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Apple has its own opinions about what web standards it should implement. It’s as simple as that. Google has been extremely successful in convincing developers t

• robbedpeter 5y ago
  Reddit is a pretty low bar. I don't think they care much about the site except to make it objectively worse than the app at every convenient opportunity.
  • tmpz22 5y ago
    > Reddit is a pretty low bar Reddit is a multi billion dollar product and one of the most trafficked sites on the internet.
    • foxes 5y ago
      Why do they continue to degrade the mobile/desktop default web experience? Promoting the app is one thing, but then actively harming the user experience? Do most people not care? Insane either way. The day old.reddit dies Ill blacklist the site permanently.
      • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        Gordon Geckos are running the show.
      • theturtletalks 5y ago
        Most consumer companies don't necessarily care about delivering the best UX, just gamifying it to get people to spend more money or time. Just look at AirBNB. You used to be able to sort by price but that option is gone completely and now you have to rely on their algorithm. There is no reason they would neuter the search unless it lead to more bookings. As far as Reddit, I'm surprised the 3rd party apps using the API haven't gotten ads yet. They're heaps better than the official Reddit app.
      • blinktag 5y ago
        They are degrading the web experience because it's easier to block trackers and advertisements in the web. When users are driven to the application, Reddit owns the whole experience and only people who are capable of configuring home firewalls have any hope of privacy.
    • brundolf 5y ago
      If you've ever used their mobile site, it's clear they go out of their way to sabotage the experience so that people will use the native app instead
      • giantrobot 5y ago
        Shit they even admit as much with the popup for the app saying "it's better in the app".
        • nomel 5y ago
          As of late, if you’re not logged in, many features get disabled, like the ability to expand/read more comments.
          • giantrobot 5y ago
            Use old.reddit.com/i.reddit.com and many of those restrictions go away.
        • docflabby 5y ago
          The oddest thing is it's still better on the web than the Android app that's practically unusable. You click open in app and then it loses your thread you're trying to read. I don't even have any strong objections to the app but happy to dance though the dark ux pattern to read the posts!
          • giantrobot 5y ago
            I have a curated list of subreddits I like to read. The moment old.reddit and i.reddit stop working I'll drop them like a bad habit. I'm not going to use their absolutely terrible "new" UI nor their insipid app.
      • The_Colonel 5y ago
        They sabotage the desktop site as well. I don't understand how anybody can see the current atrocity as an improvement. It's borderline unusable.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • brailsafe 5y ago
      A bit of a fallacy don't you think?
    • gjs278 5y ago
      and it was stolen by sjw morons who want to push the app so they ignore bugs about the mobile site
• afavour 5y ago
  You’re talking as if the W3C or even Mozilla don’t exist. This isn’t an Apple vs Google thing. This is an Apple vs web standards thing. That’s why Safari is outdated for developers.
  • jolux 5y ago
    For the most part W3C is where standards go when they’re finished (often long after developers expect them to be available everywhere, especially these days). WebUSB for example is currently a draft, not a standard. Many of these complaints are about technologies that Chrome implements that have yet to be fully standardized.
    • berkes 5y ago
      > Many of these complaints are about technologies that Chrome implements The article mentions explicitely: WebRTC, VP9, WebP, notifications, home screen icon shortcut, Local data storage, camera, microphone, USB port, and some more. The only one in there that is not supported by w3c, as far as I know, is USB. All others are proper W3 standards yet unsupported by Apple WebKit/Safari. Many of these complaints are about technologies that are fully standardized and supported by all other mayor browsers.
      • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
        Notice how these are all Google technologies? That doesn't contradict your point per se, but it basically feels to me like Google is dictating the standards right now. So I'm not sure Apple needs to play along.
        • berkes 5y ago
          How is push notifications, local storage, camera, location, microphone and USB "Google tech"?
        • woojoo666 5y ago
          It seems like the bigger issue is that Apple isn't playing a bigger part in developing web standards. If Apple doesn't like certain features, they should fight to keep them from being standardized, instead of just refusing to implement them on their own browsers. Where else are web developers supposed to look towards when trying to figure out what's standard and what's not?
• vagrantJin 5y ago
  > Chrome explicitly do not care about other browsers, and think that the world would be a better place if Chrome were the only one. They are gunning for monopoly. No shame in that. The chrome app is the biggest gateway to the internet globally and winning that war means complete dominance as the world moves towards web applications. Using the carrot rather than the stick. But therein lies the rub. Safari is betting on being bundled with macOS/iOS. That's a cool few million users with nary a breath of effort. I can at least empathise with Apple. Why put in the effort like a schmuck selling fried chicken, chips and skateboards door to door when I can lay back and just collect the meatball bacon cheddar pizza rolls falling from the sky?
  • jolux 5y ago
    > They are gunning for monopoly. No shame in that. It is pretty shameful if you’re simultaneously claiming to be the biggest defender of the open web. > Why put in the effort It’s pretty clear why at this point: developers hate them and antitrust regulators are looking for the right opportunity to go for the throat. Apple screwed up when they killed Safari on Windows, they could have had a solid shot at being the #2 browser in the world on the merits ten years ago and they totally blew it. Eddie Cue even wrote about this in some of the emails from the Epic discovery: https://twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/1389632382244847623?s=20 https://twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/1389632382244847623...
    • vagrantJin 5y ago
      My sarcasm was missed. In any case, I'm the furthest from supporting Google or anything they do. But they aren't better or worse than Apple Inc. To defend google, yes their software has the windows problem. They have to support an absurd amount of devices. So them pushing standards is just a big whale trying to get ahead of itself. No harm in that as long as devs don't go for bleeding edge features and harbour any expectations of cross browser compatibility. In not blaming Google or the regulators. They can duke it out as long as the public benefits. Safari wasnt all bad when IE was a thing. It's just that they took IE's spot by being obtuse and generally the rich kid who's a wierdo. Thanks for the tweet link. Is there a site where leaks like this are common? I really liked it more than I should and how much Apple surprisingly looks at Google. I'd always thought Apple is above looking at companies serving peasants with peasant devices.
• strogonoff 5y ago
  The difference in the amount of attention invested in spec support in Chrome and Safari can be explained by the difference in business models between Google and Apple. For Google, the browser is closely associated with their revenue streams. If you profit by showing ads across web properties, you’d naturally prefer to have more control over how those properties are viewed. The motivation can be benevolent in some aspects (to show more ads, we want people to want to browse the Web more—so we want to support fancier tech enabling fancier websites to be developed more easily) and less so in others (we want to control the viewing mechanism to ensure people keep seeing ads; we want to become the de-facto standard of browsing so that we don’t have to worry some newcomer eating at our revenue stream; the more complex the spec, the bigger our moat). To Apple, the browser means relatively little on desktop; on the more sandboxed mobile OS it matters more due to being responsible for a lot of the attack surface.
  • xnx 5y ago
    Even worse for Apple, if there was a more capable browser on iOS, the need for their app store would be reduced.
• wernercd 5y ago
  Apple's opinions are simple: If they have a good browser, then the app store - their cash cow - becomes unneeded.
  • dmitriid 5y ago
    Google's opinions are just as simple: if the web loses even partly to apps, their cash cow becomes unneeded (80% of Google's revenue is online advertising).
    • dragonwriter 5y ago
      Yes, exactly. Apple’s parochial interests are in opposition to the web being useful, Google’s are aligned with the web being useful.
      • dmitriid 5y ago
        No. Google's are aligned with the web being useful to Google. This is not the same as "the web being useful". And these days more often than not Mozilla (which has no stakes in either apps or online advertisement) sides with Apple: https://webapicontroversy.com https://webapicontroversy.com
        • admax88q 5y ago
          I don't buy Mozilla's/Apple's concerns for those APIs. Sure if seems sketch to access USB from the web, but as a user if I'm trying to achieve something and I can't do it on the web, I'll end up installing a native app which has way more access to my system. As a developer I would much rather be able to just deploy cool things on the web instead of having to package up native apps for every platform just to do things like read/write NFC tags, or send notifications to users who want them.
          • admax88q 5y ago
            Take Background Sync for example. Mozilla considers the periodic sync API "harmful" because you could use it to track users IP and consumer resources when it's not clear they're interacting with the site Their stated position: > We're concerned that this feature would allow users to be tracked across networks (leaking private information about location and IP address and how they change over time), and that it would allow script execution and resource consumption when it isn't clear to the user that they're interacting with the site. We might reconsider this position given evidence that these concerns can be safely addressed, however, addressing them for periodic background sync appears substantially harder than doing so for one-off background sync. But you could achieve very similar behaviour by using Web Push (which they _have_ implemented) and just sending periodic push message. So now as an honest web developer if I want nice background sync behaviour I have to implement some Rube Goldberg system of periodic push messages from a backend rather than just asking the system to wake me up every now and then.
• jensensbutton 5y ago
  So learning a new language and OS (ObjC/Swift and iOS) is easier than learning a new web API when you're a web developer? And it's cool because everyone simply has their own _standards_? That's... a take I guess.
• codemusings 5y ago
  Why would you lump PWAs and AMP pages together? They're hardly the same problem. PWAs are a threat to the App Store model. It's obvious that it would spawn a new category of apps that effectively enable sideloading. You've got access to all the native functions too (sensors, camera, storage). Apple doesn't want that. So they drag their feet when it comes to support.
• masswerk 5y ago
  There is a tremendous bias in favor of Chrome in developer communities. E.g., things that aren't implemented in either Chrome or Firefox (well, it's their site) aren't even listed on MDN. (The CSS section is somewhat better on this.) Which creates this whatever-Chrome-is-doing effect…