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Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

pwa.gripe

51–60 of 343 posts

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#51

I argue that developers enable the egregious behaviour by supporting safari in the first place. Just as IE was called out and shunned for its shenanigans, before they started behaving better, so too does safari need to be treated. However, it does also feel too late, they have crippled other browsers too with their platform abuse masquerading as requirements while we celebrated it.

Ah yes, let’s break our site for 1.56 billion people to stick it to apple.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#52
post #2

I'm writing this in Safari now, I'm a huge fan. There are several "features" that I actively dislike and disable in other browsers. I wonder if not being implemented in mobile safari is preventing them from being required in some webpages. * Vibration * Background Sync * Bluetooth * NFC * Notifications * Web Push

I can understand notifications and vibration. But why not Bluetooth or NFC? I can’t imagine any way those could be annoyances, or even why websites would want them outside of some extremely specialized applications.

I'm personally a WebUSB, WebBT etc hater but I totally get why PWA developers want those features. For example, let's say you're manufacturing some sort of USB device and you need a way to flash drivers. The idea of being able to just make a webpage that can update your drivers is so appealing compared to having to ship apps on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.

Similarly, if my bank website could do NFC tap-to-pay securely, that would be pretty cool. I can imagine lots of interesting opt-in uses for NFC in a webapp.

Arguments that these features are held back by Apple specifically in order to keep apps on the app store where they can control things and take 30% at least hold water, I think, even if that reasoning doesn't apply to Mozilla rejecting features.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#53
I am curious why Safari in particular is getting a lot of the hate here when firefox supports even less of the features which leads me to believe that the reason many of these features have not been accepted is because they have not been accepted by the larger ecosystem and is just google pushing their own things as standard (Feels like IE days in many ways).

That being said, I am not sure why I would actually want most of these features in the browser? Many of these things feel like they further complicate what a browser is supposed to be doing and opens up security concerns at the same time.

I think the idea of using a web app for many tasks instead of apps is fine, but I don't think the idea that a web app can do everything is the way to go.

Edit: To be clear about the Firefox comment, notice that many of the features that are not supported non chromium browsers don't support on any platform. So the question on whether these are considered web standards is outside of whether iOS allows other engines.

Edit again: Apparently the third column is based on your current browser instead of always comparing chrome, mobile safari, and firefox like I assumed. I am currently on Firefox on Windows, and there are more red X's under Firefox for me. Seems like a weird choice to not always compare all major browsers.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#54

As a daily Safari on iOS user, I don’t care about any of this, but since iOS 26 basic Safari features such as bookmarks and text search have become so buried deep underneath, they are basically unusable at this point. It infuriates me a lot more than all the liquid glass stuff (on which I’m neutral overall).

Yes. "Add to homescreen" is in the "Share" menu. That's where they burry all bodies.

Isn't that where it's been for ages?

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should just ban unsolicited prompts. That's it. Push notifications are the #1 featured requests of my online community. Some even switched to Android over it. And people don't understand adding sites to their homescreen, especially since Apple buried that feature in the Share menu. No Android user of my website ever complained about the WebPush notifications.

Does android still give you a push notification to dismiss whenever you take a screenshot?

No.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#56
As far as I can see based on pwa.gripe data, between 26.3 (my version) and the newcoming 26.4 Safari on iOS gains support for five new APIs:

— Offline support

— Media capture

— Picture-in-picture

— Storage

— Speech synthesis

As well as five more APIs with caveats:

— Installation

— Notifications

— Web Push

— Barcode detection

— Speech recognition

Even taking into account that it also evidently loses support for one (audio session; I wonder if that that has to do with potential for fingerprinting), framing this feature differential between two minor(!) releases as “intentional crippling of Mobile Safari continues” strikes me as somewhat loaded.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#57
post #50
post #28

How many of these features that chrome offers have been fully flushed out and in a true working stable state? Google Chrome has a habit of pushing features out before they're really ready and Safari is usually on par with Firefox for features from what I have seen.

It's not a question of readiness or capability. It's an MBA with a spreadsheet explaining to a room full of people how much money Apple will lose if they allow X feature to work in Safari. This is user-negative behavior from a company that has so much money the best thing they can think of to do with it is to bank it offshore in a tax haven.

Conversly, there is an MBA at google saying how much money they can make for each extra piece of data they can extract off the user’s phone.

I agree an open web platform is good. But i also think some of the things added to the browser don’t belong in the browser. Face detection? i don’t need that.

I am much more partial to attempts to force apple to enable installing 3rd party apps than i am forcing them to bloat the browser with more ways for websites to monitize me.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#58
post #53

I am curious why Safari in particular is getting a lot of the hate here when firefox supports even less of the features which leads me to believe that the reason many of these features have not been accepted is because they have not been accepted by the larger ecosystem and is just google pushing their own things as standard (Feels like IE days in many ways). That being said, I am not sure why I would actually want m…

Firefox on iOS is just a wrapper around Safari, since that is all Apple allows.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#59
post #50
post #28

How many of these features that chrome offers have been fully flushed out and in a true working stable state? Google Chrome has a habit of pushing features out before they're really ready and Safari is usually on par with Firefox for features from what I have seen.

It's not a question of readiness or capability. It's an MBA with a spreadsheet explaining to a room full of people how much money Apple will lose if they allow X feature to work in Safari. This is user-negative behavior from a company that has so much money the best thing they can think of to do with it is to bank it offshore in a tax haven.

Crippling web apps is a user-positive behavior. It just so happens that user’s incentives and apple’s incentives are aligned.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#60
post #53

I am curious why Safari in particular is getting a lot of the hate here when firefox supports even less of the features which leads me to believe that the reason many of these features have not been accepted is because they have not been accepted by the larger ecosystem and is just google pushing their own things as standard (Feels like IE days in many ways). That being said, I am not sure why I would actually want m…

> why I would actually want most of these features in the browser

The page is about PWAs, applications that can be installed by the browser rather than the platform's App Store. Native applications already have those capabilities and a lot more.

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