> Apple dragged their feet in adding support for PWAs in Safari, and when they finally did, limited the capabilities of a PWA so that native-like app functionality wouldn’t be possible, like notifications or a home screen icon shortcut Websites can get Home Screen shortcuts; this has been a thing since the original iPhone.
There's still no background sync or access to APIs that aren't purely cosmetic. That's why native implementations of an app always "feel" better.
Reddit is a pretty low bar. I don't think they care much about the site except to make it objectively worse than the app at every convenient opportunity.
> Reddit is a pretty low bar Reddit is a multi billion dollar product and one of the most trafficked sites on the internet.
Why do they continue to degrade the mobile/desktop default web experience? Promoting the app is one thing, but then actively harming the user experience? Do most people not care? Insane either way. The day old.reddit dies Ill blacklist the site permanently.
Yes, because we all want notifications and more things running in the background that can access to the device's ports. I take the points about not supporting CSS features and some of the other web standards, and the issues around Apple's 30% cut, and I'd add that some of Apple's censorship (eg. banning Parler for a while, asking Telegram and Tumblr to not allow access to certain content) is troubling, but I don't th…
Notifications can only be sent after you “install” a website as a PWA. Same for background stuff. Don’t want that? Just use it as a regular site.
Speaking from personal experience as a developer (although YMMV) - this is totally true. And I'm not even talking about some newfangled APIs like WebUSB and such (I don't really care about those personally). Safari's handling of regular HTML + CSS is regularly broken compared to other browsers. (At least in my experience.) Open the site in Chromium. Yep it works. Open the site in Firefox. Yep it works. Open the site…
This has been my experience over the past several years as well. My particular issues have been with the Canvas element and with SVG support (which is insanely buggy - even the dev tools are bugged) but there are also occasional layout issues.
Reddit is a pretty low bar. I don't think they care much about the site except to make it objectively worse than the app at every convenient opportunity.
> Reddit is a pretty low bar Reddit is a multi billion dollar product and one of the most trafficked sites on the internet.
If you've ever used their mobile site, it's clear they go out of their way to sabotage the experience so that people will use the native app instead
Reddit is a pretty low bar. I don't think they care much about the site except to make it objectively worse than the app at every convenient opportunity.
> Reddit is a pretty low bar Reddit is a multi billion dollar product and one of the most trafficked sites on the internet.
History is just repeating itself. If you capture enough browser market share, there is no incentive improve handling of web content that does not materially help the bottom line. IE gave us wonderful features (XMLHTTPRequest) but as soon as MSFT found they had a monopoly, development stalled and the world got stuck with IE6, which lacked even basic features like PNG image alpha transparency. When/if a court orders Ap…
Apple _does_ put effort into Safari. It’s just not on the parts that you and other developers want it to be on. It’s definitely on the parts that I (as a user) want it to be on (security, privacy, and battery life in roughly that order). It is unlikely that a court will be able to force Apple to expose OS APIs that would allow for the insecurity of WebUSB or WebMIDI on iOS, even if they do force other engines. And th…
You’re talking as if it’s an either/or situation. For a company the size of Apple it definitely isn’t. They could fix long-standing bugs, implement web standards others have had for years and improve security, privacy and battery life. They just don’t.
Reddit is a pretty low bar. I don't think they care much about the site except to make it objectively worse than the app at every convenient opportunity.
> Reddit is a pretty low bar Reddit is a multi billion dollar product and one of the most trafficked sites on the internet.
If you look at the features that Apple lags on adding support for, usually it's either because: 1. they can be abused (PWAs) 2. are complex to implement (WebRTC – for the longest time the recommendation in the WebRTC community if you wanted to build a C++ app was to bundle a good chunk of Chrome's libraries) 3. or could be bad for battery (web workers) So yeah, it makes some developers' jobs harder but generally ther…