When it comes to mobile browsers, there are just two that matter: Chrome and Safari have 90% market share between them. And so when Apple takes shots at alternative browsers targeting iPhone users, it’s taking those shots at Google and Google alone.
That’s the context behind Apple’s latest home town privacy stunt. As reported by SFGate, “Apple has switched one of its most prominent billboards in San Francisco to a new advertising campaign, and it appears to include a dig at a Bay Area tech rival.”
When Apple says Safari is “a browser that’s actually private,” it’s issuing a very blunt warning about its rival, the only other mobile browser of any significance.
The warning itself is no surprise—let’s be clear, if privacy is your priority it’s very unlikely you’re defaulting to Google Chrome. In its normal mode, tracking cookies are proving to have cockroach-like survival skills, while in its quasi-private “incognito mode,” it remains unclear quite how incognito that really is.
“There’s no direct reference to Google, of course,” SFGate says, “but it’s impossible not to read the advertisement as anything but a thrown gauntlet against the Mountain View tech giant and its popular Chrome browser.”
Chrome’s tracking cookies will be here until at least early 2025. Recent reports suggest that some form of AI search across user search histories might follow, along with the so-called Privacy Sandbox—which is Google’s attempt to replace tracking cookies with something less awful, albeit its objectives remain the same.
On the spin side, Chrome is an excellent browser—fast, multi-featured and continually updating with new options. It’s not surprising it has approaching 3-billion users. But it has a complex engine that underpins its front-end, and that has been the subject of high-profile, exploited vulnerabilities, far beyond anything we’ve seen with Apple’s Safari in recent years. Last month saw four Chrome zero-days confirmed, and this month the browser’s extensions have come under attack for reported risks.
In reality, Google is in something of a bind. Safari is a browser whereas Chrome is a front-end for Google’s trillion-dollar marketing machine. It cannot turn off tracking by default without an alternative that seeks to track in different ways. Not only would that kill its own golden goose, but it would also cause uproar across the wider industry. Just look at the current back and forth on tracking cookie deprecation.
Safari, meanwhile, is not perfect but has been designed with a different mindset. It doesn’t have all this baggage to contend with, and so can go head-to-head with smaller competitors such as Firefox and Brave which push privacy as a USP.
This Chrome versus Safari trade-off is complicated, of course, by Google’s securing the default search slot on iPhones. But searching within Safari is a much more private experience than using the same search technology in Chrome.
Unless there are very specific reasons to use Chrome, iPhone users should indeed default to Safari. It is fairly private by default, and its privacy mode is much better than Chrome’s—it even deletes traces between tabs, within sessions, unlike Chrome.
“If you have an Incognito window open and you open another one,” Google explains, “your private browsing session will continue in the new window. To exit Incognito mode, close all Incognito windows.” Contrast this with Safari. “Browsing initiated in one tab is isolated from browsing initiated in another tab,” Apple says, “so websites you visit can’t track your browsing across multiple sessions.”
And that little detail neatly sums up the difference. This is an Apple philosophy more than anything else. While Apple’s Californian billboard might appear trivial, there’s a lot going on behind it.
