18 ms·

Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

161 points by pcr910303 6y ago

gobengo 6y ago
This announcement from last October is a huge deal. "Meet Face ID and Touch ID for the Web" https://webkit.org/blog/11312/meet-face-id-and-touch-id-for-the-web/ https://webkit.org/blog/11312/meet-face-id-and-touch-id-for-...
- julianlam 6y ago
  Well, Safari and Chrome being the two giants in the room mean they also keep each other in check. Safari may support Face ID and Touch ID, but I doubt it would be in anybody else's best interest to also support it. Not that it matters anyway, since on iOS they all use Safari...
  - aeontech 6y ago
    If you read the parent post, the support is implemented on top of WebAuthn standard, so as far as developers are concerned, they don’t have to do anything Safari-specific to support it - their code will work fine with YubiKey or other Authenticators as well. Which is the point of web standards after all. https://webauthn.io/ https://webauthn.io/
julianlam 6y ago
> (Conversely, if Safari refuses to implement some alleged 'feature', it becomes much less useful even if Chrome does implement it.) Ah yes... such as push notifications. Firebase would be so much more useful if Safari supported push notifications...
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  What do you mean by "useful"? I've been using Safari exclusively for years now and the lack of push notifications hasn't been a problem. It's actually good because it shields me from all kinds of shitty websites demanding notification permissions while having no good reason to send any.
  - slimsag 6y ago
    From their profile: > Co-Founder of NodeBB Inc., modern forum software for the modern web. So I assume they want notifications for forum software.
    - julianlam 6y ago
      Indeed! Although in our implementation it's entirely opt-in (we don't request the permission access unless the user asks us to). It's just entirely broken on iOS, but them's the breaks.
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    Why are we optimizing the case of users browsing bad websites? Why not cater to good websites instead? Isn't a notification receiver of the most important uses of a phone?
    - olliej 6y ago
      web pages aren't something users want notifications from. Mozilla literally studied this and essentially 100% of "let us spam you" requests were denied.
      - nexuist 6y ago
        Because essentially 100% of web pages that request push notification access are garbage tabloids that nobody cares about. No push notifications on mobile Safari means that there is no incentive to build mobile web apps that function similar to their native counterparts. Obviously people are accepting push notifications somewhere or else they wouldn't be such a popular design decision.
        Google234 6y ago
        People could also build cool websites if your computer gave all sites kernel access into your computer. Doesn’t make it a good idea
- techrat 6y ago
  > Ah yes... such as push notifications. Firebase would be so much more useful if Safari supported push notifications... All part of Apple's plans to enforce their one and only apps store for use on the iOS platform. Wouldn't want those pesky webapps being able to sidestep Apple's walled garden.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
This is why, despite it being monopolistic, I hope Apple can continue their requirement on using Safari's rendering engine on iOS. It's the sole remaining defense against a far worse monopoly. Neither the Mozilla nor Edge teams have the backbone to resist Google's web platform initiatives.
- julianlam 6y ago
  > Edge teams What happened with Edge? I've been out of the loop with MS stuff for years, and last I heard you had to select a browser in the EU or something, but was this also made mandatory worldwide? I'd imagine still being bundled with Windows means their usage is not insignificant...
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Edge is now just a rebranded Chromium, and Microsoft's approach with Windows 10 suggests they are betting big on advertising and the "attention economy" thus very unlikely to push towards privacy protection.
    - userbinator 6y ago
      They are also adopting the "user herding" trend --- taking away choices and control, bludgeoning the userbase into docile and obedient consumers that they can monetise or do whatever else they want to. Take a look at the settings for IE, which actually improved with each new version, and you can clearly see which side MS used to be on. Then compare it with the useless dumbed-down "modern" UI of even pre-Chromium Edge.
  - bleachedsleet 6y ago
    Edge is now a Chromium fork
    - julianlam 6y ago
      Ah, thank you. I must've missed this rather large change...
littlestymaar 6y ago
Too bad this is only available on a operating system that spies on its users. (Sorry Apple fans, it does and while their marketing tries to hide it as much as possible, their privacy policies don't lie : https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/) It's funny how quickly one can get downvoted for criticizing Apple's misleading marketing. Apple is a data hoarding company like every others, and no “not being worse than their competitors” isn't good enough.
- p1necone 6y ago
  That's a very long document, which bits are questionable?
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  It's still better than the competition IMO. The intent of the spying should also be considered. Apple does not have a significant targeted advertising business which reduces/removes the incentive to hoover up as much personal data as they can. Would I prefer something that doesn't spy at all? Absolutely, but this means rolling your own computing environment using Linux and giving up a lot of features that are considered a given in macOS, and yet there's only 24 hours in a day and I no longer have time for that.
- zepto 6y ago
  Seems like bullshit. The linked document doesn’t support the claim.
- djrogers 6y ago
  That’s a very long, thoughtful, and detailed document. Linking to it without any context at all isn’t super helpful. What exactly are you referring to when you claim Apple ‘spies on its [sic] users’? Every bit of data Apple has about me is a) made explicitly clear, b) used for a specific purpose or feature, and c) isn’t sold to or used in any adtech bs. That all sounds good to me…
  - yladiz 6y ago
    Tangential: why did you put [sic] after its? "its" is correct there.
heavyset_go 6y ago
> (Conversely, if Safari refuses to implement some alleged 'feature', it becomes much less useful even if Chrome does implement it.) The fact that Apple refuses to implement basic features in mobile Safari that Firefox and Chrome have had for years now, and the fact that they refuse to allow other browser engines on iOS is the reason why we can't have nice things like progressive web apps. I recently worked on a health app related to the COVID pandemic. The most common use case would be served really well by a PWA, and as such, there's no reason users would need to install an app on their phones to access the web app's full set of features. Despite the web app working perfectly on Android and across Windows, Linux and macOS without native integration, we now must dedicate time and resources to develop an additional iOS app just so iOS users, which over half of Americans are, aren't left out. This is an expensive endeavor time-wise and money-wise, during a pandemic where time is of the essence and resources are stretched thin. It shouldn't be this way, but it is.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  What is Safari on iOS missing specifically?
  - jdauriemma 6y ago
    Progressive Web Apps
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      But what exactly? Wikipedia says it does support it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_application https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_application: And I know I’ve written Progressive apps for iOS myself - manifests etc. So I know it’s not as simple as you’re saying. What do you really mean?
      - jdauriemma 6y ago
        Safari absolutely does not support PWAs in a meaningful way when compared with other platforms. Service Worker support is fine, but one of its main features is its use in combination with the Push API, which is not supported in Safari. This omitted feature alone alone makes web apps on iOS far less valuable than native apps. There are other omissions as well, but this one in the most glaring.
Pxtl 6y ago
What about Edge? I found Firefox unusable on my phone - prone to crashing and a bit slow. Meanwhile, Edge for Android includes some of the privacy and Adblocking features of FF but still uses the Chromium renderer so it doesn't sacrifice performance. I'm very happy with it. On desktop I'm all FF, of course.
- imiric 6y ago
  If you're on Android, give Bromite a try. It's a Chromium fork with privacy and adblocking features and good performance. Firefox Klar/Focus also isn't bad, if you don't mind losing some of the functionality of the full version.
- tristan957 6y ago
  Full version of Firefox on Android hasn't crashed on me in months. I know what you are referring to. I would recommend giving it a try again. New version is also very fast.
fragile_frogs 6y ago
> Conversely, if Safari refuses to implement some alleged 'feature', it becomes much less useful even if Chrome does implement it. How is Safari not implementing standards seen as a good thing? While I do acknowledge that there might be privacy concerns when it comes to Chrome, I do appreciate that Google is trying to push the Web forward, while Apple is trying to hold the Web back. Safari truly is the worst browser, I fucking hate it. Apple is doing the bare minimum and pretends to "protect user privacy" when all they do is to prevent the web to compete with their app store. Apple pretends to care about the user experience when they are the only ones not implementing standards that would benefit the user. Ohh and you are on Windows and wan't to debug something on Safari? Forget it.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > How is Safari not implementing standards seen as a good thing? One, “feature” isn’t the same as a standard. And two, standards aren’t standard. They’re adopted through a dubious process and then ignored by the most powerful companies.
  - fragile_frogs 6y ago
    > And two, standards aren’t standard. They’re adopted through a dubious process and then ignored by the most powerful companies. Apple is really the only one these days ignoring these standards. Even if it a "dubious process", if there is consensus among the majority browser vendors I would call it standard.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > if there is consensus among the majority browser vendors I would call it standard “Consensus among the majority browser vendors” effectively means what Google does.
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  Ohh and you are on Windows and wan't to debug something on Safari? Forget it. Yeah, this utterly baffles me. You'd think Apple, out of sheer self-interest, would offer some sort of "Safari for Developers" that runs on Windows/Linux. Even if it's some kind of klunky suboptimally-performant thing. Just make it really obvious in terms of it's branding and theming that it's devs-only.
bleachedsleet 6y ago
I love Safari as a browser, but I hate the fact that it neuters the web and makes it feel much less powerful. Web Bluetooth and webUSB are ignored by Safari and unsupported. Notification support is lacking last I checked. No PWA functionality to speak of and webNFC won’t be added. Extensions are lacking largely due to being basically native apps that bring with them all the cost and overhead of being such. As a browser Safari is beautiful (loving the look of it on Big Sur), efficient, lightweight and has a lot of little creature comforts that other browsers can’t or won’t implement because they are Mac specific (keychain, Touch/FaceID, native share sheet, 2fa code reads direct from Messages, etc). But it’s also hard to see a future in a browser that is still stuck in a Web 2.0 philosophy. The author’s point is good though: Safari is becoming the final bastion of hope against a purely Chromium landscape just by virtue of being an Apple product with an immediately large market share. I hope Apple will use this position of power wisely and help drive browser behavior rather than just being comfortable to exist in their own little world. Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. For Apple Safari seems to be little more than a talking point when advertising MacOS/iOS. It’s just another feature. For what it’s worth I’ve been really enjoying Vivaldi of late (I have no affiliation with the project, just including for context on my day to day browser).
- ksec 6y ago
  >to exist in their own little world. Today, the iPhone has 66% market share in the United States, 75% of U.S. App Store revenues, and over 80% of time spent on the mobile internet.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    Apple sell phones globally, so really you should be using global statistics to determine what Safari needs to implement.
    - ksec 6y ago
      Are we going to include stats from Africa and India where the target market are not within the current pricing bracket of entry level iPhone? And even if you do, it is still 25%+, hardly a minority.
jimmaswell 6y ago
Safari is today's IE. I've had to write so much extra code because Safari has to be special/broken.
RantyDave 6y ago
I've been using Safari for a couple of months on an M1. Purely from a privacy perspective. I don't think I suddenly "have" privacy because I'm using Safari, but I do at least feel that Apple are in my corner. Because I give them money.
camdenlock 6y ago
Folks in these comments seem to be missing the point re: Safari lacking features, specifically features which would allow for 1) greater access to the hardware, and 2) PWAs. Apple isn’t just lagging behind. They very intentionally do not want web APIs to become a viable app development platform on their hardware ecosystem. Other hardware vendors are rapidly catching up to Apple in terms of hardware quality, so the main remaining differentiator for Apple becomes quality of software experiences. This is, of course, precisely the arena in which Apple currently dominates, owing to their investment in making their app dev stack the best in the world. More than anything else, they do NOT want to lose that advantage. So, a non-proprietary app dev platform which matches or exceeds the quality of their own? Yikes. If they allow Safari to become a gateway to such a platform, it would truly be an incomparable existential threat to their app development and distribution model. I personally think it’s inevitable, but... you can better believe Apple will fight it as hard as they can, for as long as they can. My money’s on their next CEO slipping up and allowing a full glorious Web implementation to be built. There goes any advantage to developing software experiences for the proprietary Apple platform, and that’ll be the true beginning of the end for the modern successful Apple.
hyko 6y ago
Apple are pretty much the only humanist big tech company. They’re a bulwark against all sorts of absolute nonsense that would reduce the technological landscape to more of a dismal-looking, utilitarian panopticon than it already is.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  The only thing Safari has to do is be good enough people can use it as a web browser but bad enough it can't replace apps. It doesn't need to ensure user data gets collected and sold or push ads or any other business model - it just needs to protect the 10s of billions of passive income from the app store. As a result it's free to make whatever choices make sense for the user as long as they aren't related to that. I wouldn't call it "humanist" because of that just a different revenue model. The same is true for the rest of Apple, it didn't get to a 2,000,000,000,000 market cap because it's humanist it got there with unique ways and focus on how to make money. Probably less bad than how Google does it though I don't consider that the bar for doing good.
tomcooks 6y ago
It would be great if anything closed source was barred from using the word "privacy" in marketing.
- Anktionaer 6y ago
  It would be great if people just understood that they can't trust closed-source binaries.
  - kergonath 6y ago
    To be fair, they can’t trust open-source either. Particularly when so much is happening server-side and on the cloud. Our trust model is fundamentally broken.
mt_ 6y ago
No thanks, I'll stick with firefox

161 points by pcr910303 6y ago

This announcement from last October is a huge deal. "Meet Face ID and Touch ID for the Web" https://webkit.org/blog/11312/meet-face-id-and-touch-id-for-the-web/ https://webkit.org/blog/11312/meet-face-id-and-touch-id-for-...

julianlam 6y ago
Well, Safari and Chrome being the two giants in the room mean they also keep each other in check. Safari may support Face ID and Touch ID, but I doubt it would be in anybody else's best interest to also support it. Not that it matters anyway, since on iOS they all use Safari...
- aeontech 6y ago
  If you read the parent post, the support is implemented on top of WebAuthn standard, so as far as developers are concerned, they don’t have to do anything Safari-specific to support it - their code will work fine with YubiKey or other Authenticators as well. Which is the point of web standards after all. https://webauthn.io/ https://webauthn.io/

julianlam 6y ago

> (Conversely, if Safari refuses to implement some alleged 'feature', it becomes much less useful even if Chrome does implement it.) Ah yes... such as push notifications. Firebase would be so much more useful if Safari supported push notifications...

Nextgrid 6y ago
What do you mean by "useful"? I've been using Safari exclusively for years now and the lack of push notifications hasn't been a problem. It's actually good because it shields me from all kinds of shitty websites demanding notification permissions while having no good reason to send any.
- slimsag 6y ago
  From their profile: > Co-Founder of NodeBB Inc., modern forum software for the modern web. So I assume they want notifications for forum software.
  - julianlam 6y ago
    Indeed! Although in our implementation it's entirely opt-in (we don't request the permission access unless the user asks us to). It's just entirely broken on iOS, but them's the breaks.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  Why are we optimizing the case of users browsing bad websites? Why not cater to good websites instead? Isn't a notification receiver of the most important uses of a phone?
  - olliej 6y ago
    web pages aren't something users want notifications from. Mozilla literally studied this and essentially 100% of "let us spam you" requests were denied.
    - nexuist 6y ago
      Because essentially 100% of web pages that request push notification access are garbage tabloids that nobody cares about. No push notifications on mobile Safari means that there is no incentive to build mobile web apps that function similar to their native counterparts. Obviously people are accepting push notifications somewhere or else they wouldn't be such a popular design decision.
      - Google234 6y ago
        People could also build cool websites if your computer gave all sites kernel access into your computer. Doesn’t make it a good idea
techrat 6y ago
> Ah yes... such as push notifications. Firebase would be so much more useful if Safari supported push notifications... All part of Apple's plans to enforce their one and only apps store for use on the iOS platform. Wouldn't want those pesky webapps being able to sidestep Apple's walled garden.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

This is why, despite it being monopolistic, I hope Apple can continue their requirement on using Safari's rendering engine on iOS. It's the sole remaining defense against a far worse monopoly. Neither the Mozilla nor Edge teams have the backbone to resist Google's web platform initiatives.

julianlam 6y ago
> Edge teams What happened with Edge? I've been out of the loop with MS stuff for years, and last I heard you had to select a browser in the EU or something, but was this also made mandatory worldwide? I'd imagine still being bundled with Windows means their usage is not insignificant...
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Edge is now just a rebranded Chromium, and Microsoft's approach with Windows 10 suggests they are betting big on advertising and the "attention economy" thus very unlikely to push towards privacy protection.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    They are also adopting the "user herding" trend --- taking away choices and control, bludgeoning the userbase into docile and obedient consumers that they can monetise or do whatever else they want to. Take a look at the settings for IE, which actually improved with each new version, and you can clearly see which side MS used to be on. Then compare it with the useless dumbed-down "modern" UI of even pre-Chromium Edge.
- bleachedsleet 6y ago
  Edge is now a Chromium fork
  - julianlam 6y ago
    Ah, thank you. I must've missed this rather large change...

littlestymaar 6y ago

Too bad this is only available on a operating system that spies on its users. (Sorry Apple fans, it does and while their marketing tries to hide it as much as possible, their privacy policies don't lie : https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/) It's funny how quickly one can get downvoted for criticizing Apple's misleading marketing. Apple is a data hoarding company like every others, and no “not being worse than their competitors” isn't good enough.

p1necone 6y ago
That's a very long document, which bits are questionable?
Nextgrid 6y ago
It's still better than the competition IMO. The intent of the spying should also be considered. Apple does not have a significant targeted advertising business which reduces/removes the incentive to hoover up as much personal data as they can. Would I prefer something that doesn't spy at all? Absolutely, but this means rolling your own computing environment using Linux and giving up a lot of features that are considered a given in macOS, and yet there's only 24 hours in a day and I no longer have time for that.
zepto 6y ago
Seems like bullshit. The linked document doesn’t support the claim.
djrogers 6y ago
That’s a very long, thoughtful, and detailed document. Linking to it without any context at all isn’t super helpful. What exactly are you referring to when you claim Apple ‘spies on its [sic] users’? Every bit of data Apple has about me is a) made explicitly clear, b) used for a specific purpose or feature, and c) isn’t sold to or used in any adtech bs. That all sounds good to me…
- yladiz 6y ago
  Tangential: why did you put [sic] after its? "its" is correct there.

heavyset_go 6y ago

> (Conversely, if Safari refuses to implement some alleged 'feature', it becomes much less useful even if Chrome does implement it.) The fact that Apple refuses to implement basic features in mobile Safari that Firefox and Chrome have had for years now, and the fact that they refuse to allow other browser engines on iOS is the reason why we can't have nice things like progressive web apps. I recently worked on a health app related to the COVID pandemic. The most common use case would be served really well by a PWA, and as such, there's no reason users would need to install an app on their phones to access the web app's full set of features. Despite the web app working perfectly on Android and across Windows, Linux and macOS without native integration, we now must dedicate time and resources to develop an additional iOS app just so iOS users, which over half of Americans are, aren't left out. This is an expensive endeavor time-wise and money-wise, during a pandemic where time is of the essence and resources are stretched thin. It shouldn't be this way, but it is.

chrisseaton 6y ago
What is Safari on iOS missing specifically?
- jdauriemma 6y ago
  Progressive Web Apps
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    But what exactly? Wikipedia says it does support it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_application https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_application: And I know I’ve written Progressive apps for iOS myself - manifests etc. So I know it’s not as simple as you’re saying. What do you really mean?
    - jdauriemma 6y ago
      Safari absolutely does not support PWAs in a meaningful way when compared with other platforms. Service Worker support is fine, but one of its main features is its use in combination with the Push API, which is not supported in Safari. This omitted feature alone alone makes web apps on iOS far less valuable than native apps. There are other omissions as well, but this one in the most glaring.

Pxtl 6y ago

What about Edge? I found Firefox unusable on my phone - prone to crashing and a bit slow. Meanwhile, Edge for Android includes some of the privacy and Adblocking features of FF but still uses the Chromium renderer so it doesn't sacrifice performance. I'm very happy with it. On desktop I'm all FF, of course.

imiric 6y ago
If you're on Android, give Bromite a try. It's a Chromium fork with privacy and adblocking features and good performance. Firefox Klar/Focus also isn't bad, if you don't mind losing some of the functionality of the full version.
tristan957 6y ago
Full version of Firefox on Android hasn't crashed on me in months. I know what you are referring to. I would recommend giving it a try again. New version is also very fast.

fragile_frogs 6y ago

> Conversely, if Safari refuses to implement some alleged 'feature', it becomes much less useful even if Chrome does implement it. How is Safari not implementing standards seen as a good thing? While I do acknowledge that there might be privacy concerns when it comes to Chrome, I do appreciate that Google is trying to push the Web forward, while Apple is trying to hold the Web back. Safari truly is the worst browser, I fucking hate it. Apple is doing the bare minimum and pretends to "protect user privacy" when all they do is to prevent the web to compete with their app store. Apple pretends to care about the user experience when they are the only ones not implementing standards that would benefit the user. Ohh and you are on Windows and wan't to debug something on Safari? Forget it.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> How is Safari not implementing standards seen as a good thing? One, “feature” isn’t the same as a standard. And two, standards aren’t standard. They’re adopted through a dubious process and then ignored by the most powerful companies.
- fragile_frogs 6y ago
  > And two, standards aren’t standard. They’re adopted through a dubious process and then ignored by the most powerful companies. Apple is really the only one these days ignoring these standards. Even if it a "dubious process", if there is consensus among the majority browser vendors I would call it standard.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > if there is consensus among the majority browser vendors I would call it standard “Consensus among the majority browser vendors” effectively means what Google does.
JohnBooty 6y ago
Ohh and you are on Windows and wan't to debug something on Safari? Forget it. Yeah, this utterly baffles me. You'd think Apple, out of sheer self-interest, would offer some sort of "Safari for Developers" that runs on Windows/Linux. Even if it's some kind of klunky suboptimally-performant thing. Just make it really obvious in terms of it's branding and theming that it's devs-only.

bleachedsleet 6y ago

I love Safari as a browser, but I hate the fact that it neuters the web and makes it feel much less powerful. Web Bluetooth and webUSB are ignored by Safari and unsupported. Notification support is lacking last I checked. No PWA functionality to speak of and webNFC won’t be added. Extensions are lacking largely due to being basically native apps that bring with them all the cost and overhead of being such. As a browser Safari is beautiful (loving the look of it on Big Sur), efficient, lightweight and has a lot of little creature comforts that other browsers can’t or won’t implement because they are Mac specific (keychain, Touch/FaceID, native share sheet, 2fa code reads direct from Messages, etc). But it’s also hard to see a future in a browser that is still stuck in a Web 2.0 philosophy. The author’s point is good though: Safari is becoming the final bastion of hope against a purely Chromium landscape just by virtue of being an Apple product with an immediately large market share. I hope Apple will use this position of power wisely and help drive browser behavior rather than just being comfortable to exist in their own little world. Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. For Apple Safari seems to be little more than a talking point when advertising MacOS/iOS. It’s just another feature. For what it’s worth I’ve been really enjoying Vivaldi of late (I have no affiliation with the project, just including for context on my day to day browser).

ksec 6y ago
>to exist in their own little world. Today, the iPhone has 66% market share in the United States, 75% of U.S. App Store revenues, and over 80% of time spent on the mobile internet.
- onion2k 6y ago
  Apple sell phones globally, so really you should be using global statistics to determine what Safari needs to implement.
  - ksec 6y ago
    Are we going to include stats from Africa and India where the target market are not within the current pricing bracket of entry level iPhone? And even if you do, it is still 25%+, hardly a minority.

jimmaswell 6y ago

Safari is today's IE. I've had to write so much extra code because Safari has to be special/broken.

RantyDave 6y ago

I've been using Safari for a couple of months on an M1. Purely from a privacy perspective. I don't think I suddenly "have" privacy because I'm using Safari, but I do at least feel that Apple are in my corner. Because I give them money.

camdenlock 6y ago

Folks in these comments seem to be missing the point re: Safari lacking features, specifically features which would allow for 1) greater access to the hardware, and 2) PWAs. Apple isn’t just lagging behind. They very intentionally do not want web APIs to become a viable app development platform on their hardware ecosystem. Other hardware vendors are rapidly catching up to Apple in terms of hardware quality, so the main remaining differentiator for Apple becomes quality of software experiences. This is, of course, precisely the arena in which Apple currently dominates, owing to their investment in making their app dev stack the best in the world. More than anything else, they do NOT want to lose that advantage. So, a non-proprietary app dev platform which matches or exceeds the quality of their own? Yikes. If they allow Safari to become a gateway to such a platform, it would truly be an incomparable existential threat to their app development and distribution model. I personally think it’s inevitable, but... you can better believe Apple will fight it as hard as they can, for as long as they can. My money’s on their next CEO slipping up and allowing a full glorious Web implementation to be built. There goes any advantage to developing software experiences for the proprietary Apple platform, and that’ll be the true beginning of the end for the modern successful Apple.

hyko 6y ago

Apple are pretty much the only humanist big tech company. They’re a bulwark against all sorts of absolute nonsense that would reduce the technological landscape to more of a dismal-looking, utilitarian panopticon than it already is.

zamadatix 6y ago
The only thing Safari has to do is be good enough people can use it as a web browser but bad enough it can't replace apps. It doesn't need to ensure user data gets collected and sold or push ads or any other business model - it just needs to protect the 10s of billions of passive income from the app store. As a result it's free to make whatever choices make sense for the user as long as they aren't related to that. I wouldn't call it "humanist" because of that just a different revenue model. The same is true for the rest of Apple, it didn't get to a 2,000,000,000,000 market cap because it's humanist it got there with unique ways and focus on how to make money. Probably less bad than how Google does it though I don't consider that the bar for doing good.

tomcooks 6y ago

It would be great if anything closed source was barred from using the word "privacy" in marketing.

Anktionaer 6y ago
It would be great if people just understood that they can't trust closed-source binaries.
- kergonath 6y ago
  To be fair, they can’t trust open-source either. Particularly when so much is happening server-side and on the cloud. Our trust model is fundamentally broken.

mt_ 6y ago

No thanks, I'll stick with firefox