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Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

andregarzia.com

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Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#331

Post by andrewrothman »

This is a serious problem for modern web experiences.

"After seven days of Safari use without the user interacting with a webpage on website.example, all of website.example’s non-cookie website data is deleted." (https://webkit.org/blog/9521/intelligent-tracking-prevention...)

Granted, this could turn out really well if the industry adopts another standard which requires user permission, overcomes this limitation, overcomes the existing limitation of LocalStorage on iOS getting automatically cleared when a device is low on storage, and overcomes the problem of sites being able to use up a lot of storage on users' devices without their knowledge.

I'd be very welcoming of such a standard. These could be good future replacements if the industry can adopt them:

https://chromestatus.com/feature/6428344899862528

https://wicg.github.io/kv-storage/

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5715811364765696

https://storage.spec.whatwg.org/

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#332

Post by saagarjha »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #266
diegoperini wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a few suggestions in the comment section you may or may not find agreeable.

With all due respect, this comes off as apologizing for Apple's disagreeable design choice. If anything, it should be on Apple and the browser vendors to make local storage more useful by default, not less useful. Your suggestions might as well be aimed at browser vendors, who could conceivably offer user friendly controls for local storage (e.g. import/export without the dev panel). But as is usually the case each o…

> If anything, it should be on Apple and the browser vendors to make local storage more useful by default, not less useful.

Not if the features allow for increased web tracking.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#333

Post by Grue3 »

saagarjha wrote: post #332
blurbleblurble wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, this comes off as apologizing for Apple's disagreeable design choice. If anything, it should be on Apple and the browser vendors to make local storage more useful by default, not less useful. Your suggestions might as well be aimed at browser vendors, who could conceivably offer user friendly controls for local storage (e.g. import/export without the dev panel). But as is usually the case each o…

> If anything, it should be on Apple and the browser vendors to make local storage more useful by default, not less useful. Not if the features allow for increased web tracking.

> Not if the features decrease the need for the App Store

Fixed it for you. It's all about profit.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#334

Post by osrec »

My comment from a similar article:

Rather than wiping local storage/indexed DB data after 7 days, could you not just make it an opt in thing, like the camera or mic? For example, ask users "Allow myapp.com to store app related data on your computer?". If they allow it, then give access to local storage APIs, otherwise don't. That way users can still have fully local PWAs if they wish.

As an ardent PWA developer, this change annoys me immensely.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#335

Post by saagarjha »

robenkleene wrote: post #60

I’m guessing that Apple will start hindering web apps because the new mouse support in iPadOS is going to be such a boon to web apps. Because of sandboxing, web apps are the only cross-platform apps that can run in their full versions on iPadOS. I wrote a quick summary of the situation[0]. Therefore, since native apps are more of a platform differentiator than web apps, moving forward we can expect Apple to start sys…

The people who work on making websites function better on iPad are literally a 20 second walk away from the people who work in Intelligent Tracking Prevention–do you really think that they'd seek to undermine each other in this way?

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#336

Post by saagarjha »

tomp wrote: post #321
cageface wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

moving forward we can expect Apple to start systemically hindering web apps They have been doing this for quite some time now. Always ostensibly to protect users but always also conveniently putting webapps at a permanent disadvantage to native apps. For my part I'm not interested in being a user of a platform so hostile to the web that it disallows any third party browsers.

Technically it's disallowing third-party JITs / executable data. Which is a good thing all-in-all.

Eh, I'm not completely sold on that.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#337

Post by Dylan16807 »

tyingq wrote: post #182
diggan wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With cookies you can set the expire time yourself, as a developer. And looking at the list of the original blogpost from webkit ( https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki... ) it shows the following will be affected by the 7 day cap: Indexed DB, LocalStorage, Media keys, SessionStorage, Service Worker registrations Since cookies are not mentioned, I'm assuming it's NOT affected by the 7 day cap bu…

If the cookie is set by http headers, yes. If it's set with client side js, though, it's capped at 7 days (since ITP 2.1).

What if you have a cookie set by http and try to update it with js? Will it self-destruct now?

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#338

Post by saagarjha »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #200
_0w8t wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple disallows third-party web rendering engines. Google Chrome on iOS uses own networking stack. It is still a significant restriction, but it is rather understandable. Without it it could be just Blink everywhere at this point.

> Without it it could be just Blink everywhere at this point. In what reality-distortioned universe is that worse than having a crippled web?

Please don't call anything that's not Blink "a crippled web".

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#339

Post by saagarjha »

fcarraldo wrote: post #180
untog wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a very rosy way of looking at it. iOS has had bugs with its “add to home screen” webapps that kicked around literally for years . If they were being “user first” they’d support it fully or not support it at all. Instead they implemented then neglected it.

What bugs exactly? Been using this feature for years and have never had issues with it.

Until a recent iOS release they had a number of undesirable features that made them a bit inconvenient to use: they used UIWebView (instead of the faster WKWebView), they "restarted" if you ever left them, and generally had a number of other quirks.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#340

Post by saagarjha »

robenkleene wrote: post #233
Veen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this were true, how would you explain the recent improvements to Safari on the iPad that make it as capable as desktop Safari. Until last year Google Docs did not work in Safari on the iPad. Now it works very well indeed. The same is true of most web apps.

This is a great point with a simple explanation: How good Safari was on iPad was irrelevant before mouse support. Before mouse support, we had apps made with UIKit, which is a touch-first app framework, competing with web apps, which are keyboard-and-mouse first. So UIKit apps won, because UIKit apps are better for touch. With mouse support, that situation becomes exactly inverted: In UIKit apps, the keyboard and mou…

> In UIKit apps, the keyboard and mouse are secondary

Apple just added new APIs to support these.

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