Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

utcc.utoronto.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 329 posts

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#11

Post by Nextgrid »

julianlam wrote: post #7
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #5

This is why, despite it being monopolistic, I hope Apple can continue their requirement on using Safari's rendering engine on iOS. It's the sole remaining defense against a far worse monopoly. Neither the Mozilla nor Edge teams have the backbone to resist Google's web platform initiatives.

> Edge teams What happened with Edge? I've been out of the loop with MS stuff for years, and last I heard you had to select a browser in the EU or something, but was this also made mandatory worldwide? I'd imagine still being bundled with Windows means their usage is not insignificant...

Edge is now just a rebranded Chromium, and Microsoft's approach with Windows 10 suggests they are betting big on advertising and the "attention economy" thus very unlikely to push towards privacy protection.

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#12

Post by bleachedsleet »

julianlam wrote: post #7
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #5

This is why, despite it being monopolistic, I hope Apple can continue their requirement on using Safari's rendering engine on iOS. It's the sole remaining defense against a far worse monopoly. Neither the Mozilla nor Edge teams have the backbone to resist Google's web platform initiatives.

> Edge teams What happened with Edge? I've been out of the loop with MS stuff for years, and last I heard you had to select a browser in the EU or something, but was this also made mandatory worldwide? I'd imagine still being bundled with Windows means their usage is not insignificant...

Edge is now a Chromium fork

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#13

Post by aeontech »

julianlam wrote: post #7
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #5

This is why, despite it being monopolistic, I hope Apple can continue their requirement on using Safari's rendering engine on iOS. It's the sole remaining defense against a far worse monopoly. Neither the Mozilla nor Edge teams have the backbone to resist Google's web platform initiatives.

> Edge teams What happened with Edge? I've been out of the loop with MS stuff for years, and last I heard you had to select a browser in the EU or something, but was this also made mandatory worldwide? I'd imagine still being bundled with Windows means their usage is not insignificant...

I think the parent is referring to the fact that MS abandoned their browser engine and Edge is now running on Chromium as of Jan 2020.

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#14

Post by ocdtrekkie »

julianlam wrote: post #7
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #5

This is why, despite it being monopolistic, I hope Apple can continue their requirement on using Safari's rendering engine on iOS. It's the sole remaining defense against a far worse monopoly. Neither the Mozilla nor Edge teams have the backbone to resist Google's web platform initiatives.

> Edge teams What happened with Edge? I've been out of the loop with MS stuff for years, and last I heard you had to select a browser in the EU or something, but was this also made mandatory worldwide? I'd imagine still being bundled with Windows means their usage is not insignificant...

Edge is now a Chromium fork, and is headed by an ex-Googler who cheerfully me-toos every Google web agenda. It's sole purpose is to be a Chrome browser that connects to Microsoft accounts and hence can integrate with Microsoft's enterprise tools.

Despite enterprise teams already finding Chrome's six week release cycle tedious, Microsoft immediately followed Chrome to announcing their four week cycle in the last week, and Edge also failed to protect ad blocking by rejecting the Manifest V3 changes for browser extensions designed to cripple ad blockers.

Basically, at any opportunity Microsoft has had to differentiate itself, it has decided to just do what Google does.

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#15

Post by julianlam »

slimsag wrote: post #9
Nextgrid wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "useful"? I've been using Safari exclusively for years now and the lack of push notifications hasn't been a problem. It's actually good because it shields me from all kinds of shitty websites demanding notification permissions while having no good reason to send any.

From their profile: > Co-Founder of NodeBB Inc., modern forum software for the modern web. So I assume they want notifications for forum software.

Indeed! Although in our implementation it's entirely opt-in (we don't request the permission access unless the user asks us to).

It's just entirely broken on iOS, but them's the breaks.

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#16

Post by p1necone »

littlestymaar wrote: post #8

Too bad this is only available on a operating system that spies on its users. (Sorry Apple fans, it does and while their marketing tries to hide it as much as possible, their privacy policies don't lie : https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/ ) It's funny how quickly one can get downvoted for criticizing Apple's misleading marketing. Apple is a data hoarding company like every others, and no “not being worse than…

That's a very long document, which bits are questionable?

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#17

Post by heavyset_go »

> (Conversely, if Safari refuses to implement some alleged 'feature', it becomes much less useful even if Chrome does implement it.)

The fact that Apple refuses to implement basic features in mobile Safari that Firefox and Chrome have had for years now, and the fact that they refuse to allow other browser engines on iOS is the reason why we can't have nice things like progressive web apps.

I recently worked on a health app related to the COVID pandemic. The most common use case would be served really well by a PWA, and as such, there's no reason users would need to install an app on their phones to access the web app's full set of features.

Despite the web app working perfectly on Android and across Windows, Linux and macOS without native integration, we now must dedicate time and resources to develop an additional iOS app just so iOS users, which over half of Americans are, aren't left out.

This is an expensive endeavor time-wise and money-wise, during a pandemic where time is of the essence and resources are stretched thin. It shouldn't be this way, but it is.

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#18

Post by Nextgrid »

littlestymaar wrote: post #8

Too bad this is only available on a operating system that spies on its users. (Sorry Apple fans, it does and while their marketing tries to hide it as much as possible, their privacy policies don't lie : https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/ ) It's funny how quickly one can get downvoted for criticizing Apple's misleading marketing. Apple is a data hoarding company like every others, and no “not being worse than…

It's still better than the competition IMO.

The intent of the spying should also be considered. Apple does not have a significant targeted advertising business which reduces/removes the incentive to hoover up as much personal data as they can.

Would I prefer something that doesn't spy at all? Absolutely, but this means rolling your own computing environment using Linux and giving up a lot of features that are considered a given in macOS, and yet there's only 24 hours in a day and I no longer have time for that.

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#19

Post by meibo »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #5

This is why, despite it being monopolistic, I hope Apple can continue their requirement on using Safari's rendering engine on iOS. It's the sole remaining defense against a far worse monopoly. Neither the Mozilla nor Edge teams have the backbone to resist Google's web platform initiatives.

"Not following sensible standards to protect your own App Store monopoly and being a pain in the ass to work with due to rendering differences that all other browsers get right(even Firefox)" is not a good base to build a defense against a monopoly on.

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#20

Post by aeontech »

julianlam wrote: post #6
gobengo wrote: post #2

This announcement from last October is a huge deal. "Meet Face ID and Touch ID for the Web" https://webkit.org/blog/11312/meet-face-id-and-touch-id-for-...

Well, Safari and Chrome being the two giants in the room mean they also keep each other in check. Safari may support Face ID and Touch ID, but I doubt it would be in anybody else's best interest to also support it. Not that it matters anyway, since on iOS they all use Safari...

If you read the parent post, the support is implemented on top of WebAuthn standard, so as far as developers are concerned, they don’t have to do anything Safari-specific to support it - their code will work fine with YubiKey or other Authenticators as well. Which is the point of web standards after all.

https://webauthn.io/

Post reply on HN