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Will 2020 be the year when WebKit, and the Safari browsers by extension, will have full and proper support for Service Workers and PWAs on par with other browse

Will 2020 be the year when WebKit, and the Safari browsers by extension, will have full and proper support for Service Workers and PWAs on par with other browsers? I recall reading that Safari lags behind on it, and the allegation was that Apple prefers native apps and doesn’t want web apps to be more popular.

tannhaeuser 7y ago
Hopefully not. I'd hate to click through "This site wants to push new ads to you. Allow notifications?" modals on my shiny new iPhone (edit: in addition to content being constrained to poststamp-sized areas between GDPR banners).
- crooked-v 7y ago
  Notification support is already a thing, and is separate from PWA support.
- cglong 7y ago
  As opposed to every native app that says the same thing?
  - kick 7y ago
    Making the web suck more to match the native experience would be stupid. If people wanted the inconvenience of native apps, they'd use native apps.
    - lwansbrough 7y ago
      They do use native apps, because they offer these features and other conveniences only afforded to native apps within Apple’s control.
      - soraminazuki 7y ago
        Problems with Apple’s app review guidelines should be addressed by pushing for Apple to improve the guideline itself. Pushing for Apple to make their browser more adtech-friendly to the detriment of its users is not a solution.
        saurik 7y ago
        The core problem with Apple's review guidelines is that Apple should not get to set "review guidelines" for software that runs on a phone they sold to someone else, whether or not they happen to be part of a massive oligopoly wherein their sales and deployed fleet constitute some large percentage of phones being sold with quality parts (using supply chains they have locked up through contracts to prevent small competitors, along with patents on hardware features that they bundle access to only with their locked in software ecosystem). And so like, I in some sense agree? But what this means, and the reason why I agree, is that there should exist an app I can install called Chrome or Firefox that implements a web browser that works the way I might want, in addition to the ability to install whatever app I want (which may, or may not, solve the app review problem).
- joneil 7y ago
  Browser vendors are finally catching on. From Firefox 72 permission prompts won’t be shown unless they’re triggered from a user interaction. From the blog post: > Notification prompts are very unpopular. On Release, about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user. https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/11/04/restricting-notification-permission-prompts-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/11/04/restricti... I’ve heard Chrome is moving in a similar direction
  - hqrlk 7y ago
    So instead of getting a permission prompt on load, I will get it when I first click on something. No thanks.
    - lucasverra 7y ago
      Not if you close Tab before clicking :)
      - hqrlk 7y ago
        There's the middle ground where I can freely browse the page without ever being prompted so see notifications. Apple gets this right.
    - royal_ts 7y ago
      No. It should be done the way like Slack does it: - You want to get Notifications for Messages? Click here So that you actually know what it's used for
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        I'm dealing with a bug currently where Slack doesn't keep track of whether I've enabled notifications, so I always get the banner. I think I'd go mad if every website did that :(
  - ignoramous 7y ago
- lwansbrough 7y ago
  You should understand the argument before you form an opinion on it. First of all, there are plenty of us who have legitimate use cases for web push. Second, if you care about being bothered by shitty sites prompting you unprovoked, you have a couple options: content blockers or use different sites. The need for notifications is real and Apple’s choice to exclude their availability in iOS is a business move not a technical move or a users-first move. Making PWAs better on iOS runs counter to Apple’s walled garden business model.
  - ori_b 7y ago
    > The need for notifications is real Do you keep metrics on acceptance rates? How many of the notification prompts that you pop up are actually accepted? How much of the time are you just annoying your users?
    - lwansbrough 7y ago
      Like I said, our use case is legitimate in the strictest sense. Users request to enable notifications themselves. We never automatically prompt for it. So like.. 100%.
  - tannhaeuser 7y ago
    > There are plenty of us who have legitimate use cases for web push Such as? The only use case for notifications and PWAs I'm coming across are clickbait news sites creating a sense of urgency with "homepage was updated" modals obscuring content and capturing click events. Web user agents have freedoms in rendering pages to users, and Safari siding with users and power efficiency is a good thing. In line with other comments, I predict browsers will soon provide opt-out for notifications, then eventually deprecate them altogether, like they did with popups/popunders. Now, more importantly, Safari could work on their odd pick list control rendering like a dial wheel.
    - lwansbrough 7y ago
      > Such as? Such as a user presses a button in order to enable push notifications.
asadkn 7y ago
No PWAs, no proper service workers, no native lazyload, no WebP, always lagging behind with more buggy implementation of almost everything. Can't blame people who call it the new IE6/8.
- maximegarcia 7y ago
  And web share target...
arciini 7y ago
There's been a lot of talk on this thread about the push notifications aspect. Setting that aside, at Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com https://wanderlog.com), we considered using PWA's and didn't because of another 2 WebKit limitations: storage and fast expiration. We wanted to store pictures of where the user wants to go and cache map tiles offline. Mobile Safari has a limit of 50 MB. This is not enough for these use-cases. Even more annoyingly, Apple deletes PWA's on iPhones after a few weeks. Our users often plan their trips months or many weeks in advance, and don't look at them for weeks at a time. By the time they go on the trip, they may be shocked to see that Apple has evicted their data from the local storage, just as they land somewhere where they no longer have access to 3G data! I think Google's approach of providing virtually unlimited permanent storage is also probably not the best, but something in the middle might be better. At the moment, it's clear that making PWA's capable is not an Apple-wide priority, even if the WebKit or Safari team may be in favor. We decided to avoid fighting it and build a native (React Native) app instead.
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  Why not choosing Cordova/IONIC? Through it's 4000 native Java plugins it can do all the things a PWA can, and even more.
jxdxbx 7y ago
I sure hope not. Why do I want web pages to be able to run persistent background tasks? Such an obviously bad idea. The tragedy is that Apple actually is implementing support for this garbage.
- why-oh-why 7y ago
  Web pages will never run persistent background tasks on iOS unless you install them. And even then, native apps are also both highly restricted and often have background tasks that you wouldn’t approve of if you knew what they were.
iforgotpassword 7y ago
I sure hope not. Apple is the last bastion slowing down widespread use of these horrible technologies that have way more downsides than problems they solve. Privacy and increasing attack surface on your system are the primary concerns for me.

tannhaeuser 7y ago

Hopefully not. I'd hate to click through "This site wants to push new ads to you. Allow notifications?" modals on my shiny new iPhone (edit: in addition to content being constrained to poststamp-sized areas between GDPR banners).

crooked-v 7y ago
Notification support is already a thing, and is separate from PWA support.
cglong 7y ago
As opposed to every native app that says the same thing?
- kick 7y ago
  Making the web suck more to match the native experience would be stupid. If people wanted the inconvenience of native apps, they'd use native apps.
  - lwansbrough 7y ago
    They do use native apps, because they offer these features and other conveniences only afforded to native apps within Apple’s control.
    - soraminazuki 7y ago
      Problems with Apple’s app review guidelines should be addressed by pushing for Apple to improve the guideline itself. Pushing for Apple to make their browser more adtech-friendly to the detriment of its users is not a solution.
      - saurik 7y ago
        The core problem with Apple's review guidelines is that Apple should not get to set "review guidelines" for software that runs on a phone they sold to someone else, whether or not they happen to be part of a massive oligopoly wherein their sales and deployed fleet constitute some large percentage of phones being sold with quality parts (using supply chains they have locked up through contracts to prevent small competitors, along with patents on hardware features that they bundle access to only with their locked in software ecosystem). And so like, I in some sense agree? But what this means, and the reason why I agree, is that there should exist an app I can install called Chrome or Firefox that implements a web browser that works the way I might want, in addition to the ability to install whatever app I want (which may, or may not, solve the app review problem).
joneil 7y ago
Browser vendors are finally catching on. From Firefox 72 permission prompts won’t be shown unless they’re triggered from a user interaction. From the blog post: > Notification prompts are very unpopular. On Release, about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user. https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/11/04/restricting-notification-permission-prompts-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/11/04/restricti... I’ve heard Chrome is moving in a similar direction
- hqrlk 7y ago
  So instead of getting a permission prompt on load, I will get it when I first click on something. No thanks.
  - lucasverra 7y ago
    Not if you close Tab before clicking :)
    - hqrlk 7y ago
      There's the middle ground where I can freely browse the page without ever being prompted so see notifications. Apple gets this right.
  - royal_ts 7y ago
    No. It should be done the way like Slack does it: - You want to get Notifications for Messages? Click here So that you actually know what it's used for
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      I'm dealing with a bug currently where Slack doesn't keep track of whether I've enabled notifications, so I always get the banner. I think I'd go mad if every website did that :(
- ignoramous 7y ago
lwansbrough 7y ago
You should understand the argument before you form an opinion on it. First of all, there are plenty of us who have legitimate use cases for web push. Second, if you care about being bothered by shitty sites prompting you unprovoked, you have a couple options: content blockers or use different sites. The need for notifications is real and Apple’s choice to exclude their availability in iOS is a business move not a technical move or a users-first move. Making PWAs better on iOS runs counter to Apple’s walled garden business model.
- ori_b 7y ago
  > The need for notifications is real Do you keep metrics on acceptance rates? How many of the notification prompts that you pop up are actually accepted? How much of the time are you just annoying your users?
  - lwansbrough 7y ago
    Like I said, our use case is legitimate in the strictest sense. Users request to enable notifications themselves. We never automatically prompt for it. So like.. 100%.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  > There are plenty of us who have legitimate use cases for web push Such as? The only use case for notifications and PWAs I'm coming across are clickbait news sites creating a sense of urgency with "homepage was updated" modals obscuring content and capturing click events. Web user agents have freedoms in rendering pages to users, and Safari siding with users and power efficiency is a good thing. In line with other comments, I predict browsers will soon provide opt-out for notifications, then eventually deprecate them altogether, like they did with popups/popunders. Now, more importantly, Safari could work on their odd pick list control rendering like a dial wheel.
  - lwansbrough 7y ago
    > Such as? Such as a user presses a button in order to enable push notifications.

asadkn 7y ago

No PWAs, no proper service workers, no native lazyload, no WebP, always lagging behind with more buggy implementation of almost everything. Can't blame people who call it the new IE6/8.

maximegarcia 7y ago
And web share target...

arciini 7y ago

There's been a lot of talk on this thread about the push notifications aspect. Setting that aside, at Wanderlog (https://wanderlog.com https://wanderlog.com), we considered using PWA's and didn't because of another 2 WebKit limitations: storage and fast expiration. We wanted to store pictures of where the user wants to go and cache map tiles offline. Mobile Safari has a limit of 50 MB. This is not enough for these use-cases. Even more annoyingly, Apple deletes PWA's on iPhones after a few weeks. Our users often plan their trips months or many weeks in advance, and don't look at them for weeks at a time. By the time they go on the trip, they may be shocked to see that Apple has evicted their data from the local storage, just as they land somewhere where they no longer have access to 3G data! I think Google's approach of providing virtually unlimited permanent storage is also probably not the best, but something in the middle might be better. At the moment, it's clear that making PWA's capable is not an Apple-wide priority, even if the WebKit or Safari team may be in favor. We decided to avoid fighting it and build a native (React Native) app instead.

The_rationalist 7y ago
Why not choosing Cordova/IONIC? Through it's 4000 native Java plugins it can do all the things a PWA can, and even more.

jxdxbx 7y ago

I sure hope not. Why do I want web pages to be able to run persistent background tasks? Such an obviously bad idea. The tragedy is that Apple actually is implementing support for this garbage.

why-oh-why 7y ago
Web pages will never run persistent background tasks on iOS unless you install them. And even then, native apps are also both highly restricted and often have background tasks that you wouldn’t approve of if you knew what they were.

iforgotpassword 7y ago

I sure hope not. Apple is the last bastion slowing down widespread use of these horrible technologies that have way more downsides than problems they solve. Privacy and increasing attack surface on your system are the primary concerns for me.