Thanks to new EU laws designed to rein in bullying and oversized tech companies, Apple will soon allow alternative browsers on the iPhone. And these will be the proper versions, not the watered-down Chrome and Firefox-style Safari skins that have been available until now.

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is the EU’s far-reaching legislation designed to force Big Tech to open up its closed platforms and better respect user privacy. It’s a massive set of laws, and one we’ll certainly come back to in the coming months, but today we’re looking at the new requirement that forces Apple to allow alternative browsers on the iPhone. As we’ll see, this can have huge benefits for users, but it can also have drawbacks. Let’s take a closer look.

"While there are currently multiple web browsers on iOS, they all use Safari's rendering engine, WebKit, under the hood. That's because Apple doesn't allow any other browser engines on the platform, period. This will change in the EU, meaning that (for example) Google Chrome on the iPhone in Europe could use Google's rendering engine. This has intriguing implications for web apps, as some web apps simply won't run on Safari, but will on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge," writes Jason Snell, a veteran Apple journalist, on his Six Colors blog.

The big difference is that Apple now allows third-party rendering engines in browsers. While you can now download Chrome for iPhone and iPad, under the hood it still uses Safari’s Webkit engine to actually render the web page. Whereas on your Mac, PC, or Chromebook, the Chrome browser uses Google’s Blink rendering engine. This engine is what takes the raw HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. and turns it into text, executes all the included software code, and so on. It’s like a miniature operating system that lives in the browser.