7 ms·

Apple’s browser engine ban is holding back web app innovation

100 points by feross 5y ago

baby 5y ago
related: Flash still hasn't really been replaced...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Spivak 5y ago
This argument makes no sense. When people want "other browser engines" on iOS what they mean is "I want Blink so I can write my websites only for Chrome and push the operational burden on browser vendors to maintain compatibility" which isn't exactly innovative. Apple's browser ban is literally the only thing in the whole world making it so that publishers have to put any effort into cross-browser compatibility and graceful degradation. Having a browser that people have no choice but to make work that doesn't move at the speed of Google's CI pipeline is such a good thing for users of Not Chrome.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Alternative view point: other browsers on ios would actually force apple to compete and make designing for safari not a cluster fuck. How exactly do you want engineers who don't have an apple computer or phone to test for safari?
  - Spivak 5y ago
    Compete on what though? Every web developer right now has no choice but to design for Chrome as well. You just don't care because it's what you would have chosen anyway. There's no "competition" in the browser engine space. There's only posturing for market share dominance and lock-in which you can call competition if you like, but nobody is competing based on "may the browser users like best win."
    - aaomidi 5y ago
      Browser specs are actually pretty well communicated. Most stuff get buy in from major players in the game (e.g. Google and Mozilla). Some stuff remain specific to one browser (e.g. idle detection in Chrome). Apple is the one that has consistently been either extremely behind on new functionality, or just broken implementation of existing functionality (basic auth on mobile safari comes to mind). And again, my main issue is that there is no way to test on Safari without owning Apple hardware.
      - tored 5y ago
        True, but if I want to test Chrome I need to install spyware on my computer. ( I'm aware of Chromium releases)
        rejhgadellaa 5y ago
        So.. you're saying you can use (pure) Chromium or Brave, Edge, etc, to test, right? Not sure what your point is, because you're immediately saying you know there are alternatives :)
        tored 5y ago
        Point is that Google is not a saint for following web standards.
    - jakelazaroff 5y ago
      Compete on standards adherence? Look at how many features are either only partially supported or totally unsupported on Safari vs. other browsers: https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+94,chrome+97,safari+15,ios_saf+15,android+93,and_chr+93,and_ff+92 https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+94,chrome+97,safari+15,...
- crabmusket 5y ago
  It may also mean "I don't want to pay the 30% app store tax, be subject to their review process, purchase an Apple device for development, etc." Of course, those objections could come from good or bad actors alike.
  - souplesse 5y ago
    I think we’re talking web apps, but the third complaint could still be valid.
    - crabmusket 5y ago
      Right, but building a web app is a way to not have to use the app store payments. But web apps' capabilities are limited, so you must build a native app and go through the app store.
tims33 5y ago
I completely get the sentiment of the article, but if the point is diversifying browsers on iOS the battery life issues seem significant.
- rejhgadellaa 5y ago
  We don't really know if there's going to be a hit on battery life because we've never been able to test this (since there are no alternative browsers to test with). Besides, you should be able to keep using Safari and the impact will be exactly zero :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
otterley 5y ago
None of the arguments about battery life, security, or privacy were contradicted in this article. Additionally, the author seems to be under the belief that "if only Safari supported PWAs, they'd be as good as native apps." But that's an exercise in wishful thinking. There's no evidence that that is true, nor has there ever been. Finally, "write once, run anywhere" has been a dream since the early days of Java and applets. It's never come true, and there's nothing significantly different today about computers that makes it any likelier. I don't know about y'all, but I have no desire to run a lowest-common-denominator webapp on my iPhone. I paid a premium price for the thing and I want a premium experience from my software. (I'm still open to the argument that PWAs are a necessity, as opposed to merely a "nice to have," and from a developer who has a track record of publishing high-quality, irresistible apps that customers love.)
- foxes 5y ago
  The fundamental ideas underlying the architecture may not be radically different (I mean apart from things like gpu, threading, etc), but certainly our knowledge of programming, and programming languages have changed. Why is write once run anywhere such a bad idea? Most high end applications are pretty declarative - "this is how the program behaves", and then you run it on a platform that someone else should worry about how it actually manages the state/how the computer does the actual computation with hardware. Web seems like one answer to this. You can serve macOS, linux, windows, and then someone else worries about implementing the browser on those platforms. Seems like it has come true. What about unity? You can pretty much just click a button and then you build versions for all the different platforms, there shouldn't be specific code in your unity project. I feel there's plenty of other examples.
  - otterley 5y ago
    It's not a bad idea if you don't care about security, performance, native look-and-feel, or battery life. Most users care about these things. They do not care about developer productivity.
    - foxes 5y ago
iosawwwaaayyy 5y ago
I just want ublock origin on iOS. I bought an iPhone after seeing that it had Firefox, but I should have done more research. It's not actually Firefox, just a rebranded WebKit. It doesn't support extensions. So, after trying a few paid Safari "content blockers" and being dissatisfied, I gave the iPhone away. How is this a different situation from the antitrust case which prevented Microsoft from bundling Internet Explorer and preventing competing browsers in Windows?
- bradknowles 5y ago
  There are decent ad blockers available for iOS. But they have to be integrated into the OS and not the browser. Frankly, I don’t want a fully functional Firefox or Chrome to be available on iOS, because those browsers are essentially an OS all to themselves. And iOS is bad enough on its own, I don’t want someone else to force me to allow an entire ‘nother OS that I have to have on my device. If you want real-deal Firefox and Chrome on your handheld device, then you need Android or other Linux-based platform. And you will pay the price for choosing such a heavyweight option with such anemic processors. Personally, I prefer to have a relatively lightweight OS that is jealously guarded, with an App Store that is much more carefully curated, on high speed and powerful processors, and which can remain relevant and fairly current for at least five years or more. You can either have your cake, or eat it, but you cannot do both. Choose one.
  - lenkite 5y ago
    Nobody is forcing you to install Firefox/Chrome - you are completely free to follow your choice. We merely don't want your opinion enforced on us and desire the freedom to install a browser of our choice.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      That's not how this works though. There at least needs to be an acknowledgment that once iOS allows Blink based browsers that developers will suddenly not care at all about Safari and tell users to install Chrome if something doesn't work. So like I get you but it's not really the user's choice and never has been.
jfoster 5y ago
> “battery life, security, privacy, and a stance against Chrome dominating the entire web” Sounds almost like an argument against 3rd party apps on Apple's platform overall. Browsers are just one specific type of 3rd party app.
oddity 5y ago
Certainly, Apple's crippling of PWAs and total control of browsers on their platform is a problem, but I've seen enough to know that what (web) devs really want is Chrome (or, more accurately, a monoculture). Whether it's Chromium in a browser (Chrome, Edge, Opera) or Chromium in an app shell (Electron), your stack is never good enough unless it's Chrome. Hopefully both Apple and Google have their worst aspects reined in at approximately the same time because otherwise we're just going to move the problem to the web layer.
Shank 5y ago
A decade ago, Java was derided for letting developers ship apps on multiple platforms while forgoing native controls, with a high memory and storage footprint with the JRE through the JVM. While JavaScript is not Java, it has essentially become Java: instead of shipping a JRE and Jars, it’s the entirety of Chromium, with its JS VM, and a relatively high memory and storage footprint. It seems to me like we haven’t changed much here, resource wise. Then, particularly on mobile devices, many apps recreate native controls with weird quirks or defects that don’t play nicely with the native conventions. Just like in the Java world, you can get “almost perfect” but if the OS updates or a convention changes, the non-native apps are stuck reinventing the wheel to accommodate change (or they ignore it entirely). As a developer, I love writing the same app for multiple places. As a user, I find it infuriating to deal with. While Apple is assuredly being lame by preventing other browser engines (I want Firefox, with WebRequest in blocking mode), they’re not wrong if they think that more PWAs will bring problems.
- otterley 5y ago
  You're about a decade off. It's been over two decades! (Remember Java Swing?)
- srgpqt 5y ago
  iOS 15 changed the default text color of <button> elements to blue. Thanks Apple, it is very helpful and certainly not defacing many apps and sites at all! /s
- WA 5y ago
  I agree with everything, one thing though: > they’re not wrong if they think that more PWAs will bring problems Why? Webview-based apps (Cordova, Capacitor) are very common, especially in the long-tail of the App Store. PWAs and Cordova-based apps are more or less exactly the same. The only difference is: - No 30 % for IAPs for Apple. - No App Store rules enforcement. Hence, maybe Apple fears some brand damage if a porn PWA gets very popular. So, the difference for the end user compared to App Store-approved Webview-based apps is non-existant. It must be a policy thing, not a technical thing.
- rejhgadellaa 5y ago
theo-steiner 5y ago
Oh wow, the comments on here really go into the opposite direction of what I was expecting. How come people fear chrome becoming the only option for browsing, but at the same time don't agree that apple should be incentivised to better safari? I mean, who if not Apple has the ressources to compete with google on the browser front.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  So, the issue is that the "innovation" Safari is often accused of "holding back" is privacy-invasive features proposed by Google engineers. Which is to say, Safari (and the requirement of iOS users using it) is the last thing holding back Google from complete control of the web at this point.
  - theo-steiner 5y ago
    I built a "creative" website over the last few months. I had to jump through many hoops to get very standard css behavior to work on safari. Transform scale for example leads to text being rendered pixelated while transformZ is not 0. Firefox and Chrome don't have this bug, which has been around for years on Safari. Last time I checked, CSS was not privacy invasive.
    - mindblock 5y ago
      Agreed. I've had display: flex make a component inline on random elements in a web app. No discernible reason whatsoever, just some flex elements dont appear on the screen as boxes. There's a reason web devs say Safari is the new IE.
  - rejhgadellaa 5y ago
    Which features are we talking about? Bluetooth? NFC? Contacts? Because native apps enjoy all of them, AFAIK. These same features tend to have extra protections built in that native apps do not to ensure privacy and security. The web is extremely paranoid when implementing these features. From what I've learned, WebKit is not engaging in discussions regarding these new features. They could have a say in shaping the web, come up with alternatives, new features, etc. Instead they dig in their heels. If Safari needs "the requirement of iOS users using it" to hold back Chrome, it tells us people actually want to switch. Letting Apple decide what's best for us (for reasons that have nothing to do with "what's best for us", I think is safe to assume) is not the solution for the monolith browser problem we're seeing.
mtomweb 5y ago
Anyone defending Safari has never had to write an app for it. It is so full of bugs I’d be amazed if someone didn’t run into problems with it. A core reason to reverse the AppleBrowserBan is so that it forces Apple to actually fund the Safari team properly. Apple has no incentive whatsoever to make Safari stable let alone add features that would let web-apps compete with native apps.
qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
I'm guessing the author wants site to be to send notifications. Please never do that. PWA are 99.999% spam. See Firefox’s research on the topic. I hate every time I visit a new site and there’s some dumb pop up on my browser asking me to enable push notifications. Sometimes I miss click and end up having to go through the annoying process of removing them. The recent mozilla study showed that sites already try and show <<100s billion notifications to users a year, let's not add to that. > 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...
pentagrama 5y ago
This topic has so many layers. And I'm ok if Apple don't want to allow PWA features on Safari. My problem with Apple is that they technically don't allow other browser engines in iOS, all non-safari browsers on iOS are Safari with a skin. That should change. And regarding Native apps vs. Web apps (PWA), let's imagine some examples, I think is a good exercise to enrich the discussion: ---------- - The NYT app I think that this can perfectly be PWAs in the state that PWA features are supported right now in 2021. Users can install it, add the icon to the homescreen, get push notifications, save articles to read offline, uninstall it. Pretty good. But Apple don't want that because they will not get a 30% cut for all those NYT subscriptions generated in the app. ---------- - A keyboard app I never used a PWA that feels snappy like a native keyboard app, or in reality a PWA that have so fast and complex interactions. The latency of native is so smooth. And also, how do you integrate a PWA as a keyboard app in the OS? I don't think is possible right now. In this case I think that web apps do not compete with native, at least for now. Recently I found this Google-developed web app to compress images and is pretty good tho https://squoosh.app/ https://squoosh.app/
- codyswann 5y ago
  > Users can install it, add the icon to the homescreen, get push notifications Did I miss something? Did iOS 15 add push and installabilty for PWAs?
  - rejhgadellaa 5y ago
    Push notifications are still not a thing on iOS (not for websites/-apps). You can install a PWA-capable web app. Try twitter. ... you have to dig into the Share menu, then "Add to home screen". And prepare for weird bugs because PWA mode on iOS is broken in many, many ways. It introduces bugs that aren't there in Safari or Chrome on iOS (which is also Safari, basically). I'm at a point where I actively try to prevent Safari from installing a home screen shortcut as a PWA. I "upgrade" web apps to PWA on other platforms, but Safari just gets a regular shortcut which opens in a tab. Too much problems...
    - 5y ago
javchz 5y ago
My main issue with this, it's how the "only one web engine" creates an unnecessary e-waste, creating artificially obsolete devices. I have an old iPad, I get that Apple doesn't want to support it anymore, fair enough. But a regular user can't install a new browser (without breaking the TOS) despite the hardware still working fine, it's not fast, but it's usable. The problem: Safari (or iOS Chrome/Firefox) is only updated alongside the main OS. And the thing doesn't support new web standards (CSS Grid and flexbox websites don't work well, and let's not get started with video/image codecs or new JS APIs). Android (that it's far from perfect) at least allows you to install the last available browser independently of the OS version you have, even non-blink browsers. With 3rd party engines, Apple could allow a lot of old devices still be usable despite their age. Which sounds bad in the short term for Apple, but imagine situations like a kid buying an old iPad from a pawn shop, learn how to use it, and when he gets a better budget, buy a new one with the OS he is already familiar. For reference, until 5 months ago "TenFourFox" (a firefox fork) for the PowerPC line of Macs, was still getting updates. Besides, alongside with other business practices, this it's Apple almost screaming "please do me an antitrust audit" with the Epic case so close. I mean, IE almost broke Microsoft in the 90s.
- bluepoint 5y ago
  Could this also be a critique of the ever changing web “standards”?
  - javchz 5y ago
    A little bit... but more, in the lack of backwards compatibility. I get it, legacy systems are painful. But I could see the server depending on the client sending 2 variations. The modern one with new standards and heavy libraries, and a minimalist one with classic standards for old devices. It's a shame AMP didn't went for something like this, and instead went for their own weird standard https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ .

100 points by feross 5y ago

baby 5y ago

related: Flash still hasn't really been replaced...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Spivak 5y ago

This argument makes no sense. When people want "other browser engines" on iOS what they mean is "I want Blink so I can write my websites only for Chrome and push the operational burden on browser vendors to maintain compatibility" which isn't exactly innovative. Apple's browser ban is literally the only thing in the whole world making it so that publishers have to put any effort into cross-browser compatibility and graceful degradation. Having a browser that people have no choice but to make work that doesn't move at the speed of Google's CI pipeline is such a good thing for users of Not Chrome.

aaomidi 5y ago
Alternative view point: other browsers on ios would actually force apple to compete and make designing for safari not a cluster fuck. How exactly do you want engineers who don't have an apple computer or phone to test for safari?
- Spivak 5y ago
  Compete on what though? Every web developer right now has no choice but to design for Chrome as well. You just don't care because it's what you would have chosen anyway. There's no "competition" in the browser engine space. There's only posturing for market share dominance and lock-in which you can call competition if you like, but nobody is competing based on "may the browser users like best win."
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    Browser specs are actually pretty well communicated. Most stuff get buy in from major players in the game (e.g. Google and Mozilla). Some stuff remain specific to one browser (e.g. idle detection in Chrome). Apple is the one that has consistently been either extremely behind on new functionality, or just broken implementation of existing functionality (basic auth on mobile safari comes to mind). And again, my main issue is that there is no way to test on Safari without owning Apple hardware.
    - tored 5y ago
      True, but if I want to test Chrome I need to install spyware on my computer. ( I'm aware of Chromium releases)
      - rejhgadellaa 5y ago
        So.. you're saying you can use (pure) Chromium or Brave, Edge, etc, to test, right? Not sure what your point is, because you're immediately saying you know there are alternatives :)
        tored 5y ago
        Point is that Google is not a saint for following web standards.
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    Compete on standards adherence? Look at how many features are either only partially supported or totally unsupported on Safari vs. other browsers: https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+94,chrome+97,safari+15,ios_saf+15,android+93,and_chr+93,and_ff+92 https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+94,chrome+97,safari+15,...
crabmusket 5y ago
It may also mean "I don't want to pay the 30% app store tax, be subject to their review process, purchase an Apple device for development, etc." Of course, those objections could come from good or bad actors alike.
- souplesse 5y ago
  I think we’re talking web apps, but the third complaint could still be valid.
  - crabmusket 5y ago
    Right, but building a web app is a way to not have to use the app store payments. But web apps' capabilities are limited, so you must build a native app and go through the app store.

tims33 5y ago

I completely get the sentiment of the article, but if the point is diversifying browsers on iOS the battery life issues seem significant.

rejhgadellaa 5y ago
We don't really know if there's going to be a hit on battery life because we've never been able to test this (since there are no alternative browsers to test with). Besides, you should be able to keep using Safari and the impact will be exactly zero :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

otterley 5y ago

None of the arguments about battery life, security, or privacy were contradicted in this article. Additionally, the author seems to be under the belief that "if only Safari supported PWAs, they'd be as good as native apps." But that's an exercise in wishful thinking. There's no evidence that that is true, nor has there ever been. Finally, "write once, run anywhere" has been a dream since the early days of Java and applets. It's never come true, and there's nothing significantly different today about computers that makes it any likelier. I don't know about y'all, but I have no desire to run a lowest-common-denominator webapp on my iPhone. I paid a premium price for the thing and I want a premium experience from my software. (I'm still open to the argument that PWAs are a necessity, as opposed to merely a "nice to have," and from a developer who has a track record of publishing high-quality, irresistible apps that customers love.)

foxes 5y ago
The fundamental ideas underlying the architecture may not be radically different (I mean apart from things like gpu, threading, etc), but certainly our knowledge of programming, and programming languages have changed. Why is write once run anywhere such a bad idea? Most high end applications are pretty declarative - "this is how the program behaves", and then you run it on a platform that someone else should worry about how it actually manages the state/how the computer does the actual computation with hardware. Web seems like one answer to this. You can serve macOS, linux, windows, and then someone else worries about implementing the browser on those platforms. Seems like it has come true. What about unity? You can pretty much just click a button and then you build versions for all the different platforms, there shouldn't be specific code in your unity project. I feel there's plenty of other examples.
- otterley 5y ago
  It's not a bad idea if you don't care about security, performance, native look-and-feel, or battery life. Most users care about these things. They do not care about developer productivity.
  - foxes 5y ago

iosawwwaaayyy 5y ago

I just want ublock origin on iOS. I bought an iPhone after seeing that it had Firefox, but I should have done more research. It's not actually Firefox, just a rebranded WebKit. It doesn't support extensions. So, after trying a few paid Safari "content blockers" and being dissatisfied, I gave the iPhone away. How is this a different situation from the antitrust case which prevented Microsoft from bundling Internet Explorer and preventing competing browsers in Windows?

bradknowles 5y ago
There are decent ad blockers available for iOS. But they have to be integrated into the OS and not the browser. Frankly, I don’t want a fully functional Firefox or Chrome to be available on iOS, because those browsers are essentially an OS all to themselves. And iOS is bad enough on its own, I don’t want someone else to force me to allow an entire ‘nother OS that I have to have on my device. If you want real-deal Firefox and Chrome on your handheld device, then you need Android or other Linux-based platform. And you will pay the price for choosing such a heavyweight option with such anemic processors. Personally, I prefer to have a relatively lightweight OS that is jealously guarded, with an App Store that is much more carefully curated, on high speed and powerful processors, and which can remain relevant and fairly current for at least five years or more. You can either have your cake, or eat it, but you cannot do both. Choose one.
- lenkite 5y ago
  Nobody is forcing you to install Firefox/Chrome - you are completely free to follow your choice. We merely don't want your opinion enforced on us and desire the freedom to install a browser of our choice.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    That's not how this works though. There at least needs to be an acknowledgment that once iOS allows Blink based browsers that developers will suddenly not care at all about Safari and tell users to install Chrome if something doesn't work. So like I get you but it's not really the user's choice and never has been.

jfoster 5y ago

> “battery life, security, privacy, and a stance against Chrome dominating the entire web” Sounds almost like an argument against 3rd party apps on Apple's platform overall. Browsers are just one specific type of 3rd party app.

oddity 5y ago

Certainly, Apple's crippling of PWAs and total control of browsers on their platform is a problem, but I've seen enough to know that what (web) devs really want is Chrome (or, more accurately, a monoculture). Whether it's Chromium in a browser (Chrome, Edge, Opera) or Chromium in an app shell (Electron), your stack is never good enough unless it's Chrome. Hopefully both Apple and Google have their worst aspects reined in at approximately the same time because otherwise we're just going to move the problem to the web layer.

Shank 5y ago

A decade ago, Java was derided for letting developers ship apps on multiple platforms while forgoing native controls, with a high memory and storage footprint with the JRE through the JVM. While JavaScript is not Java, it has essentially become Java: instead of shipping a JRE and Jars, it’s the entirety of Chromium, with its JS VM, and a relatively high memory and storage footprint. It seems to me like we haven’t changed much here, resource wise. Then, particularly on mobile devices, many apps recreate native controls with weird quirks or defects that don’t play nicely with the native conventions. Just like in the Java world, you can get “almost perfect” but if the OS updates or a convention changes, the non-native apps are stuck reinventing the wheel to accommodate change (or they ignore it entirely). As a developer, I love writing the same app for multiple places. As a user, I find it infuriating to deal with. While Apple is assuredly being lame by preventing other browser engines (I want Firefox, with WebRequest in blocking mode), they’re not wrong if they think that more PWAs will bring problems.

otterley 5y ago
You're about a decade off. It's been over two decades! (Remember Java Swing?)
srgpqt 5y ago
iOS 15 changed the default text color of <button> elements to blue. Thanks Apple, it is very helpful and certainly not defacing many apps and sites at all! /s
WA 5y ago
I agree with everything, one thing though: > they’re not wrong if they think that more PWAs will bring problems Why? Webview-based apps (Cordova, Capacitor) are very common, especially in the long-tail of the App Store. PWAs and Cordova-based apps are more or less exactly the same. The only difference is: - No 30 % for IAPs for Apple. - No App Store rules enforcement. Hence, maybe Apple fears some brand damage if a porn PWA gets very popular. So, the difference for the end user compared to App Store-approved Webview-based apps is non-existant. It must be a policy thing, not a technical thing.
rejhgadellaa 5y ago

theo-steiner 5y ago

Oh wow, the comments on here really go into the opposite direction of what I was expecting. How come people fear chrome becoming the only option for browsing, but at the same time don't agree that apple should be incentivised to better safari? I mean, who if not Apple has the ressources to compete with google on the browser front.

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
So, the issue is that the "innovation" Safari is often accused of "holding back" is privacy-invasive features proposed by Google engineers. Which is to say, Safari (and the requirement of iOS users using it) is the last thing holding back Google from complete control of the web at this point.
- theo-steiner 5y ago
  I built a "creative" website over the last few months. I had to jump through many hoops to get very standard css behavior to work on safari. Transform scale for example leads to text being rendered pixelated while transformZ is not 0. Firefox and Chrome don't have this bug, which has been around for years on Safari. Last time I checked, CSS was not privacy invasive.
  - mindblock 5y ago
    Agreed. I've had display: flex make a component inline on random elements in a web app. No discernible reason whatsoever, just some flex elements dont appear on the screen as boxes. There's a reason web devs say Safari is the new IE.
- rejhgadellaa 5y ago
  Which features are we talking about? Bluetooth? NFC? Contacts? Because native apps enjoy all of them, AFAIK. These same features tend to have extra protections built in that native apps do not to ensure privacy and security. The web is extremely paranoid when implementing these features. From what I've learned, WebKit is not engaging in discussions regarding these new features. They could have a say in shaping the web, come up with alternatives, new features, etc. Instead they dig in their heels. If Safari needs "the requirement of iOS users using it" to hold back Chrome, it tells us people actually want to switch. Letting Apple decide what's best for us (for reasons that have nothing to do with "what's best for us", I think is safe to assume) is not the solution for the monolith browser problem we're seeing.

mtomweb 5y ago

Anyone defending Safari has never had to write an app for it. It is so full of bugs I’d be amazed if someone didn’t run into problems with it. A core reason to reverse the AppleBrowserBan is so that it forces Apple to actually fund the Safari team properly. Apple has no incentive whatsoever to make Safari stable let alone add features that would let web-apps compete with native apps.

qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago

I'm guessing the author wants site to be to send notifications. Please never do that. PWA are 99.999% spam. See Firefox’s research on the topic. I hate every time I visit a new site and there’s some dumb pop up on my browser asking me to enable push notifications. Sometimes I miss click and end up having to go through the annoying process of removing them. The recent mozilla study showed that sites already try and show <<100s billion notifications to users a year, let's not add to that. > 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...

pentagrama 5y ago

This topic has so many layers. And I'm ok if Apple don't want to allow PWA features on Safari. My problem with Apple is that they technically don't allow other browser engines in iOS, all non-safari browsers on iOS are Safari with a skin. That should change. And regarding Native apps vs. Web apps (PWA), let's imagine some examples, I think is a good exercise to enrich the discussion: ---------- - The NYT app I think that this can perfectly be PWAs in the state that PWA features are supported right now in 2021. Users can install it, add the icon to the homescreen, get push notifications, save articles to read offline, uninstall it. Pretty good. But Apple don't want that because they will not get a 30% cut for all those NYT subscriptions generated in the app. ---------- - A keyboard app I never used a PWA that feels snappy like a native keyboard app, or in reality a PWA that have so fast and complex interactions. The latency of native is so smooth. And also, how do you integrate a PWA as a keyboard app in the OS? I don't think is possible right now. In this case I think that web apps do not compete with native, at least for now. Recently I found this Google-developed web app to compress images and is pretty good tho https://squoosh.app/ https://squoosh.app/

codyswann 5y ago
> Users can install it, add the icon to the homescreen, get push notifications Did I miss something? Did iOS 15 add push and installabilty for PWAs?
- rejhgadellaa 5y ago
  Push notifications are still not a thing on iOS (not for websites/-apps). You can install a PWA-capable web app. Try twitter. ... you have to dig into the Share menu, then "Add to home screen". And prepare for weird bugs because PWA mode on iOS is broken in many, many ways. It introduces bugs that aren't there in Safari or Chrome on iOS (which is also Safari, basically). I'm at a point where I actively try to prevent Safari from installing a home screen shortcut as a PWA. I "upgrade" web apps to PWA on other platforms, but Safari just gets a regular shortcut which opens in a tab. Too much problems...
  - 5y ago

javchz 5y ago

My main issue with this, it's how the "only one web engine" creates an unnecessary e-waste, creating artificially obsolete devices. I have an old iPad, I get that Apple doesn't want to support it anymore, fair enough. But a regular user can't install a new browser (without breaking the TOS) despite the hardware still working fine, it's not fast, but it's usable. The problem: Safari (or iOS Chrome/Firefox) is only updated alongside the main OS. And the thing doesn't support new web standards (CSS Grid and flexbox websites don't work well, and let's not get started with video/image codecs or new JS APIs). Android (that it's far from perfect) at least allows you to install the last available browser independently of the OS version you have, even non-blink browsers. With 3rd party engines, Apple could allow a lot of old devices still be usable despite their age. Which sounds bad in the short term for Apple, but imagine situations like a kid buying an old iPad from a pawn shop, learn how to use it, and when he gets a better budget, buy a new one with the OS he is already familiar. For reference, until 5 months ago "TenFourFox" (a firefox fork) for the PowerPC line of Macs, was still getting updates. Besides, alongside with other business practices, this it's Apple almost screaming "please do me an antitrust audit" with the Epic case so close. I mean, IE almost broke Microsoft in the 90s.

bluepoint 5y ago
Could this also be a critique of the ever changing web “standards”?
- javchz 5y ago
  A little bit... but more, in the lack of backwards compatibility. I get it, legacy systems are painful. But I could see the server depending on the client sending 2 variations. The modern one with new standards and heavy libraries, and a minimalist one with classic standards for old devices. It's a shame AMP didn't went for something like this, and instead went for their own weird standard https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ .