201–210 of 469 posts
surprised this is at the top of HN. isn’t it obvious that every app does this? tiktok, snapchat, even linkedin all open links in their built-in browser and can track what you’re doing. click open in safari if you’re doing anything more than visiting a single page.
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This class of security problem is also a great reason to never allow custom browser engines.
...why wouldn't it be possible? iOS has application sandboxing, just drop all DNS requests for the webview that's outside a developer-defined namespace. I'm sure someone at Apple could find a better way to implement it, but we shouldn't accept lame excuses like this. Apple has 200 billion dollars in cash, this is not an advanced problem space.
I generally don't see any appeal to in-app browsers in the first place. They often have extremely broken navigation controls (i.e. attempting to swipe back to a previous page usually just returns back to the app), block the ability to navigate to a specific URL, content blockers don't work, don't allow opening "smart links" that would typically open in another app if opened from a normal browser, etc. From what I'm g…
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It's even worse than that: 1. Nothing you visit gets saved in your history. So many times I'm looking through my history thinking "I could have sworn I read an article about this..." only to eventually discover (if I'm lucky) that it was in Twitter's stupid in-app browser. But oh well, never going to find that article again! The irony of the APP knowing everything you visit but you never getting to remember what you…
> instead they just made "SFSafariViewController" which does none of these things Actually, SFSafariViewController acts as a full Safari without giving any ability to the developer to inject scripts or receive data to track you(except for ad taps through Private Click Measurement). It's actually a nice solution, it shares cookies(non-session ones) with Safari.
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How is the walled garden allowing a phone to last for four years? Where you getting new phones because you polluted your non-walled garden device with so many bad apps that you chose to get a new device? Not really following your point, but maybe I am?
i was getting new phones mostly because my devices were getting bogged down by android updates and capabilities. the os allowed developers to do more and more things, and offered more and more customization, faster than the pace of hardware improvements supported, to the point i'd have to get a new phone if i wanted something both up-to-date and fast. if i kept a phone longer much longer than a year, i'd have to worr…
"2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript."
If apps can use their own in app browser, why can't say Brave for example, create an app that does very little, except it browses the web with its own in app browser?
I generally don't see any appeal to in-app browsers in the first place. They often have extremely broken navigation controls (i.e. attempting to swipe back to a previous page usually just returns back to the app), block the ability to navigate to a specific URL, content blockers don't work, don't allow opening "smart links" that would typically open in another app if opened from a normal browser, etc. From what I'm g…
surprised this is at the top of HN. isn’t it obvious that every app does this? tiktok, snapchat, even linkedin all open links in their built-in browser and can track what you’re doing. click open in safari if you’re doing anything more than visiting a single page.
I've meant to write a blog post about this, but here goes: In-app browsers allow users to view inappropriate content, often against the wishes of sensitive individuals. People especially at risk for this include addicts and children. Nearly every app, even "safe apps" including children-rated apps, allow access to an in app browser. Even when iOs has locked down all access to Safari, a parent has removed access to al…
Tangential, but these same links have always been a great way to break out of poorly designed kiosk systems. I recall noodling with a huge interactive display on the side of a bus stop that had an embedded map, and surely enough the TOS link launched a browser, and from there you could use the Save As dialog to get to anything to execute