The Browser Choice Alliance
• Vivaldi Browser
• Slides

Hello yeah, thank you to Terrence Eden for prompting this test card and not the only community member whose feedback I've been taking on board because Anna Rodriguez was very kind and told me that my CSS day talk was boring and facile and stupid. So thanks for that Anna, I've taken it on board. You are always right yeah, except when you're wrong.

So let's un-fuck the mobile web together. My name is Bruce Lawson and I'm an HTM alcoholic. Thank you.

This is actually a brand of clothing in Japan and my friend Mike Smith from W3C said, "You've got to come to this department store." I was like, "Why? What do I want a to-go department store?" And he showed me this and I posed and then the security guards asked us to leave.

The web is fucked. I mean, it's great, but it is comprehensively fucked and I'm sorry if I'm baffling everybody with computer science terminology here. It was conceived by Sir Uncle Timbo himself, who was from Birmingham, where I'm from. It was conceived but for everyone.

But lately, the culmination of a couple of decades, it has become basically in the hands of a small number of tech bros, which I would suggest to you good folks of London web standards, is a bit of a shame, TM. So I went about investigating how this could have happened.

Was it you, Google? No way, not me. Was it you, Facebook? No way, not me. You, Microsoft? No chance, not me. Was it you, Apple? No, not me.

So they all denied it. But it gave me a chance to use up all of Vivaldi's special effects budget, so that was pretty good. So let's look at the rap sheets. Google started off saying don't be evil. Now it's basically promoting advertising driven web architecture. They went from do no evil to let's fuck the web for money. Got web API proposals aligned with advertising and AI. Their AIO reviews are replacing search, which is a terribly big problem because publishers are already struggling for revenues from Google ads.

But of course if the AI search results are enough for people and they don't click through, there is no revenue from ads. And they're attempting to close Android app distribution by requiring that all apps be signed via Google Play, which therefore cuts off all of the people who distribute on de-Googled Android platforms.

Facebook, of course. Migration of the web into closed social platforms, algorithmic control of content distribution, preying on kids and damaging people's mental health, subverting democracy, as in the Brexit vote in Cambridge Analytica. And let's not forget genocide. I know it's easy to forget because it's happening somewhere else to other people, but it's very much implicated in the death of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people in Myanmar.

Apple, my favourite, born 1st April 1976. Well, they made Safari with all of its bugs. The mandatory webkit browser engine on iOS, restrictions on progressive web apps, which I will bore you about senselessly today, preferencing the app store over web applications and other crimes.

And of course our friends at Microsoft. Historic browser monopolisation, which set the web back a long time. The embrace, extend and extinguish strategy, IE six stagnation, which most of you, in fact all of you, are probably too young to remember apart from Jake, but it was a big problem. Copilot in all the things, nothing wrong with copilot, but when it's rammed in your throat, it's a problem. Colluding with the FBI, we found that the FBI have been given keys to people's windows machines and gone through them. They also have told the French government they can't guarantee that any French company's data that's held on OneDrive or Azure is safe from the Patriot Act, and once again renewed browser monopolisation. I'm not going to bang on about that too much because my chum Gerardo over here will talk about that after the break.

So let's go back to a simpler time, a better time, a time of VHS, video cassettes, to have compact discs, proper mobile phones, and the time when I had a really great haircut. I know, right? They were the browser wars, and I've deliberately chosen this photograph of the Battle of Passchendaele because World War I seems like a hell of a long time ago, and the original browser wars, which kind of culminated in the early part of the millennium, seem like a hell of a long time ago, but they're not. Actually, a lot of the stuff that happened here is happening again today, albeit in a different venue. Microsoft were terrified of Netscape, but they weren't really terrified of Netscape per se, they were terrified of the open web, and so they did everything they could to destroy Netscape.

They bought a browser called Spyglass, which they re-badged as Internet Explorer. They promised the management of Spyglass that they would have a revenue share of all of the sales of Internet Explorer, knowing of course they were going to give it away for free in perpetuity. The reason they did this is why the first browser war is telling today. In 1996, in an internal document called Winning at Internet Content, and I really like that @ sign there, the core threat for Microsoft was the potential for this platform to abstract the Win32 API. These APIs could be the most important APIs in the future, putting Win32 and Microsoft platform position in jeopardy.

It wasn't they were jealous of Netscape being better or more widely distributed than Internet Explorer. They were scared of the open web itself, because the open web would be the platform for applications and Microsoft Windows would not be. Go for maximum browser share. This is a no revenue product, but we will lose the Internet platform battle if we do not have a significant user installed base. This is from the Department of Justice's findings around 2001, I think, when this finally came to court and got resolved. When it got resolved, Microsoft were forbidden from being naughty for 10 plus years and interestingly now I bother regulators and mix with economists like Gerardo far more than any normal northern code monkey ever should be required to do. We know a guy called Gene Burrus and Gene Burrus was Microsoft's attorney, chief attorney at this time. Interestingly when the verdict came down Microsoft went okay this is what we're going to do we'll comply and we're going to make sure that all of our competitors comply with the same rules because if we're going to be restricted on what kind of monopolization we can do we're going to make damn sure that our competitors are and for a decade it was fine and mostly now desktop exists alongside the web it isn't trying anymore to monopolize the web with some notable exceptions uh Microsoft.

If you type in Vivaldi browser which I just happen to work for but also if you type in Firefox or Chrome into Microsoft Bing which is the default search engine on Microsoft Edge which is the default web browser on Microsoft Windows you'll get a handy sponsored message saying you don't need to download another browser Microsoft recommends Microsoft Edge for a far secure and modern web experience though the suggestion here of course is that another browser such as Vivaldi or Firefox is not secure not fast and not modern and of course uh not all desktop is entirely free of can I say fascist assholes here okay fascist people uh we have seen even Linux even Linux which actually in us Torvalds has said was never meant to be any kind of social justice project at all even Linux is being um fascist as we speak but largely desktop is open but the platforms or the monopolists or the big tech bros learned a valuable lesson and when mobile came around that was their cue to begin monopolization as far as they could we've gone from here this is for everyone and for a while this promise held true so for example apps on phones are highly light tray live on your home screen you can tickle them into life with just a wiggle of your digits they take over with a lovely whole full screen experience they can work offline they can store things locally on devices they were better than the web so the web caught up progressive web apps because I think these are good because the web should be for everybody regardless of disabilities whether permanent or situational you know this shit but they should also be equally available for people on lower powered devices constrained networks and expensive data plans and progressive web apps tend to be better for those people than native apps in short they are websites plus you can save them to the home screen open full screen they can work offline with service worker a much smaller initial install because it's basically a manifest and an icon.

And you've seen them twitter original wordle starbucks uber pinterest tinder spotify and lots of adult oriented websites just mean porn gambling etc things that are not allowed on the app store because of course Cupertino in california and woe betide that california doesn't export its own pure botanical morals to the rest of the world there are lots of things that are not allowed on the app store so they exist as pwas Stuart Langridge a chum of mine up in birmingham who spoke at state of the browser a couple of years ago he made this game farmbound it's a progressive web app on android it runs lovely and full screen on ios it can run lovely and full screen on a lower spec browser maybe on a feature phone or a

semi feature phone it isn't an app it's just a website but it still works everybody gets some experience and people with more modern more fast devices get a better experience as though a classic example of progressive enhancements in short it's better it's free to develop you don't need to buy a developer license you don't need to own a mac or an iphone or a windows machine in order to build a web app if you've got a a text editor and a browser you can build a web app it's open standards which are nice there's no gatekeeper you can publish what you want you write once and it runs anywhere because it's the web and the web has 30 years worth of experience of working on any device it's instant update the moment you make a change and push it to your server the next person who opens the web app if they're online gets your change you don't have to wait for a gatekeeper to accept your change and this is important if it's a security flaw that you're fixing there's no outside interference it's just better.

In last year's state um state of html I forget which one it is 48 percent of developers said they've used progressive web app api second only to web socket even more than geolocation even apple loves progressive web apps or at least pretends to they said to the australian regulator pwas eliminate the need to download the developer's app through the app store increasingly available on devices including ios they have the look feel and functionality of a native app and unfortunately regulators believe this and regulators are not bad people they're not all bad people but they are economists and they are lawyers they're not developers and so uh on a quick overview often a web app can look like it has the same power but it doesn't.

So for example on Stuart's farmbound game on an android device if it's running chrome chrome will just detect that farmbound is a pwa and if you haven't installed it chrome will offer you the chance it will say do you want to install it Stuart didn't have to write this banner it's just given to him by the os and the browser with a simple tag in the head on ios if you know that progressive web apps are a thing and you know you can install them it is this simple and intuitive experience you click the share menu of course you do to install something and then finally it's installed I think it's five levels deep now and of course not everybody even knows this is possible but apple do have something called smart app banners like the install prompt you get for pwas and android it's just one tag in the head and apple say smart app banners vastly improve users browsing experience compared to other promotional methods in ios smart app banners provide a consistent look and feel that users come to recognize.

The innocent and naive amongst you might think this is very similar to what you saw with the install banners on android for pwas but they look like this a banner at the top given to you by the operating system so there's a consistent look and feel but there's one essential difference let's zoom in and here's the essential difference apple can charge between 20 and 30 percent of every purchase done in app if it's downloaded from the app store they can't tax you a penny for anything that your customers buy on a progressive web app now of course apple deny that they're motivated by cash it's all for your security it's for your comfort it's for your health they're doing it to protect you because you are too stupid to do it yourself whereas on the web we've always said there's an api for that apple say there's an app for that for good reason this is a feature detector for common web app apis on chrome on android this is chrome on ios and it's missing loads of those apis even though they're both chrome developers notice this the main pain points in using browser apis developers say it's browser support and they mean safari and the reason why chrome on ios and chrome for android are so different is app store rule 2.5.6 apps that browse the web must use the appropriate webkit framework and webkit javascript and of course browsers are native apps so they must use webkit and webkit javascript there's the illusion of competition once you take the mask off firefox for ios edge on the iphone chrome on the iphone the Vivaldi on the iphone they are all apple safari they are all running webkit and it's not a webkit that you can replace or enhance it is a particular webkit that apple dictate the abilities of they can leave out the api's that they don't want to support.
So for example no browser on ios can support web bluetooth or until recently push notifications even though native apps could access those things on the device but apple would not allow webkits to access those api's and every browser on ios has to be webkit I would argue if I were a lawyer or an economist or clever like errata I would argue this was monopolization this was restraint of trade is this a problem well apple will tell you that they do this because the web is insecure and it's for web browsers allow viruses and all kinds of awful stuff and web apps are incredibly secure.

Now when we think of security honesty and integrity we naturally think of the white house don't we um and in march the trump administration released an official white house app for ios and android nearly everything in the app is available on whitehouse.gov nearly everything the apps unique additions of push notifications a pre-filled text message to the president and an ice tip button so you can dob your neighbors into the feds pretty compelling reason to download the app I would say but the ice tip button is also available at ice.gov if any of you have any neighbors that you think need dobbing in um go on for your comfort and security the native app should have a manifest disclosing what data it collects the white house app declared an empty array meanwhile the actual binary contained 10 analytics frameworks the gps poll precise coordinates every four and a half minutes in the foreground every nine and a half hour minutes in the background and it could they could remotely enable or disable gps tracking without update or without apple review one of the embedded trackers was huawei mobile services huawei is not allowed in the usa lest uh china get their hands on stuff um we should then maybe this is reassuring maybe it's reassuring but only 23 of those network requests go to third parties.

If this was a pwa if this was a website these would be bugs or if these were bugs in the browser they would be fixed record quick Jake would have his army of ais no Jake would be there on github burning the midnight oil making sure that these firefox bugs were sorted I know that of Vivaldi we would be too but this is not bugs this is by design this is designed into the native app apis and ecosystem so all of these perks are at fault google is at fault a few weeks ago I put in a dma digital markets act the eu act I put in a request under the dma for google to open its web apk minting system basically if you install a web app on chrome it on the fly makes it into a an android apk which then gets installed as a native app because it's become a native app and that means that in the app drawer you'll see it as a separate app etc all well and good in this is just to get around android architectural limitations but google were not allowing anybody else access so on firefox and on the Vivaldi and on any other android browser that wanted to installing a web app wasn't installing it as fully onto android as chrome allowed B

Breaking news you're the first to hear it but at 3 15 p.m today Luke Luke igalia I forget it's certainly Warlow Luke Warlow of igalia blue sky I forget what the verb is tweeted blue sky you eat it whatever by complete coincidence just after I put in that dma request the culmination of nine years of engineering effort in google just happened to land and they've opened it up so any android browser will be able to install pwas good for google obviously I'm going to piss and moan about microsoft because microsoft edge and steering but i'm not going to mention that anymore because my glamorous colleague Gerardo will talk more about that apple are the most egregious and that's why i'm banging on about them most.

And I would suggest that apart from your comfort and security on ios apple might care about the estimated 25 to 30 billion us dollars it gets from the tax by charging developers a commission on sales through the app store just a hunch and we were so pissed off about this in lockdown time in 2021 that four of us got together it's me my friend Stuart Langridge and two people who actually wanted to remain anonymous because they were so worried about retribution from apple pulling their app from the app store they were anonymous they're no longer anonymous but we started a group called open web advocacy because we believed in the words of the parking machine outside chinatown in birmingham we believed change is possible so we started my wife said why the fuck are you photographing a car park it's okay she went is it for a talk for those weird web people.

So we started a group called open web advocacy and it was just a group of ramshackle web developers pissed off at big tech trying to limit the reach of the web which so uncle timbo had invented and given to us all um and we wanted app an end to apple requiring webkit we wanted deep integration for progressive web apps just like it has an android and we wanted any kind of barrier that gatekeepers artificially put up to be removed madness and I thought okay this is the second logged lockdown we can go and talk right to the um the regulators it'll be a laugh and a short lockdown project I no longer with owa the reason is not I don't it's not that I don't love them anymore it's I got employed by vivaldi which is an independent employee-owned browser in norway and owa's shtick is that it's independent web developers and I didn't want apple's lawyers to say look Bruce Lawson he works for big little tech he's not independent they are astroturf so I resigned but we still send each other valentine's cards we don't actually this is giving up the ghost we went right we got invited down to london after the lockdown finished to speak to the cma the competition and markets authority which is the regulator in the uk uh I think they were just so shocked at a bunch of ramshackle web developers in our home offices as opposed to shiny toothed million pound suited lobbyists they just thought fuck it let's just invite them down because they're weird we went down we wore our suits well I didn't but I will polish my shoes and they listened to us they asked us questions and they listened to us and they asked us really good questions back and I was expecting lots of old people in lawyers wigs covered with cobwebs going what is a computer but they were nothing like that they were lawyers and economists but they were not thick they they knew what they didn't know and they asked us the questions and really really asked us deep questions until they were educated and it was great and they were really cool so eventually they came out with their report apple bans alternatives to its own browser engine this seriously inhibits the capability of web apps depriving consumers and businesses of the benefits of this innovative technology.

I like them so much I divide design them a better logo one that I think gives that quintessential english feeling but just being a little less staid and things went mad and it was looking really good for a time and then Sir Kier Starmer happened and he got seduced by big tech and he believed that the only way to grow uh British tech was basically to lie down and take it from american big tech uh the cma that the guy who ran the cma guy called marcus bockering was fired because he was insufficiently pro-growth and they replaced him with a bloke who had recently been head of amazon in china because a bloke from amazon can be relied upon to um keep big tech in check i'm sure but it looks like the cma are fighting back.

Whisper it I got invited last monday to stand on the roof of the financial times building overlooking st paul but I wasn't there as a scarecrow right I was there drinking posh wine with men in suits and women in suits at a big meeting to launch this report bottleneck britain in which lots of clever people from a think tank recommend the government publish as an updated strategic seats idea that should clarify that proactive and rapid and bold enforcement is pro-growth the priority should be reducing barriers to entry for competitors not maximizing inward investment from incumbents I know this isn't a particularly stirring battle cry but yeah this is right there was a woman there uh Chi Onwurah MP and this week she last week she introduced uh a bill just a 10-minute bill it's not going to get law but it starts the conversation the digital twin bill to stop people profiling you and advertising you.

She says I hope we can all agree now that leo neo libertarian complacency has not worked we're told that governments are too slow and too stupid to shape tech because the market knows best the tech giants are hubs of amazing innovation but as the committee has heard they are controlled by a small number of extremely wealthy men without the usual corporate governance or competitive restraints we need to limit their power with our democratic power to protect our citizens hoorah the cma introduced us to our friends in the eu I say our friends because of course the uk is not a member of the eu anymore but we're kind of eu adjacent and the eu were also regulating big tech but they were talking about apps but they weren't talking about browser engines we berated them from our lockdown bedrooms wearing our lockdown dressing gowns or our lockdown um conference t-shirts until they wrote it into the law so now it's the law.

Then we were invited to speak to the Japanese fair trade commission at two o'clock in the morning because that was a sensible time for the Japanese ftc that was quite a laugh but the Japanese fair trade commission um sought our input into the newly passed smartphone act which stops uh big tech dictating what browsers or what engines or what software you can use on your smartphones in Japan.

Most recently i've been talking to the korean fair trade commission um who are writing or drafting similar legislation in short uh with owa and with my colleague Gerardo here uh with the browser choice alliance i've talked to people in lots of different jurisdictions australia Japan uh singapore even the states we've had good success in brazil I spoke to the colombians I don't speak any spanish unfortunately but I think I looked convincing and knowledgeable um but the weird thing is these people because they're economists and lawyers they did not give a shit that I have my name in the acknowledgments of the html5 specification they could not care a whit that I could share a beer with Håkon Wium Lie who invented css and Brendan Ike who invented javascript they didn't care about that.

It was like walking into a building like this and they were asking difficult questions they'd say things like we're a designated gatekeeper and there are articles for dma requires in third party they were asking hard questions that are completely outside the brain space of a birmingham-based tech monkey but luckily luckily I had a guide like gollum who guided dildo or whatever his name was through the dark marshes i'm making this up gotta watch those kind of stuff like gollum I had a guide a reformed sinister economist from columbia who now lives in brussels Gerardo down here who's going to talk to you next he's an economist he knows shit and he knows how to talk to these people in suits and he's done enormous help and got us in front of regulators that we never would have got in front of before so where are we now in the europe ios is designated as a gatekeeper operating system and safari is designated as a gatekeeper browser android is a gatekeeper operating system as in as is windows um and chrome is a gatekeeper browser on android because it's the default but microsoft edge is not designated a gatekeeper more about later so as of now in europe in fact for a few months and in Japan you can sideload apps onto your ios device without having to go through the app store it is a ball ache and it's complex and I suspect that apple are not pushing out putting out all the stops to make it a simple process but you can do it if you go to altstore.io and you are in the eu or Japan.

On this iphone in my pocket I have real chromium running on ios real full fat chromium not chrome with webkit in it but the actual thing you can tell it's chromium because it's running 66 percent of the fugu apis those are the apis that make web apps feel happier that can talk to bluetooth and usb whereas safari on my device is only running 25 percent of those apis because safari uses webkit and apple chooses what goes in webkit so I have chromium on here now and it runs really fast even though it doesn't have um just in time uh interpreting and it hasn't been optimized but you can't have it and that's not because i'm selfish you can't have it because apple has locked you into a gilded cage not because it chases profit oh no it's for you it's for your comfort and your security they've been giving dire warnings like this cold war poster if russia should win if the communist should win the next world war many American men would be sterilized to their apple have been giving lots of fud about what would happen if non-webkit browsers were allowed if non-webkit browsers were allowed bad people like Jake evil Jake bad people like evil bruce bad people like evil Alex Russell would take over and probably destroy democracy of course it takes don't laugh it's bloody serious.

Big tech outspends everybody else on lobbying in the eu tobacco spent 14 million euros last year oil and gas 30 million euros big pharma 40 million euros big tech spent 48 million euros i have spent about 48 quid and that's on wh smith meal dealers going through the channel tunnel to meet up people in brussels.

I said we can do this together so what's the come by our moment you're asking what can we all do well you've done you will learn the web stands people a heck of a lot already because you've written to people uh you've written to the cma when open web advocacy have said we need to hear from real developers you've done a lot by coming here and listen to me bang on when there are far more entertaining like test cards to watch or paint to dry.

Um you've listened to me because Dave's invited me thank you it's going to be a big year this year this fall this autumn if you see me tweet saying please send a message please send a message you don't have to write an essay you don't have to talk in special dma terms they know that what they want to hear they're some real web developers not from lobbyists in norway where my employers are based there is an overriding uh common law uh concept called all our man's are written it is the right to roam if some land is unused and unfenced off it's presumed you have a right to go there as long as you don't cause any trouble what we would like is this kind of all man's right.

What big tech want us to accept is this we're at a fork in the road there's going to be a big meeting uh early october and the people from owa are coming in from the states from australia um and all over the world to meet up with the competition of markets authority in the uk and the digital markets act team in brussels for a big meeting so you can help listen out for the call and when we call please answer we'll do questions after Gerardo's talk because we're going to be talking kind of about the same things but from very different perspectives because he's clever um so we'll ask the questions of both of us thank you for listening i'm sorry i've been banging on forever.