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

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

#91

Post by ArchOversight »

saurik wrote: post #86
diebeforei485 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very reasonable gatekeeping. People would be inundated with notifications on their phones.

No: you would--at worst--be asked more often than you would like to approve notifications for random websites, all of which you would click no on; this feature doesn't just magically cause notifications... hell: it already even exists on desktop Safari and I just click "no".

Yeah, having to click no all the time on desktop Safari is terrible.

Also websites have realized that I am going to click No in the browser, so now they popup first asking if I want to allow push notifications in JavaScript so when I click no, they can ask me again later, vs if they popped up the browser and got a "No" there they could never ask me again.

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

#92

Post by jojobas »

heavyset_go wrote: post #17

> (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 heal…

The answer is to make the nice things and force Apple to implement them lest its user feel left behind.

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

#93

Post by bentcorner »

3np wrote: post #61
heavyset_go wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this specific use case, it's missing the Web Push API[1], which can be used to implement push notifications, and the Web Notification API[2], which can also be used for the same thing. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...

Maybe your app is a rare exception, but apart from chat apps, any use of notifications I’ve seen are undesirable and abused to spam users. Even those that do have a legit use-case still abuse it by pushing non-desirable (from user perspective) messages. I think apart from Gitter I’ve never wanted a notification, as a user.

I don't like browser notifications, especially on mobile. Maybe it's me but there's no explicit place agreed upon between me and the browser where the browser says "if the site sends a notification, here is where it will be".

Mobile is already bad enough where if you swipe a notification away, well I hope you remembered the icon and the bit of context that was on that notification. Browser notifications just make this worse.

And then there's the whole "will I get a notification if the browser app is closed? What if I get a notification in the middle of the night, will I receive it in the morning? Will it continue to receive notifications if I restart my phone?" kind of questions. Maybe it all just works but I am very untrusting of the whole feature.

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

#94

Post by phantomathkg »

Spartan-S63 wrote: post #83
heavyset_go wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a mobile and desktop Firefox user, and Firefox has supported the features that are missing from iOS Safari like the Web Notifications API since 2013, and the Web Push API since January 2016.

Why should a web browser be able to send notifications? Why are we overloading web browsers to do more and more things? I get that transferring data over the internet is king, but surely we can devise better user interfaces than bloated browsers, etc?

Why not? Why must an app be written natively?

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

#95

Post by Google234 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #17

> (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 heal…

I don’t want websites to be able to send notifications to my phone. Sites abuses this and are always asking on my computer and it’s too easy to accidentally say accept.

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

#96

Post by tasogare »

bleachedsleet wrote: post #37

I love Safari as a browser, but I hate the fact that it neuters the web and makes it feel much less powerful. Web Bluetooth and webUSB are ignored by Safari and unsupported. Notification support is lacking last I checked. No PWA functionality to speak of and webNFC won’t be added. Extensions are lacking largely due to being basically native apps that bring with them all the cost and overhead of being such. As a brows…

> Web Bluetooth and webUSB are ignored by Safari and unsupported. Notification support is lacking last I checked. No PWA functionality to speak of and webNFC won’t be added.

Very good, none of those webCVE features deserve to be potentially accessible from malicious scripts on the web.

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

#97

Post by Google234 »

fragile_frogs wrote: post #69
JohnBooty wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ohh and you are on Windows and wan't to debug something on Safari? Forget it. Yeah, this utterly baffles me. You'd think Apple, out of sheer self-interest, would offer some sort of "Safari for Developers" that runs on Windows/Linux. Even if it's some kind of klunky suboptimally-performant thing. Just make it really obvious in terms of it's branding and theming that it's devs-only.

I wanted to test a web app and was naive enough to buy an old iPhone 6, thinking I could test and debug my app. To my disappointment you can't update Safari through the app store and developer tools are pretty much non existent...

To be fair, that’s a very old phone and IOS12 is still getting updates in 2021. I’m not sure that the issue is, safari is updated along with IOS.

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

#98

Post by paulmd »

Spartan-S63 wrote: post #83
heavyset_go wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a mobile and desktop Firefox user, and Firefox has supported the features that are missing from iOS Safari like the Web Notifications API since 2013, and the Web Push API since January 2016.

Why should a web browser be able to send notifications? Why are we overloading web browsers to do more and more things? I get that transferring data over the internet is king, but surely we can devise better user interfaces than bloated browsers, etc?

Web browsers are essentially an inner platform now. Instead of taking the time to develop native apps, or even to write using cross-platform frameworks, developers prefer to trade performance/security/privacy for developer time. It's really just an acceleration of a trend that has been going on for decades (Wirth's Law) but Web 2.0 is hip and cool. You're not writing some lumbering dog of a Java application (write once run anywhere!), you're agile and using React and web sockets, you're one of the cool kids (writing a lumbering dog of a Javascript application).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

All in all, building out applications using cross-platform frameworks seems to be a far better solution for end users, and not significantly worse in terms of developer velocity, but I think there are other reasons they are not adopted, primarily that the web makes it far easier to invade privacy and deploy dark patterns, while that behavior typically is checked by the app store approval process for "native" or cross-platform applications.

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

#99

Post by Google234 »

fragile_frogs wrote: post #76
olliej wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

web pages aren't something users want notifications from. Mozilla literally studied this and essentially 100% of "let us spam you" requests were denied.

> web pages aren't something users want notifications from. I agree users don't want notifications from web pages, but the web is much more then just web pages and I would argue that on web applications users are much more likely to allow push notifications if they get a clear benefit.

Every other platform supports these notifications and yet somehow 99% of the sites that do it are using it for spam.

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

#100

Post by Google234 »

nexuist wrote: post #66
olliej wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

web pages aren't something users want notifications from. Mozilla literally studied this and essentially 100% of "let us spam you" requests were denied.

Because essentially 100% of web pages that request push notification access are garbage tabloids that nobody cares about. No push notifications on mobile Safari means that there is no incentive to build mobile web apps that function similar to their native counterparts. Obviously people are accepting push notifications somewhere or else they wouldn't be such a popular design decision.

People could also build cool websites if your computer gave all sites kernel access into your computer. Doesn’t make it a good idea
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