7 ms·

Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025

208 points by dhruv3006 10mo ago

jsdeveloper 10mo ago
[dead]
Terretta 10mo ago
The full screen thing -- have you tried saving the SPA to the home screen? Together with some meta tags, that launches full screen and stays full screen, like an app. The bashing on apple for this "to sell more apps" is nonsense, Apple originally designed and intended for HTML5 apps to beat Flash. One of the earliest games for iPhone was PacMac, it was a SPA web app saved to home screen, it worked great.* OTOH, in 30 years of web dev, I never got pages about raccoons to work either. * Haven't checked this lately to see if they deprecated this.
- brailsafe 10mo ago
  > The bashing on apple for this "to sell more apps" is nonsense, Apple originally designed and intended for HTML5 apps to beat Flash. Whatever their apparent intention might have been ~15 years ago, it would be hard to argue that Apple puts a lot of resources into trying to protect its fiefdom. I don't think it would be all that different to suggest they (Apple) wouldn't try to control how people pay for apps by preventing app developers to offer a web-based payment option, on the basis of their past relationship with HTML5. A huge component in their success with iPhones has been control over the entire supply chain. That said, it is a somewhat conspiratorial take that is probably better explained by laziness, bad choices, and control over proprietary UX patterns (that suck), than generalized competition, but it's not much of a reach. They also compute localStorage limits differently and have always diverged for stupid reasons
  - llmslave2 10mo ago
    Interestingly enough Apple has put a ton of effort into Safari recently and have shot up to the top of the interop leaderboards. https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable I don't really buy the conspiratorial takes either. I think they just had different priorities for their browser.
    - darkwater 10mo ago
      And what else can drive priorities for software development in a company with virtually infinite resources?
    - YmiYugy 10mo ago
      I think it's fair to say that Safari is no longer late. That comes with 3 caveats. 1. Safari isn't updated independently of the OS, so users who don't update or whose iPhones don't get updates anymore will be forever stuck on old Safari versions. 2. Being timely on new features does little to alleviate the pain that comes from all the old messiness. 3. Different priorities driven by economic incentives of protecting their 30% cut. Fair enough. But shutting out alternative web engines on iOS is definitely a dick move.
    - mdhb 10mo ago
      Unfortunately this is more misdirection from Apple. When they were asking for community input as to what developers wanted to be a part of interop 2025 that then had to go for a further non-public round with the browser makers. Apple then proceeded to veto all of the most popular suggestions and insist that then running grep over their codebase in order to fix a comparability bug [1] with chrome and Firefox version 1 was somehow a legitimate contribution precisely so they could game the interop stats that you’re citing here. The moment you look at the real statistics (https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&aligned https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...) where Apple can’t game the system the story becomes much clearer and the criticism much more justified. [1] https://web.dev/blog/interop-2025 https://web.dev/blog/interop-2025 (scroll down to the text decoration topic)
      - JimDabell 10mo ago
        > The moment you look at the real statistics (https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...) where Apple can’t game the system the story becomes much clearer and the criticism much more justified. This is misleading. The “real statistics” you link to include non-standard, Blink-only APIs like Web Bluetooth and Web USB. These are not web standards. Google proposed them and both Mozilla and Apple have rejected them on security and privacy grounds. Google have not been able to convince anybody to implement them. Web standards are not simply whatever Google unilaterally decide they want. Standards require consensus.
- sccxy 10mo ago
  Home Screen Safari and Browser Safari act very differently. There are a lot of bugs where home screen safari passes feature detection but in reality does not work. iOS and Safari are hell.
NooneAtAll3 10mo ago
this felt not as a "50 problems in web api" list, but more like "50 reasons to stop caring about iOS and just leave it rotting"
- 0x3f 10mo ago
  They can get away with it because iOS users have a higher propensity to pay than any other platform. So it's often not a good idea to stop caring about iOS, assuming you want to make money, anyway. Even if you don't, iOS users are just different from Android and web, so they're often desirable regardless.
  - delifue 10mo ago
    Many problems in article are specific to old versions of iOS which is only in old versions of iPhone. Most old iPhone users are not potential paying customers. iOS need to be supported but old versions of iOS don't.
  - lelanthran 10mo ago
    > They can get away with it because iOS users have a higher propensity to pay than any other platform. It used to be true, but the last time I saw evidence was in 2015 or thereabouts. Is it still true in (almost) 2026, though?
    - Hendrikto 10mo ago
      Linus and Luke talked about this recently during the WAN show. The gap shrunk a little, but is still huge, on the order of 5–6 times the spend per user, when it used to be 8–9 times.
qingcharles 10mo ago
I feel like there are a lot of iOS/iPadOS 17 and below devices holding things back right now. Desktop browsers are in a really good standards space now with their constant and frequent nagging for users to update.
- leptons 10mo ago
  Apple is the only ones holding anything back on iOS. They forbid any browser except Safari. At least if they let Google Chrome or any other browser maker use their own browser engine, iOS could have a capable browser installed. It is one reason among many Apple is being sued by the DOJ, but so far no progress forcing them to allow other browser engines like they did in the EU.
  - kg 10mo ago
    IMO if they had allowed Firefox onto the App Store (Mozilla have had working ports more than once AFAIK) it might have helped it hold onto market share - I think Apple is partly responsible for the Chrome monoculture.
    - least 10mo ago
      If that were the case then why isn’t Firefox on mobile on Android more successful? Apple blocking other browser engines in iOS is the only thing preventing a complete hegemony of the web by Google/Blink.
      - NetOpWibby 10mo ago
        Different platforms, different tastes. Facebook's Threads app has more activity on iOS than Android[1]. --- [1] https://pxlnv.com/linklog/threads-android-ranking/ https://pxlnv.com/linklog/threads-android-ranking/
        least 10mo ago
        I could be entirely off base, but I would expect Android to be more likely to have more users that would go out of their way to use a non-default web browser, given that it seems to be favored by people who like customizing things. The relative openness of the platform invites a different demographic. On the other hand, the default on Android is Chrome so there may be less motivation to change since it's the 'default' platform to target. But if Apple opened up iOS to other browsers, the likely outcome would not be Firefox gaining market share but Chrome completely taking over. I do not like that iOS doesn't allow for alternative engines but I appreciate that it's basically the only thing that even somewhat reigns Google in.
AshleysBrain 10mo ago
It sounds like they were testing with iOS 12? In practice that has fallen out of use and doesn't need to be supported any more. Yes, a bunch of problems are to do with Safari specifically, but if you target relatively modern versions only (iOS 16+ is pretty reasonable IMO) it'll save a lot of pain.
- mediumdeviation 10mo ago
  Yeah, supporting iOS 12 in 2025 is odd. I was investigating browser support levels just recently for a library and also settled on iOS 16 as a reasonable level. For reference, iOS 12.x and below are used 0.33% globally https://browsersl.ist/#q=safari+%3C+13+or+ios+%3C+13 https://browsersl.ist/#q=safari+%3C+13+or+ios+%3C+13. Selecting iOS 16 would still exclude less than 1% globally https://browsersl.ist/#q=safari+%3C+16+or+ios+%3C+16 https://browsersl.ist/#q=safari+%3C+16+or+ios+%3C+16. In both cases the vast majority would be older iOS which is unfortunate because I assume they're on older devices with no upgrade path, but you have to decide on the transpile/polyfill cutoff at some point and browser support has an extremely long tail.
- YmiYugy 10mo ago
  I have to support iOS 16. In terms of browser specific bugs that I have to deal with I'd say about 80-90% of what I encounter is Safari specific. Of that another 80% only affects iOS and of that like 2/3 are fixed in more current versions.
irishcoffee 10mo ago
I'm so glad every time I see something like this that I don't do webdev for a living. I've cross-compiled code for mobile before, and I've made personal websites before. I sure wouldn't want to do that for a living.
- braebo 10mo ago
  It has its pros and cons and can be challenging, but I enjoy it.
Artoooooor 10mo ago
Safari - Internet Explorer of 2025
fizzynut 10mo ago
Honestly I gave up trying to support apple products a while ago - the fact that iOS and Mac lock the browser version to the os version makes it such a royal pain in the ass to support.
- ajross 10mo ago
  It's absolutely amazing the degree to which Apple has recapitulated the Internet Explorer debacle of thirty years ago.
- wobfan 10mo ago
  To be fair, the macOS Safari is not tied to the OS. Don't remember if it ever was, but it def isn't anymore then.
  - fizzynut 10mo ago
    Unfortunately it was and still is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)#Version_compatibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)#Version_c.... MacOs is slightly more forgiving in that the last 2 versions can get the latest safari. However, people tend to keep a computer a lot longer than a phone and many don't or can't update macOS, so it's not much better.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
anonymous908213 10mo ago
Interesting article which reinforces my decision to never engage with web development in any manner other than throwing WASM paint on a Canvas. > But a purpose-built game framework like Unity would have polyfill to protect you from more of these layout and audio problems Unity doesn't polyfill, it just relies on WASM for everything which results in significantly more consistent behaviour provided your browser supports WASM to begin with. > Unity and Godot might be better choices, but I have no experience with them and I assume they only make sense for games. Unity has been used for non-game purposes successfully, and there are also other WASM-compatible frameworks specifically targeting non-game GUI use cases.
- socalgal2 10mo ago
  Unity in the browser fails basic interactions like copy and paste. All WASM paint on an Canvas apps on the browser have similar issues with non-english input, accessability, integration with tihngs like dictionaries, password managers, etc... So, no, do not do Wasm + Canvas
  - anonymous908213 10mo ago
    To be clear, I am not suggesting the WASM canvas approach for ordinary web pages. WASM is for things that are unto themselves full-fledged applications, with the convenience of instant access to running them in a sandbox on any platform. The game described in the article certainly makes more sense with WASM than HTML5, as it uses web APIs for doing something that isn't displaying a standard web page but instead needs to conform to a specific set of characteristics to provide a consistent and polished user experience. Also, while Unity doesn't, features like canvas copy-pasting can be implemented manually or by another framework. Non-English input works fine with WASM; if it doesn't render, it's because the application developer didn't include a font that supports those characters, since there's no fallback-font kind of thing going on. But this stuff is exactly the same as developing any kind of non-web application; if the framework doesn't provide a feature, you have to provide it yourself. It needs to be approached from an application development perspective rather than a web development perspective; you don't get the freebies of web, both the good and the bad, but this gives you much more control and capability.
ripped_britches 10mo ago
I could probably give another 50 as could everyone else reading Biggest peev for me is inconsistent support for transparent (alpha channel) video
skybrian 10mo ago
I think the lesson is that writing a mobile game using HTML is still tricky. Few of these issues would come up when writing a web page.
- extra88 10mo ago
  Especially when you don't approach it that way; they made an HTML game in desktop Chrome then worked on getting it to work in various mobile browsers, including quite old ones. The article gets to the right conclusion, develop mobile first. I'd put it more generally as develop for the most constrained devices you intend to support. If they had done so, it would have saved a lot of time (some of their expectations about APIs still would not have been met).
lelanthran 10mo ago
I kinda feel like "Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025" is an inaccurate title. More like "+40 reasons to ignore iOS as a target when making your HTML game"
- spoiler 10mo ago
  I've been saying this for years, and it gets down voted occasionally, but safari/webkit feels like the new IE6. I know Chrome is very bullish with adding extra features and is aggressively pushing some standards, but I've rarely had to write "workarounds" or hacks for Chrome when writing web-standard compliant code for other browsers, but I've had to frequently do it for Safari. It's been a few years since I've had battle Safari quirks, one example that stuck with me from a couple of years ago is that LocalStorage is not available in private browsing mode. Other browsers just treat it as ephemeral/SessionStorage basically. Also I remember our Sentry being _littered_ with random React internals throwing (it was like a couple of different things), but it was only ever iOS that had those issues.
  - robertjpayne 10mo ago
    Chrome probably has the benefit of being updated frequently rather than more of an annual cycle. But Safari still isn't anywhere near IE6 levels of awfulness.
    - mxey 10mo ago
      Safari adds support for new web features in point releases throughout the year.
      - stefanfisk 10mo ago
        But only for the latest major iOS version.
        raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
        The latest version of iOS supports the iPhone 11 introduced in 2019.
pjmlp 10mo ago
Yeah, fifty reason why Web hasn't yet fully turned into ChromeOS Platform. Standard Web in 2025 is whatever Google decides to implement on Chrome, and all existing forks downstream from it, including Electron crap.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
nottorp 10mo ago
Ok, the complaints about Apple being behind the Google "standard" are probably legitimate, as long as we keep in mind Chrome isn't a standard. But the part about a virtual mouse cursor so you have hover... no. No no and no. No on Apple, no on Android, no on any touch only device. The iPhone took the world by storm because they designed their UI for fat finger touch only. Back then, Google speed redesigned their unreleased Android along the same paradigms when they saw how easy the Apple solution was to use. If you have a mouse heavy game, no matter if you do it in native code or html, you have to have different interfaces for touch and mouse/kb if you want it to be playable.
- mxey 10mo ago
  I had the same thought about the idea that Safari is “behind”. My hypothesis is that features only “exist” to people if they are implemented in Chrome. If a feature exists in WebKit but not in Chrome, nobody talks about it.
thrance 10mo ago
At which point to you just go "fuck Apple" and choose to display a passive-agressive "This game only works on browsers with reasonable compatibility" instead? That's probably what I'd have done.
- giantrobot 10mo ago
  > This game only works on browsers with reasonable compatibility Just say Chrome. This is what you mean.
  - thrance 10mo ago
    Nope, I do all my frontend dev for Firefox and then it works on Chrome too.
eviks 10mo ago
> The web has supported these basic functions for over a decade. Surely in the year 2025, I thought, HTML5 is a good choice for these simple needs. > What really happened was, I hit over 50 surprising problems related to gaps in web standards, requiring me to spend over half of the total development time The half part might be surprising, but the fact that the web is broken in all the big and little places shouldn't really be, isn't that part of deep web lore that you get even by looking at the omnipresent dom tree, but especially if you're a druid and forest-native? Like, "No you can't control the real size of anything" has been one of the many fundamental cascading flaws of that peculiar joke of a design system since forever, no?
etchalon 10mo ago
While this list is accurate enough, I assume the developer doesn't have to support older Android phones, because ... yeah. That's hell. But it is interesting that most of the listed issues that are genuine bugs are fairly minor, while the show-stoppers are largely Apple trying to protect user's from bad actors. Which, as a developer, I hate. But as a user, I appreciate. Surfing the web on my Android devices is absolute madness in certain segments of the web.
teleforce 10mo ago
>TLDR: buy an old iPhone and test with it daily >This is not because iPhones are good, it's because they're bad This just confirmed my biases and suspicions that iPhone is very much overrated technologically and essentially toxic to the mobile open eco-system. Perhaps the only saving grace is that in the early days Apple with iPhone was promoting standard HTML instead of proprietary system like Adobe Flash.
- mxey 10mo ago
  iPhones tend to have dramatically better JavaScript performance so you might wanna also test on an average Android phone.
bottlero_cket 10mo ago
This article is an absolute treasure trove of real problems I too have encountered on my own journey of creating an html game, and excellent solutions that I was completely unable to find on my own! I give real props for the depth of this analysis. I would like to re-emphasize the author’s point that the mobile web begins to struggle with anything beyond a Wikipedia page about raccoons. I feel this point was understated! Consider realtor.com (and many others) where zooming in a picture causes everything but the picture to zoom! Insane when you consider how much houses cost. What about on shopify—type websites, where everything scrolls left when you try to swipe left to activate the carousel of pictures. How often I wish they would design these sites as they would a Wikipedia article on raccoons — as bare bones as they can get!
blendergeek 10mo ago
> Browsers are designed to be the end user's self-service toolkit to combat our bad websites. Users can override fonts, mute sounds, enlarge text, pinch-zoom in, open images in a separate tab, copy-and-paste, autofill rote form inputs, switch to "simplified reading mode", search for the same information elsewhere, reload the page to reset Javascript bugs, and even try a different browser to see if they happen to have the one on their computer that we bothered to test. To be fair, part of this is that a "good website" for a web developer is often a "bad website" for a user. Giving users the ability to work around bad websites is good for users and if this makes "good experiences" hard to write, I think its a small price to pay. So much of web development is finding ways to combat the users (to track them, show them ads, prevent them from using the site how they want). I think web browsers should keep providing features for users to fight back rather than simply being tools of web developers.
chrismorgan 10mo ago
Quite a bit of this, mainly later on, feels unjust. Many are problems about mobile devices, not the web. Sizes don’t mean what you might expect? They don’t on any platform. A pixel hasn’t been a physical pixel reliably for at least fifteen years, and far longer in some ecosystems. Physical units never matched reality reliably, which is part of the reason they have steadily been phased out or discouraged across all platforms (Firefox’s mozmm unit is a fun piece of history: it tried to be one physical millimetre). > One way we could have ensured that designs are accessible is to make it impossible to build anything else. The only way of achieving this is by hobbling the web in a way that I guarantee would have killed it. > The <input> tag is like 30 years old, but that has apparently not been enough time for us to figure out how to make it usable! It was enough time. <input> was fine. But then devices without physical keyboards came along, and ruined it. You’ll have the same problems if you try adding text input to your landscape mobile game using the platform’s native toolkit. In these areas, the web is not the problem: phones are, due to their limited screen size and different input methods; and mixed-input devices/platforms are—Windows two-in-ones are full of touch/pen niggles Android doesn’t have, whether you’re web or native (and Android with a pointer has issues in the other direction).
- nine_k 10mo ago
  Web as a platform is universally deployed on mobile devices. Whether it is theoretically impeccable or not (heh), the way it works in practice is such that it does not isolate the author from the shortcomings of the target native platform. Though it tries to, and it sort of promises that in the standards, it fails to consistently deliver, especially on iOS where Apple virtually does not allow competition. Such is the sad reality of the web platform.
  - Kinrany 10mo ago
    Surely the web cannot be blamed for Apple refusing to support the web.
- amadeuspagel 10mo ago
  > It was enough time. <input> was fine. But then devices without physical keyboards came along, and ruined it. Maybe the default text input method on touchscreens should be dictation.
shevy-java 10mo ago
This seems more about Apple though? Let Safari die already.
ongytenes 10mo ago
In defense of Firefox, there is a reason for the iOS Firefox browser being so bad. Apple mandates all other browsers to use the WebKit rendering engine instead of their own. Firefox isn't able to use the Gecko engine. I guess Apple is afraid that others will show up the Safari browser.
whartung 10mo ago
Don't you love how English can just turn your head around? When I first read this, I read it like "Here's 50 problems that have standard web APIs"...that solve the problems! As in, "here's problem 27, and here's the API to solve it". Mind, I haven't read that article, and that's not what it's about. Just how I read the headline. Just interesting how the language center can work.
amadeuspagel 10mo ago
> The unglamorous answer is that this might be just a documentation problem. MDN is pretty good, even though Mozilla increasingly concerns me as a steward of the open web. What if it were just a little better? What if it had a comment section where people could discuss these issues, like the PHP docs? What if it had a wiki, where people could collaborate on fixing them, like ArchWiki?
- graypegg 10mo ago
  The example that comes to my mind is apidock for Ruby! https://apidock.com/ruby/String/split https://apidock.com/ruby/String/split Though, considering how much information tends to get centralized in these comments, I think the wiki-like direction is the way to go. (I know anyone can edit MDN, but it's via github PRs rather than being able to make quick edits on the site.)
  - DebugDruid 10mo ago
    I don’t see a problem with the github PR workflow for updating documentation. Yes, it’s one step more, but it’s nothing special when you use github’s online editor. PS: MDN and MSDN are my favorite documentation sites.
- extra88 10mo ago
  MDN is on GitHub, every page ends with "View this page on GitHub • Report a problem with this content" links. I've pointed out errors a couple of times and they were corrected pretty quickly.
  - qingcharles 10mo ago
    I've found them responsive to errors too. When I pointed out some bugs on Microsoft's docs they just basically replied "hurry up and fix them then!" which annoyed me at first, but they actually poked me until I stopped being lazy and submitted a PR, wherein I actually learned some new things.
pwdisswordfishy 10mo ago
> Browsers are designed to be the end user's self-service toolkit to combat our bad websites. One of them "self-aware wolves", I see. How did the author wish things to work? That websites should be able to micromanage the user experience without restraint while indulging in whatever abusive behaviours they please, that the user should be powerless against?
raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
How many times will we have to learn the same lesson? The web and web technologies suck as an app platform. Apple, Palm, Microsoft and RIM tried it.
butz 10mo ago
Amazing game, with all that effort put in you definitely deserve some compensation for it. Have you considered uploading your game to itch.io and adding an option for players to tip you? Bonus points for not using any "gen ai" nonsense. And especially huge kudos for detailed hint system. Can't wait for your next game. And to be "on topic", have you considered making UI more "web app" like, e.g. something more akin to large enterprise CRUD system with tables and menus, that might be more suited for such interfaces, in stead of your own custom UI solution?

208 points by dhruv3006 10mo ago

[dead]

The full screen thing -- have you tried saving the SPA to the home screen? Together with some meta tags, that launches full screen and stays full screen, like an app. The bashing on apple for this "to sell more apps" is nonsense, Apple originally designed and intended for HTML5 apps to beat Flash. One of the earliest games for iPhone was PacMac, it was a SPA web app saved to home screen, it worked great.* OTOH, in 30 years of web dev, I never got pages about raccoons to work either. * Haven't checked this lately to see if they deprecated this.

brailsafe 10mo ago
> The bashing on apple for this "to sell more apps" is nonsense, Apple originally designed and intended for HTML5 apps to beat Flash. Whatever their apparent intention might have been ~15 years ago, it would be hard to argue that Apple puts a lot of resources into trying to protect its fiefdom. I don't think it would be all that different to suggest they (Apple) wouldn't try to control how people pay for apps by preventing app developers to offer a web-based payment option, on the basis of their past relationship with HTML5. A huge component in their success with iPhones has been control over the entire supply chain. That said, it is a somewhat conspiratorial take that is probably better explained by laziness, bad choices, and control over proprietary UX patterns (that suck), than generalized competition, but it's not much of a reach. They also compute localStorage limits differently and have always diverged for stupid reasons
- llmslave2 10mo ago
  Interestingly enough Apple has put a ton of effort into Safari recently and have shot up to the top of the interop leaderboards. https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable I don't really buy the conspiratorial takes either. I think they just had different priorities for their browser.
  - darkwater 10mo ago
    And what else can drive priorities for software development in a company with virtually infinite resources?
  - YmiYugy 10mo ago
    I think it's fair to say that Safari is no longer late. That comes with 3 caveats. 1. Safari isn't updated independently of the OS, so users who don't update or whose iPhones don't get updates anymore will be forever stuck on old Safari versions. 2. Being timely on new features does little to alleviate the pain that comes from all the old messiness. 3. Different priorities driven by economic incentives of protecting their 30% cut. Fair enough. But shutting out alternative web engines on iOS is definitely a dick move.
  - mdhb 10mo ago
    Unfortunately this is more misdirection from Apple. When they were asking for community input as to what developers wanted to be a part of interop 2025 that then had to go for a further non-public round with the browser makers. Apple then proceeded to veto all of the most popular suggestions and insist that then running grep over their codebase in order to fix a comparability bug [1] with chrome and Firefox version 1 was somehow a legitimate contribution precisely so they could game the interop stats that you’re citing here. The moment you look at the real statistics (https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&aligned https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...) where Apple can’t game the system the story becomes much clearer and the criticism much more justified. [1] https://web.dev/blog/interop-2025 https://web.dev/blog/interop-2025 (scroll down to the text decoration topic)
    - JimDabell 10mo ago
      > The moment you look at the real statistics (https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...) where Apple can’t game the system the story becomes much clearer and the criticism much more justified. This is misleading. The “real statistics” you link to include non-standard, Blink-only APIs like Web Bluetooth and Web USB. These are not web standards. Google proposed them and both Mozilla and Apple have rejected them on security and privacy grounds. Google have not been able to convince anybody to implement them. Web standards are not simply whatever Google unilaterally decide they want. Standards require consensus.
sccxy 10mo ago
Home Screen Safari and Browser Safari act very differently. There are a lot of bugs where home screen safari passes feature detection but in reality does not work. iOS and Safari are hell.

NooneAtAll3 10mo ago

this felt not as a "50 problems in web api" list, but more like "50 reasons to stop caring about iOS and just leave it rotting"

0x3f 10mo ago
They can get away with it because iOS users have a higher propensity to pay than any other platform. So it's often not a good idea to stop caring about iOS, assuming you want to make money, anyway. Even if you don't, iOS users are just different from Android and web, so they're often desirable regardless.
- delifue 10mo ago
  Many problems in article are specific to old versions of iOS which is only in old versions of iPhone. Most old iPhone users are not potential paying customers. iOS need to be supported but old versions of iOS don't.
- lelanthran 10mo ago
  > They can get away with it because iOS users have a higher propensity to pay than any other platform. It used to be true, but the last time I saw evidence was in 2015 or thereabouts. Is it still true in (almost) 2026, though?
  - Hendrikto 10mo ago
    Linus and Luke talked about this recently during the WAN show. The gap shrunk a little, but is still huge, on the order of 5–6 times the spend per user, when it used to be 8–9 times.

qingcharles 10mo ago

I feel like there are a lot of iOS/iPadOS 17 and below devices holding things back right now. Desktop browsers are in a really good standards space now with their constant and frequent nagging for users to update.

leptons 10mo ago
Apple is the only ones holding anything back on iOS. They forbid any browser except Safari. At least if they let Google Chrome or any other browser maker use their own browser engine, iOS could have a capable browser installed. It is one reason among many Apple is being sued by the DOJ, but so far no progress forcing them to allow other browser engines like they did in the EU.
- kg 10mo ago
  IMO if they had allowed Firefox onto the App Store (Mozilla have had working ports more than once AFAIK) it might have helped it hold onto market share - I think Apple is partly responsible for the Chrome monoculture.
  - least 10mo ago
    If that were the case then why isn’t Firefox on mobile on Android more successful? Apple blocking other browser engines in iOS is the only thing preventing a complete hegemony of the web by Google/Blink.
    - NetOpWibby 10mo ago
      Different platforms, different tastes. Facebook's Threads app has more activity on iOS than Android[1]. --- [1] https://pxlnv.com/linklog/threads-android-ranking/ https://pxlnv.com/linklog/threads-android-ranking/
      - least 10mo ago
        I could be entirely off base, but I would expect Android to be more likely to have more users that would go out of their way to use a non-default web browser, given that it seems to be favored by people who like customizing things. The relative openness of the platform invites a different demographic. On the other hand, the default on Android is Chrome so there may be less motivation to change since it's the 'default' platform to target. But if Apple opened up iOS to other browsers, the likely outcome would not be Firefox gaining market share but Chrome completely taking over. I do not like that iOS doesn't allow for alternative engines but I appreciate that it's basically the only thing that even somewhat reigns Google in.

AshleysBrain 10mo ago

It sounds like they were testing with iOS 12? In practice that has fallen out of use and doesn't need to be supported any more. Yes, a bunch of problems are to do with Safari specifically, but if you target relatively modern versions only (iOS 16+ is pretty reasonable IMO) it'll save a lot of pain.

mediumdeviation 10mo ago
Yeah, supporting iOS 12 in 2025 is odd. I was investigating browser support levels just recently for a library and also settled on iOS 16 as a reasonable level. For reference, iOS 12.x and below are used 0.33% globally https://browsersl.ist/#q=safari+%3C+13+or+ios+%3C+13 https://browsersl.ist/#q=safari+%3C+13+or+ios+%3C+13. Selecting iOS 16 would still exclude less than 1% globally https://browsersl.ist/#q=safari+%3C+16+or+ios+%3C+16 https://browsersl.ist/#q=safari+%3C+16+or+ios+%3C+16. In both cases the vast majority would be older iOS which is unfortunate because I assume they're on older devices with no upgrade path, but you have to decide on the transpile/polyfill cutoff at some point and browser support has an extremely long tail.
YmiYugy 10mo ago
I have to support iOS 16. In terms of browser specific bugs that I have to deal with I'd say about 80-90% of what I encounter is Safari specific. Of that another 80% only affects iOS and of that like 2/3 are fixed in more current versions.

irishcoffee 10mo ago

I'm so glad every time I see something like this that I don't do webdev for a living. I've cross-compiled code for mobile before, and I've made personal websites before. I sure wouldn't want to do that for a living.

braebo 10mo ago
It has its pros and cons and can be challenging, but I enjoy it.

Artoooooor 10mo ago

Safari - Internet Explorer of 2025

fizzynut 10mo ago

Honestly I gave up trying to support apple products a while ago - the fact that iOS and Mac lock the browser version to the os version makes it such a royal pain in the ass to support.

ajross 10mo ago
It's absolutely amazing the degree to which Apple has recapitulated the Internet Explorer debacle of thirty years ago.
wobfan 10mo ago
To be fair, the macOS Safari is not tied to the OS. Don't remember if it ever was, but it def isn't anymore then.
- fizzynut 10mo ago
  Unfortunately it was and still is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)#Version_compatibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)#Version_c.... MacOs is slightly more forgiving in that the last 2 versions can get the latest safari. However, people tend to keep a computer a lot longer than a phone and many don't or can't update macOS, so it's not much better.
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anonymous908213 10mo ago

Interesting article which reinforces my decision to never engage with web development in any manner other than throwing WASM paint on a Canvas. > But a purpose-built game framework like Unity would have polyfill to protect you from more of these layout and audio problems Unity doesn't polyfill, it just relies on WASM for everything which results in significantly more consistent behaviour provided your browser supports WASM to begin with. > Unity and Godot might be better choices, but I have no experience with them and I assume they only make sense for games. Unity has been used for non-game purposes successfully, and there are also other WASM-compatible frameworks specifically targeting non-game GUI use cases.

socalgal2 10mo ago
Unity in the browser fails basic interactions like copy and paste. All WASM paint on an Canvas apps on the browser have similar issues with non-english input, accessability, integration with tihngs like dictionaries, password managers, etc... So, no, do not do Wasm + Canvas
- anonymous908213 10mo ago
  To be clear, I am not suggesting the WASM canvas approach for ordinary web pages. WASM is for things that are unto themselves full-fledged applications, with the convenience of instant access to running them in a sandbox on any platform. The game described in the article certainly makes more sense with WASM than HTML5, as it uses web APIs for doing something that isn't displaying a standard web page but instead needs to conform to a specific set of characteristics to provide a consistent and polished user experience. Also, while Unity doesn't, features like canvas copy-pasting can be implemented manually or by another framework. Non-English input works fine with WASM; if it doesn't render, it's because the application developer didn't include a font that supports those characters, since there's no fallback-font kind of thing going on. But this stuff is exactly the same as developing any kind of non-web application; if the framework doesn't provide a feature, you have to provide it yourself. It needs to be approached from an application development perspective rather than a web development perspective; you don't get the freebies of web, both the good and the bad, but this gives you much more control and capability.

ripped_britches 10mo ago

I could probably give another 50 as could everyone else reading Biggest peev for me is inconsistent support for transparent (alpha channel) video

skybrian 10mo ago

I think the lesson is that writing a mobile game using HTML is still tricky. Few of these issues would come up when writing a web page.

extra88 10mo ago
Especially when you don't approach it that way; they made an HTML game in desktop Chrome then worked on getting it to work in various mobile browsers, including quite old ones. The article gets to the right conclusion, develop mobile first. I'd put it more generally as develop for the most constrained devices you intend to support. If they had done so, it would have saved a lot of time (some of their expectations about APIs still would not have been met).

lelanthran 10mo ago

I kinda feel like "Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025" is an inaccurate title. More like "+40 reasons to ignore iOS as a target when making your HTML game"

spoiler 10mo ago
I've been saying this for years, and it gets down voted occasionally, but safari/webkit feels like the new IE6. I know Chrome is very bullish with adding extra features and is aggressively pushing some standards, but I've rarely had to write "workarounds" or hacks for Chrome when writing web-standard compliant code for other browsers, but I've had to frequently do it for Safari. It's been a few years since I've had battle Safari quirks, one example that stuck with me from a couple of years ago is that LocalStorage is not available in private browsing mode. Other browsers just treat it as ephemeral/SessionStorage basically. Also I remember our Sentry being _littered_ with random React internals throwing (it was like a couple of different things), but it was only ever iOS that had those issues.
- robertjpayne 10mo ago
  Chrome probably has the benefit of being updated frequently rather than more of an annual cycle. But Safari still isn't anywhere near IE6 levels of awfulness.
  - mxey 10mo ago
    Safari adds support for new web features in point releases throughout the year.
    - stefanfisk 10mo ago
      But only for the latest major iOS version.
      - raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
        The latest version of iOS supports the iPhone 11 introduced in 2019.

pjmlp 10mo ago

Yeah, fifty reason why Web hasn't yet fully turned into ChromeOS Platform. Standard Web in 2025 is whatever Google decides to implement on Chrome, and all existing forks downstream from it, including Electron crap.

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nottorp 10mo ago

Ok, the complaints about Apple being behind the Google "standard" are probably legitimate, as long as we keep in mind Chrome isn't a standard. But the part about a virtual mouse cursor so you have hover... no. No no and no. No on Apple, no on Android, no on any touch only device. The iPhone took the world by storm because they designed their UI for fat finger touch only. Back then, Google speed redesigned their unreleased Android along the same paradigms when they saw how easy the Apple solution was to use. If you have a mouse heavy game, no matter if you do it in native code or html, you have to have different interfaces for touch and mouse/kb if you want it to be playable.

mxey 10mo ago
I had the same thought about the idea that Safari is “behind”. My hypothesis is that features only “exist” to people if they are implemented in Chrome. If a feature exists in WebKit but not in Chrome, nobody talks about it.

thrance 10mo ago

At which point to you just go "fuck Apple" and choose to display a passive-agressive "This game only works on browsers with reasonable compatibility" instead? That's probably what I'd have done.

giantrobot 10mo ago
> This game only works on browsers with reasonable compatibility Just say Chrome. This is what you mean.
- thrance 10mo ago
  Nope, I do all my frontend dev for Firefox and then it works on Chrome too.

eviks 10mo ago

> The web has supported these basic functions for over a decade. Surely in the year 2025, I thought, HTML5 is a good choice for these simple needs. > What really happened was, I hit over 50 surprising problems related to gaps in web standards, requiring me to spend over half of the total development time The half part might be surprising, but the fact that the web is broken in all the big and little places shouldn't really be, isn't that part of deep web lore that you get even by looking at the omnipresent dom tree, but especially if you're a druid and forest-native? Like, "No you can't control the real size of anything" has been one of the many fundamental cascading flaws of that peculiar joke of a design system since forever, no?

etchalon 10mo ago

While this list is accurate enough, I assume the developer doesn't have to support older Android phones, because ... yeah. That's hell. But it is interesting that most of the listed issues that are genuine bugs are fairly minor, while the show-stoppers are largely Apple trying to protect user's from bad actors. Which, as a developer, I hate. But as a user, I appreciate. Surfing the web on my Android devices is absolute madness in certain segments of the web.

teleforce 10mo ago

>TLDR: buy an old iPhone and test with it daily >This is not because iPhones are good, it's because they're bad This just confirmed my biases and suspicions that iPhone is very much overrated technologically and essentially toxic to the mobile open eco-system. Perhaps the only saving grace is that in the early days Apple with iPhone was promoting standard HTML instead of proprietary system like Adobe Flash.

mxey 10mo ago
iPhones tend to have dramatically better JavaScript performance so you might wanna also test on an average Android phone.

bottlero_cket 10mo ago

This article is an absolute treasure trove of real problems I too have encountered on my own journey of creating an html game, and excellent solutions that I was completely unable to find on my own! I give real props for the depth of this analysis. I would like to re-emphasize the author’s point that the mobile web begins to struggle with anything beyond a Wikipedia page about raccoons. I feel this point was understated! Consider realtor.com (and many others) where zooming in a picture causes everything but the picture to zoom! Insane when you consider how much houses cost. What about on shopify—type websites, where everything scrolls left when you try to swipe left to activate the carousel of pictures. How often I wish they would design these sites as they would a Wikipedia article on raccoons — as bare bones as they can get!

blendergeek 10mo ago

> Browsers are designed to be the end user's self-service toolkit to combat our bad websites. Users can override fonts, mute sounds, enlarge text, pinch-zoom in, open images in a separate tab, copy-and-paste, autofill rote form inputs, switch to "simplified reading mode", search for the same information elsewhere, reload the page to reset Javascript bugs, and even try a different browser to see if they happen to have the one on their computer that we bothered to test. To be fair, part of this is that a "good website" for a web developer is often a "bad website" for a user. Giving users the ability to work around bad websites is good for users and if this makes "good experiences" hard to write, I think its a small price to pay. So much of web development is finding ways to combat the users (to track them, show them ads, prevent them from using the site how they want). I think web browsers should keep providing features for users to fight back rather than simply being tools of web developers.

chrismorgan 10mo ago

Quite a bit of this, mainly later on, feels unjust. Many are problems about mobile devices, not the web. Sizes don’t mean what you might expect? They don’t on any platform. A pixel hasn’t been a physical pixel reliably for at least fifteen years, and far longer in some ecosystems. Physical units never matched reality reliably, which is part of the reason they have steadily been phased out or discouraged across all platforms (Firefox’s mozmm unit is a fun piece of history: it tried to be one physical millimetre). > One way we could have ensured that designs are accessible is to make it impossible to build anything else. The only way of achieving this is by hobbling the web in a way that I guarantee would have killed it. > The <input> tag is like 30 years old, but that has apparently not been enough time for us to figure out how to make it usable! It was enough time. <input> was fine. But then devices without physical keyboards came along, and ruined it. You’ll have the same problems if you try adding text input to your landscape mobile game using the platform’s native toolkit. In these areas, the web is not the problem: phones are, due to their limited screen size and different input methods; and mixed-input devices/platforms are—Windows two-in-ones are full of touch/pen niggles Android doesn’t have, whether you’re web or native (and Android with a pointer has issues in the other direction).

nine_k 10mo ago
Web as a platform is universally deployed on mobile devices. Whether it is theoretically impeccable or not (heh), the way it works in practice is such that it does not isolate the author from the shortcomings of the target native platform. Though it tries to, and it sort of promises that in the standards, it fails to consistently deliver, especially on iOS where Apple virtually does not allow competition. Such is the sad reality of the web platform.
- Kinrany 10mo ago
  Surely the web cannot be blamed for Apple refusing to support the web.
amadeuspagel 10mo ago
> It was enough time. <input> was fine. But then devices without physical keyboards came along, and ruined it. Maybe the default text input method on touchscreens should be dictation.

shevy-java 10mo ago

This seems more about Apple though? Let Safari die already.

ongytenes 10mo ago

In defense of Firefox, there is a reason for the iOS Firefox browser being so bad. Apple mandates all other browsers to use the WebKit rendering engine instead of their own. Firefox isn't able to use the Gecko engine. I guess Apple is afraid that others will show up the Safari browser.

whartung 10mo ago

Don't you love how English can just turn your head around? When I first read this, I read it like "Here's 50 problems that have standard web APIs"...that solve the problems! As in, "here's problem 27, and here's the API to solve it". Mind, I haven't read that article, and that's not what it's about. Just how I read the headline. Just interesting how the language center can work.

amadeuspagel 10mo ago

> The unglamorous answer is that this might be just a documentation problem. MDN is pretty good, even though Mozilla increasingly concerns me as a steward of the open web. What if it were just a little better? What if it had a comment section where people could discuss these issues, like the PHP docs? What if it had a wiki, where people could collaborate on fixing them, like ArchWiki?

graypegg 10mo ago
The example that comes to my mind is apidock for Ruby! https://apidock.com/ruby/String/split https://apidock.com/ruby/String/split Though, considering how much information tends to get centralized in these comments, I think the wiki-like direction is the way to go. (I know anyone can edit MDN, but it's via github PRs rather than being able to make quick edits on the site.)
- DebugDruid 10mo ago
  I don’t see a problem with the github PR workflow for updating documentation. Yes, it’s one step more, but it’s nothing special when you use github’s online editor. PS: MDN and MSDN are my favorite documentation sites.
extra88 10mo ago
MDN is on GitHub, every page ends with "View this page on GitHub • Report a problem with this content" links. I've pointed out errors a couple of times and they were corrected pretty quickly.
- qingcharles 10mo ago
  I've found them responsive to errors too. When I pointed out some bugs on Microsoft's docs they just basically replied "hurry up and fix them then!" which annoyed me at first, but they actually poked me until I stopped being lazy and submitted a PR, wherein I actually learned some new things.

pwdisswordfishy 10mo ago

> Browsers are designed to be the end user's self-service toolkit to combat our bad websites. One of them "self-aware wolves", I see. How did the author wish things to work? That websites should be able to micromanage the user experience without restraint while indulging in whatever abusive behaviours they please, that the user should be powerless against?

raw_anon_1111 10mo ago

How many times will we have to learn the same lesson? The web and web technologies suck as an app platform. Apple, Palm, Microsoft and RIM tried it.

butz 10mo ago

Amazing game, with all that effort put in you definitely deserve some compensation for it. Have you considered uploading your game to itch.io and adding an option for players to tip you? Bonus points for not using any "gen ai" nonsense. And especially huge kudos for detailed hint system. Can't wait for your next game. And to be "on topic", have you considered making UI more "web app" like, e.g. something more akin to large enterprise CRUD system with tables and menus, that might be more suited for such interfaces, in stead of your own custom UI solution?