9 ms·

Apple apparently hates the name "progressive web apps", so how about: "offline web apps" or "installable web apps" or just "unrestricted web apps"? I'd like tho

by SiVal 7y ago

Apple apparently hates the name "progressive web apps", so how about: "offline web apps" or "installable web apps" or just "unrestricted web apps"? I'd like those names more, too. Regardless of the name, where is WebKit's commitment to joining Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and countless web developers in making web apps first-class apps on iOS? Apple keeps silently "considering" and "accidentally" messing up various aspects of web app support, while strictly prohibiting browsers that work well. By prohibiting high-quality browsers, Apple pushes developers toward Apple-proprietary "native" technologies--those that are both allowed to be the only things that work well on Apple devices and are NOT allowed to work anywhere else. Two WebKit goals I'd like to see for 2020: (1) Allow non-WebKit browsers on iOS (start outperforming your competition instead of merely banning your competition), and (2) Make iOS the best platform for powerful web apps instead of the worst, the leader instead of the spoiler.

aphextron 7y ago
>where is WebKit's commitment to joining Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and countless web developers in making web apps first-class apps on iOS? PWAs are a Google initiative for Android phones, with Mozilla and Microsoft simply following suit to get their products into Google's platform. Apple doesn't have that problem. They have their own platform with their own goals in mind. Non-native experiences are strictly inferior to native, and they know that. With quality being Apple's primary differentiator in the market, it only makes sense that they would take an extremely measured approach here.
- SahAssar 7y ago
  PWA is not a google-only thing, and if apple has better ideas for the implementation they should propose those, not implement a half-baked, buggy implementation of the standard agreed by all others years ago. Native vs non-native is a red herring, there are performant webapps and slow native apps. There are accessible webapps and non-accessible native apps. If performance, accessibility or quality was the goal they would have stricter controls on their own store (as in not allowing apps that are basically "webpage-wrapped-in-webview" apps), as it is it seems that the goal is vendor lock-in and the revenue from in-app purchases.
saagarjha 7y ago
> start outperforming your competition instead of merely banning your competition FWIW, Safari generally outperforms competing browsers on benchmarks.
- greggman2 7y ago
  WAT? I see Safari being substantially slower on pretty much every benchmark I throw at it. Unless you:re on iOS where Apple bans competing browers
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    No, I'm talking about macOS. Instead of linking to webkit.org's results, I'll provide a relatively recently run by someone on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361888
    - millstone 7y ago
      An under-appreciated fact is that JavaScriptCore is really really fast, and often outperforms v8 on benchmarks.
  - pohl 7y ago
    Do you consider efficient use of battery to be a dimension of “performance”? I do.
    - Frondo 7y ago
      Safari's impact on battery life is amazing, and the main reason it's also my daily driver. I work a lot off of battery, and while Firefox recently got a lot better, it's still hard to trade a few hours of work time. and yes, even on my five years old air, I can get five hours of work in using safari, only three with Firefox.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  By using undocumented MacOS private APIs, which bolsters his point. On OSes that don't have this issue, other browsers perform better on the same hardware. https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-reduced-power-usage-in-firefox-70-on-macos-with-core-animation/ https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-red... This has been going on since WebKit launched with no effort from Apple to clean it up, so it certainly seems intentional. http://archive.is/MtntN http://archive.is/MtntN
jxdxbx 7y ago
Web apps suck and all the doodads and gewgaws that browsers now have to implement have made the web a surveillance nightmare that is a worse experience for publishing and reading. There is a place in the world for lowest-common-denominator cross-platform apps, but I wish it wasn't my browser.
- sozy777 7y ago
  We all know why Apple needs the appstore... To make money
  - coldtea 7y ago
    You tell it as if it is some dirty secret. Apple wants to make money, developers need to make money, etc. They're for profit. You can get an OpenMoko phone and install something non-profit on it.
Razengan 7y ago
Most modern web tech is trash and a crutch for lazy developers. There. I said it. In a blunt way what so many other comments here have tried to say without offending anyone. Redirect your ire. :) At best most uses of such tech prey upon users' information, naïveté, and hardware resources. At worst they are outright malicious. I'm glad there is at least one company with the muscle to put their foot down on this shit. We'd still be stuck with fucking Flash if y'all had your way. Instead of reinventing a wheel that doesn't travel far to begin with, major companies should be putting a better effort into write-once-run-natively-everywhere technologies. I don't care if it's SwiftUI, XAML, Qt or whatever. Just stop forcing everyone to spend most of their software time in a half-assed VM when we have had perfectly capable operating systems for millennia.
millstone 7y ago
What is this hope for healthy browser engine competition? On Android and ChromeOS, Chrome and Chromium-based browsers have more than 99% marketshare. "Apple should allow non-WebKit browsers" is really saying "what's holding back the mobile web is that Google does not completely dominate it." Only one thing prevents that outcome today.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  That's a novel argument against allowing competing browsers. Let's apply a basic check on its validity. Do you think Mozilla agrees with it? I think you'll find the answer is "no." Not allowing competing browsers does not help the web ecosystem or the users. It helps only Apple.
  - millstone 7y ago
    Yes I think Mozilla would agree with both the marketshare figures, and that iOS is the only effective check on Google's mobile web dominance. How has allowing competing browser engines on Android helped the web ecosystem? Non-Chromium browsers are a rounding error on Android.
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      > How has allowing competing browser engines on Android helped the web ecosystem? By allowing people to install Firefox. Would you rather that Android be Chrome-only? Neither, I suspect, would Mozilla. The same applies to iOS, with its backwards browser holding back the web. Your argument would justify Microsoft making IE 6 the only allowed browser on Windows. Do you really not see how ridiculous that is?
- kitsunesoba 7y ago
  Yes, this is precisely my fear. The moment that iOS is opened up to third party web engines and Blink-based Chrome has been ported, “viewed best in” badges will rise from the dead, and users will be badgered into installing Chrome for iOS, eliminating the last major non-Chrome holdout (Safari currently holds 16% marketshare). This will make Firefox extremely vulnerable with its ~4.3% marketshare.
coldtea 7y ago
>Regardless of the name, where is WebKit's commitment to joining Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and countless web developers in making web apps first-class apps on iOS? Why should they make "web apps first-class apps on iOS"? As an iOS user I'd rather they discouraged them. The whole value proposition of iOS is getting fast, native apps, that directly use the APIs. Not encouraging lowest common denominator implementations...

by SiVal 7y ago

aphextron 7y ago

>where is WebKit's commitment to joining Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and countless web developers in making web apps first-class apps on iOS? PWAs are a Google initiative for Android phones, with Mozilla and Microsoft simply following suit to get their products into Google's platform. Apple doesn't have that problem. They have their own platform with their own goals in mind. Non-native experiences are strictly inferior to native, and they know that. With quality being Apple's primary differentiator in the market, it only makes sense that they would take an extremely measured approach here.

SahAssar 7y ago
PWA is not a google-only thing, and if apple has better ideas for the implementation they should propose those, not implement a half-baked, buggy implementation of the standard agreed by all others years ago. Native vs non-native is a red herring, there are performant webapps and slow native apps. There are accessible webapps and non-accessible native apps. If performance, accessibility or quality was the goal they would have stricter controls on their own store (as in not allowing apps that are basically "webpage-wrapped-in-webview" apps), as it is it seems that the goal is vendor lock-in and the revenue from in-app purchases.

saagarjha 7y ago

> start outperforming your competition instead of merely banning your competition FWIW, Safari generally outperforms competing browsers on benchmarks.

greggman2 7y ago
WAT? I see Safari being substantially slower on pretty much every benchmark I throw at it. Unless you:re on iOS where Apple bans competing browers
- saagarjha 7y ago
  No, I'm talking about macOS. Instead of linking to webkit.org's results, I'll provide a relatively recently run by someone on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361888
  - millstone 7y ago
    An under-appreciated fact is that JavaScriptCore is really really fast, and often outperforms v8 on benchmarks.
- pohl 7y ago
  Do you consider efficient use of battery to be a dimension of “performance”? I do.
  - Frondo 7y ago
    Safari's impact on battery life is amazing, and the main reason it's also my daily driver. I work a lot off of battery, and while Firefox recently got a lot better, it's still hard to trade a few hours of work time. and yes, even on my five years old air, I can get five hours of work in using safari, only three with Firefox.
lern_too_spel 7y ago
By using undocumented MacOS private APIs, which bolsters his point. On OSes that don't have this issue, other browsers perform better on the same hardware. https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-reduced-power-usage-in-firefox-70-on-macos-with-core-animation/ https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-red... This has been going on since WebKit launched with no effort from Apple to clean it up, so it certainly seems intentional. http://archive.is/MtntN http://archive.is/MtntN

jxdxbx 7y ago

Web apps suck and all the doodads and gewgaws that browsers now have to implement have made the web a surveillance nightmare that is a worse experience for publishing and reading. There is a place in the world for lowest-common-denominator cross-platform apps, but I wish it wasn't my browser.

sozy777 7y ago
We all know why Apple needs the appstore... To make money
- coldtea 7y ago
  You tell it as if it is some dirty secret. Apple wants to make money, developers need to make money, etc. They're for profit. You can get an OpenMoko phone and install something non-profit on it.

Razengan 7y ago

Most modern web tech is trash and a crutch for lazy developers. There. I said it. In a blunt way what so many other comments here have tried to say without offending anyone. Redirect your ire. :) At best most uses of such tech prey upon users' information, naïveté, and hardware resources. At worst they are outright malicious. I'm glad there is at least one company with the muscle to put their foot down on this shit. We'd still be stuck with fucking Flash if y'all had your way. Instead of reinventing a wheel that doesn't travel far to begin with, major companies should be putting a better effort into write-once-run-natively-everywhere technologies. I don't care if it's SwiftUI, XAML, Qt or whatever. Just stop forcing everyone to spend most of their software time in a half-assed VM when we have had perfectly capable operating systems for millennia.

millstone 7y ago

What is this hope for healthy browser engine competition? On Android and ChromeOS, Chrome and Chromium-based browsers have more than 99% marketshare. "Apple should allow non-WebKit browsers" is really saying "what's holding back the mobile web is that Google does not completely dominate it." Only one thing prevents that outcome today.

lern_too_spel 7y ago
That's a novel argument against allowing competing browsers. Let's apply a basic check on its validity. Do you think Mozilla agrees with it? I think you'll find the answer is "no." Not allowing competing browsers does not help the web ecosystem or the users. It helps only Apple.
- millstone 7y ago
  Yes I think Mozilla would agree with both the marketshare figures, and that iOS is the only effective check on Google's mobile web dominance. How has allowing competing browser engines on Android helped the web ecosystem? Non-Chromium browsers are a rounding error on Android.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > How has allowing competing browser engines on Android helped the web ecosystem? By allowing people to install Firefox. Would you rather that Android be Chrome-only? Neither, I suspect, would Mozilla. The same applies to iOS, with its backwards browser holding back the web. Your argument would justify Microsoft making IE 6 the only allowed browser on Windows. Do you really not see how ridiculous that is?
kitsunesoba 7y ago
Yes, this is precisely my fear. The moment that iOS is opened up to third party web engines and Blink-based Chrome has been ported, “viewed best in” badges will rise from the dead, and users will be badgered into installing Chrome for iOS, eliminating the last major non-Chrome holdout (Safari currently holds 16% marketshare). This will make Firefox extremely vulnerable with its ~4.3% marketshare.

coldtea 7y ago

>Regardless of the name, where is WebKit's commitment to joining Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and countless web developers in making web apps first-class apps on iOS? Why should they make "web apps first-class apps on iOS"? As an iOS user I'd rather they discouraged them. The whole value proposition of iOS is getting fast, native apps, that directly use the APIs. Not encouraging lowest common denominator implementations...