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If Apple was forced to compete on iOS for the dominant position that Safari holds, it would receive greater investment, add support for vital missing PWA featur

If Apple was forced to compete on iOS for the dominant position that Safari holds, it would receive greater investment, add support for vital missing PWA features and potentially as a result grow its desktop market. I believe competition in the long run would break Blinks dominant position, and be better for both consumers and developers.

microtonal 4y ago
If Apple was forced to compete It is not a fair market since the maker of one of the browsers also owns a significant portion of the websites that people use daily. Now Google has to play nice with Safari to some extend, since the don't want to miss out on the lucrative iPhone market. Once Google can offer Chrome on iOS, they will destroy Safari with the same underhanded practices as they did to Firefox (a pattern of subtly breaking Firefox with Google products).
- samwillis 4y ago
  > Once Google can offer Chrome on iOS, they will destroy Safari with the same underhanded practices I don't believe that would happen, firstly Apple would fight back, and secondly the competition authorities would take action against Google. Google is under scrutiny for its behaviour too. You can't fight or justify anti competitive behaviour with anti competitive behaviour back.
  - nlitened 4y ago
    > firstly Apple would fight back With what?
  - girvo 4y ago
    You have more faith in our competition authorities fairness and approaches to these mega corps than I do, but I hope you’re right and I am wrong.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    The moment iOS is forced to give browser freedom, chrome has won. It will be a sad day for sure.
    - mtomweb 4y ago
      Already passed in the EU. Recommended in Japan, Australia and the UK. Apple is not the company fighting for the web or browser diversity, they are the ones holding back.
      - sbuk 4y ago
        How? Other than Gecko (Firefox), there is just Blink, which is owned and controlled by Google, and full of proprietary extensions that many here like to claim are standards. WebKit is sadly the last hope for an open web. Pushing for Chrome now is like pushing for IE/Trident in the naughties.
        mtomweb 4y ago
        https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#the-chromium-argument https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#the-chr...
        rvz 4y ago
        Firefox had its chance to push back again the Chrome dominance. It survived against IE and became the dominant browser for a short time over IE but allowed Chrome to take over and eat its lunch. Now Firefox is declining into irrelevance. The EU Digital Markets Act demands for Apple to open up to more browsers with just cement Chrome's dominance and make Firefox even more irrelevant.
        acdha 4y ago
        “Allowed” is an interesting way to describe being the target of hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and heavy promotion on several of the most popular websites in the world.
  - snowwrestler 4y ago
    Apple is already fighting back, with Safari.
    - super_flanker 4y ago
      No Apple is not fighting back, it's forcing everyone to use safari/webkit based browser on iOS.
      - acdha 4y ago
        Safari is quite competitive with Chrome - very noticeably faster at a fraction of the RAM and battery usage – and solidly dusted Chrome on the Interop 2022 competition all three vendors ran: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable
  - the_other 4y ago
    Google already does this. G-suite is a Trojan horse for their browser, which is a Trojan horse for their advertising engine. They'll disable suite features, or make it mysteriously not run in your "outdated" browser. You'll have to move to something Google approved just to be able to collaborate with your team, or your friends. > You can't fight or justify anti competitive behaviour with anti competitive behaviour back. The way it seems to me, for this case, is that those two "anti-"s cancel out and leave you with direct competition?
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      >They'll disable suite features, or make it mysteriously not run in your "outdated" browser. Can you give an example of a G-suite (or any google product) feature that does not work in Firefox?
      - AndroidKitKat 4y ago
        While being 3 years old, this video [1] is a good example of some of the behavior Google uses when they find out you're not using Chrome. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELCq63652ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELCq63652ig
      - error503 4y ago
        TBH most everything works fine for me (unless I just don't know what I'm missing), but there is a very clear and frustrating gap with Meet backgrounds (blur etc.), which are artificially disabled on Firefox for dubious reasons.
      - acdha 4y ago
        Meet used to say WebRTC wasn’t working and boot you out of meetings if you used Firefox. Every other service worked perfectly, but they clearly were slacking on fixing it for at least a year before we stopped using Meet. GCP periodically breaks their console logins for Firefox users.
- moonchrome 4y ago
  What are these websites ? Search - I don't really see a browser specific optimization potential here. YouTube is probably mostly app based on mobile. Gmail and other gsuite apps are also app based on mobile. I'd be surprised if they cared about mobile Safari support in those much or if it played a big factor.
  - endemic 4y ago
    Here's just one example that I can remember of Google Search doing UA sniffing to serve a worse experience to Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444
  - acdha 4y ago
    All 3 of those sites heavily promoted Chrome to users of other browsers, inaccurately claiming that the service would be better with it (it wasn't). YouTube also had an interesting example of the problem: they shipped some code using Chrome's early draft of what became Web Components. Firefox and Safari implemented the standard version, but there was a LONG period where YouTube used a very slow polyfill instead of upgrading to the standard version, causing Chrome to appear to be faster because it wasn't all of that extra JavaScript. If YouTube was an independent company they would likely have fixed a poor user experience much faster.
nine_k 4y ago
Vital missing PWA features are indeed vital for Apple to stymie PWAs and force all iOS software through App Store which they fully control. PWAs is a territory where the Apple tax (30%) cannot be enforced.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Sounds like opinion of those who haven't used the many rich home screen web apps available, indistinguishable from an app store app for most users. Complaining about this is memetic rather than fact based.
dickersnoodle 4y ago
"Vital missing PWA features" are really only vital for devs who don't want to do native mobile apps. For the rest of us, they're a yawn.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- postalrat 4y ago
  And for users who prefer keeping control. Why do you think reddit wants you to run their app and not their website on your device?
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    So they can run ads where I can't easily block them, presumably.
  - acdha 4y ago
    This is an interesting argument because while Google advertises the PWA concept as benefiting users, many of the features Apple and Mozilla haven’t shipped have been held back over privacy concerns. Reddit works fine in a browser, but the company wants to push you into the native app to get better ad data - they’re not going to support a PWA which gives you more control. The biggest exception is Web Notifications and while that’s useful the desktop situation suggests there’s more than a little validity to the spam concerns. I would like that for a couple of sites but suspect I’d get really tired of selecting the “never allow” option in prompts.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > And for users who prefer keeping control. The moment Firefox implemented one of the many hardware APIs aggressively pushed and promoted by Google, they immediately discovered it was used for fingerprinting: https://twitter.com/denschub/status/1582730985778556931 https://twitter.com/denschub/status/1582730985778556931 Chrome doesn't even show a prompt in this case. So much for "control".
    - 4y ago
acdha 4y ago
Here's what Safari users don't get. Can you be precise about which ones are vital? 1. Install prompt (the user has to start with the "Add to Home Screen" command) 2. Link interception (i.e. browsing in the normal browser switching to the PWA rather than continuing normally) 3. Shared storage between the normal browser and the PWA 4. Ability to start fullscreen 5. SVG icons 6. Background sync 7. Push notifications The rest of that is largely a list of things like "Web Bluetooth" which are non-standard Chrome features which Firefox also doesn't implement and often have significant privacy or security concerns.
- BeefySwain 4y ago
  I would say every one of those except the SVG icons put PWA's at a huge disadvantage, to the point of being borderline unusable. Do you feel like the current state of PWA's in iOS presents a viable alternative to publishing an app for any real usecase?
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Having played with several PWAs on Android and Windows where support is better, I’m not sure that they’d be any more popular even if Safari filled those feature holes. The average PWA experience sits somewhere between underwhelming and uncompelling, primarily because SPAs in general are anything but consistently good. For PWAs to not be bad, SPAs need to stop being bad first.
    - BeefySwain 4y ago
      A ton of "Native Apps" are SPA's using React native, Cordova, et al. The problem is not the tech, the problem is the arbitrary feature gating (including the kinds of tricks that React Native is able to leverage when packaging an app vs running in a mobile browser).
- boucher 4y ago
  Push notifications alone are enough to force most apps to be native. But a lot of the other stuff missing is what keeps the experience from being quite as polished as a native app.

microtonal 4y ago

If Apple was forced to compete It is not a fair market since the maker of one of the browsers also owns a significant portion of the websites that people use daily. Now Google has to play nice with Safari to some extend, since the don't want to miss out on the lucrative iPhone market. Once Google can offer Chrome on iOS, they will destroy Safari with the same underhanded practices as they did to Firefox (a pattern of subtly breaking Firefox with Google products).

samwillis 4y ago
> Once Google can offer Chrome on iOS, they will destroy Safari with the same underhanded practices I don't believe that would happen, firstly Apple would fight back, and secondly the competition authorities would take action against Google. Google is under scrutiny for its behaviour too. You can't fight or justify anti competitive behaviour with anti competitive behaviour back.
- nlitened 4y ago
  > firstly Apple would fight back With what?
- girvo 4y ago
  You have more faith in our competition authorities fairness and approaches to these mega corps than I do, but I hope you’re right and I am wrong.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  The moment iOS is forced to give browser freedom, chrome has won. It will be a sad day for sure.
  - mtomweb 4y ago
    Already passed in the EU. Recommended in Japan, Australia and the UK. Apple is not the company fighting for the web or browser diversity, they are the ones holding back.
    - sbuk 4y ago
      How? Other than Gecko (Firefox), there is just Blink, which is owned and controlled by Google, and full of proprietary extensions that many here like to claim are standards. WebKit is sadly the last hope for an open web. Pushing for Chrome now is like pushing for IE/Trident in the naughties.
      - mtomweb 4y ago
        https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#the-chromium-argument https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#the-chr...
      - rvz 4y ago
        Firefox had its chance to push back again the Chrome dominance. It survived against IE and became the dominant browser for a short time over IE but allowed Chrome to take over and eat its lunch. Now Firefox is declining into irrelevance. The EU Digital Markets Act demands for Apple to open up to more browsers with just cement Chrome's dominance and make Firefox even more irrelevant.
        acdha 4y ago
        “Allowed” is an interesting way to describe being the target of hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and heavy promotion on several of the most popular websites in the world.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  Apple is already fighting back, with Safari.
  - super_flanker 4y ago
    No Apple is not fighting back, it's forcing everyone to use safari/webkit based browser on iOS.
    - acdha 4y ago
      Safari is quite competitive with Chrome - very noticeably faster at a fraction of the RAM and battery usage – and solidly dusted Chrome on the Interop 2022 competition all three vendors ran: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable
- the_other 4y ago
  Google already does this. G-suite is a Trojan horse for their browser, which is a Trojan horse for their advertising engine. They'll disable suite features, or make it mysteriously not run in your "outdated" browser. You'll have to move to something Google approved just to be able to collaborate with your team, or your friends. > You can't fight or justify anti competitive behaviour with anti competitive behaviour back. The way it seems to me, for this case, is that those two "anti-"s cancel out and leave you with direct competition?
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    >They'll disable suite features, or make it mysteriously not run in your "outdated" browser. Can you give an example of a G-suite (or any google product) feature that does not work in Firefox?
    - AndroidKitKat 4y ago
      While being 3 years old, this video [1] is a good example of some of the behavior Google uses when they find out you're not using Chrome. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELCq63652ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELCq63652ig
    - error503 4y ago
      TBH most everything works fine for me (unless I just don't know what I'm missing), but there is a very clear and frustrating gap with Meet backgrounds (blur etc.), which are artificially disabled on Firefox for dubious reasons.
    - acdha 4y ago
      Meet used to say WebRTC wasn’t working and boot you out of meetings if you used Firefox. Every other service worked perfectly, but they clearly were slacking on fixing it for at least a year before we stopped using Meet. GCP periodically breaks their console logins for Firefox users.
moonchrome 4y ago
What are these websites ? Search - I don't really see a browser specific optimization potential here. YouTube is probably mostly app based on mobile. Gmail and other gsuite apps are also app based on mobile. I'd be surprised if they cared about mobile Safari support in those much or if it played a big factor.
- endemic 4y ago
  Here's just one example that I can remember of Google Search doing UA sniffing to serve a worse experience to Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=975444
- acdha 4y ago
  All 3 of those sites heavily promoted Chrome to users of other browsers, inaccurately claiming that the service would be better with it (it wasn't). YouTube also had an interesting example of the problem: they shipped some code using Chrome's early draft of what became Web Components. Firefox and Safari implemented the standard version, but there was a LONG period where YouTube used a very slow polyfill instead of upgrading to the standard version, causing Chrome to appear to be faster because it wasn't all of that extra JavaScript. If YouTube was an independent company they would likely have fixed a poor user experience much faster.

nine_k 4y ago

Vital missing PWA features are indeed vital for Apple to stymie PWAs and force all iOS software through App Store which they fully control. PWAs is a territory where the Apple tax (30%) cannot be enforced.

Terretta 4y ago
Sounds like opinion of those who haven't used the many rich home screen web apps available, indistinguishable from an app store app for most users. Complaining about this is memetic rather than fact based.

dickersnoodle 4y ago

"Vital missing PWA features" are really only vital for devs who don't want to do native mobile apps. For the rest of us, they're a yawn.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
postalrat 4y ago
And for users who prefer keeping control. Why do you think reddit wants you to run their app and not their website on your device?
- pwinnski 4y ago
  So they can run ads where I can't easily block them, presumably.
- acdha 4y ago
  This is an interesting argument because while Google advertises the PWA concept as benefiting users, many of the features Apple and Mozilla haven’t shipped have been held back over privacy concerns. Reddit works fine in a browser, but the company wants to push you into the native app to get better ad data - they’re not going to support a PWA which gives you more control. The biggest exception is Web Notifications and while that’s useful the desktop situation suggests there’s more than a little validity to the spam concerns. I would like that for a couple of sites but suspect I’d get really tired of selecting the “never allow” option in prompts.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > And for users who prefer keeping control. The moment Firefox implemented one of the many hardware APIs aggressively pushed and promoted by Google, they immediately discovered it was used for fingerprinting: https://twitter.com/denschub/status/1582730985778556931 https://twitter.com/denschub/status/1582730985778556931 Chrome doesn't even show a prompt in this case. So much for "control".
  - 4y ago

acdha 4y ago

Here's what Safari users don't get. Can you be precise about which ones are vital? 1. Install prompt (the user has to start with the "Add to Home Screen" command) 2. Link interception (i.e. browsing in the normal browser switching to the PWA rather than continuing normally) 3. Shared storage between the normal browser and the PWA 4. Ability to start fullscreen 5. SVG icons 6. Background sync 7. Push notifications The rest of that is largely a list of things like "Web Bluetooth" which are non-standard Chrome features which Firefox also doesn't implement and often have significant privacy or security concerns.

BeefySwain 4y ago
I would say every one of those except the SVG icons put PWA's at a huge disadvantage, to the point of being borderline unusable. Do you feel like the current state of PWA's in iOS presents a viable alternative to publishing an app for any real usecase?
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Having played with several PWAs on Android and Windows where support is better, I’m not sure that they’d be any more popular even if Safari filled those feature holes. The average PWA experience sits somewhere between underwhelming and uncompelling, primarily because SPAs in general are anything but consistently good. For PWAs to not be bad, SPAs need to stop being bad first.
  - BeefySwain 4y ago
    A ton of "Native Apps" are SPA's using React native, Cordova, et al. The problem is not the tech, the problem is the arbitrary feature gating (including the kinds of tricks that React Native is able to leverage when packaging an app vs running in a mobile browser).
boucher 4y ago
Push notifications alone are enough to force most apps to be native. But a lot of the other stuff missing is what keeps the experience from being quite as polished as a native app.