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Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

pwa.gripe

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Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#181

Post by leptons »

troupo wrote: post #157
rejhgadellaa wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many of these are in fact not a standard according to W3C and should not be implemented in any browser until it is. That's not exactly how standards work. A browser (or anyone) comes up with a spec, a browser can ship it (to test the waters in an origin-trial, to gain traction if they believe in it), and the standard (often) comes after the fact: "Working Groups don't gate what browsers ship, nor do they define wha…

> A browser (or anyone) comes up with a spec, a browser can ship it (to test the waters in an origin-trial, to gain traction if they believe in it), and the standard (often) comes after the fact: 1. Google often doesn't bother even with a spec. Or it creates a semblance of a spec, throws it up on a googler's Github account, ships it and advertises it as "emergin standard" on web.dev I mean, the status of many (if not…

1. That's just your skewed take.

2. That's just your skewed take.

3. So what, bugs can be fixed. It's nowhere near as abusive as what Apple does by forcing Safari on every iOS browser.

4. You think the "browser wars" are over? Apple's actions clearly indicate the war is on, and they've selected the nuclear option of forbidding any other browser on their platform.

>Internet Explorer in the 2000s: shits out a bunch of own non-standard crap, people boo them

Did people "boo" XMLHTTPRequest? Because it actually revolutionized the web, and people cheered it.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#182

Post by leptons »

dagmx wrote: post #136
leptons wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s hard to delineate which of these are Chrome features or actual web standards. And it’s therefore hard to blame either Safari or Firefox for not supporting them if they’re not standardized yet. Maybe you don't realize that Apple is on the W3C board that gets to decide which APIs become standards, so they can squash any API that they think could cut into their app store. Citing Firefox as some kind of evidence do…

You’ve said this above and have been corrected that Apple cannot single handedly veto proposals. Given the rest of your argument hinges on a misunderstanding of the process I’m not sure it holds much merit.

[dead]

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#183

Post by leptons »

nerdjon wrote: post #141
leptons wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The very important part about this is whether or not these features are actually considered a web standard or is it Google pushing their own agenda. Apple is on the W3C board that gets to decide what APIs become standards, so Apple is definitely pushing their own agenda on the W3C. So you can't really complain that Google is pushing their own agenda with these APIs when Apple is the one refusing to make them a stand…

Google is also involved in W3C and do I really need to bring up the topics API as Google attempting to use their position to push their agenda as well? We really need to stop putting google on a pedestal as if they are truelly on the side of an open web, like every company they are looking out for their own interests. Which is fine, they are allowed to do this. That doesn't change that many of these are in fact not a…

>Google is also involved in W3C and do I really need to bring up the topics API as Google attempting to use their position to push their agenda as well?

How is Web Bluetooth an evil agenda of Google??

It's making web browsers more capable. It's not some evil conspiracy to enrich Google. If Apple wants to let the W3C move forward in making it a standard, then all browsers would benefit, and all users that would like to use a bluetooth enabled web-app would benefit.

The only one that benefits from not allowing it to become a standard is Apple, because they get to force developers to make a native app, where Apple can extract a % of sales through the app.

>Just because Google does something it doesn't mean the rest of the industry should follow. If we did that in IE days we would still have ActiveX

IE was the first to implement XMLHTTPRequest. It changed the web fundamentally, and was the basis for "web 2.0". Everyone was glad that they created it, standards or not when it was first implemented.

If we didn't have browser manufacturers pushing the limits, we'd be stuck with "web 1.0" and browsers that did nothing interesting outside of loading animated gifs of dancing babyies.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#184

Post by leptons »

mrweasel wrote: post #94
hx8 wrote: 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

Looking down the list I can find more features that I'd like to yank out of Safari, and Chrome, than features I'd like to see added. Things that should be removed, according to me: * Audio recording * Geolocation * Motion * Media capture

You have to explicitly allow all of those features to work in a webpage, they aren't on by default, so I'm not sure what you're worrying about.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#185

Post by leptons »

JimDabell wrote: post #120
leptons wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which browser engine are you getting on iOS when you install Firefox? If you answered Firefox, you are WRONG. You get Safari , because Apple forces all browsers on iOS to use their own crippled browser engine. Apple also is part of the W3C board that gets to decide which APIs get to become standards, so they also influence what other browser makers do. This would be a non-issue if Apple didn't force all browsers on i…

No, you get Firefox. There is much more to a web browser than just its rendering engine. When you install Firefox on iOS, you get Firefox. It uses the WebKit rendering engine, but it’s still the Firefox browser. To be frank, it’s pretty insulting and dismissive to all the people putting huge amounts of work into building browsers only to for you go around telling people that all their work is really just a mirage.

It absolutely is a mirage. It's like those Ferrari kit cars where you take a Ford or whatever car frame and remove the outer shell and put a Ferrari shell on top of it. It's not a Ferrari, it only looks like a Ferrari.

The browser engine is the majority part of the browser, everything else around it is window dressing. So when you install Firefox on iOS, you are getting Safari with a thin wrapper around it. You are not getting the Firefox rendering engine, which is the most important part of a web browser.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#186

Post by mort96 »

rejhgadellaa wrote: post #178
mort96 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And even if they wouldn't want to compete: fine. Let them give up. Again, this leads to Chromium out-competing everything else and getting as entrenched in mobile as it already is in desktop. This is a bad outcome. > I work at a place where most of our users are on mobile, and most of them are on iOS. So WebKit sets the bar for what we can do. In other words, Apple has successfully prevented you from writing a web…

> In other words, Apple has successfully prevented you from writing a web application ... by abusing their monopoly position on iOS (instead of competing). Good outcome?

From the perspective of avoiding a web that's wholly controlled by Google? Yeah, absolutely.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#187

Post by spiderfarmer »

CamJN wrote: post #45
spiderfarmer wrote: post #23

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.

I don’t care what your website does, not one tiny bit. I care that the majority of websites are shit, and therefore the web platform should be as minimal and isoltated from the device as possible.

Well my website isn't shit so I don't care about your opinion.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#188

Post by genthree »

rejhgadellaa wrote: post #169
genthree wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No choice.

Funny you would say that. Because businesses and users have only one choice on iOS: native apps, because the web app isn't viable (and/or available) on iOS.

Yeah, it’s great.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#189

Post by bspinner »

pilif wrote: post #61
nerdjon wrote: 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 is not in a position where it is the only browser allowed to run on a platform. On iOS, you’re either doing a native app, sharing 30% of your income with Apple, or you’re restricted to Safari’s feature set. No browser in iOS can use anything but WebKit

> No browser in iOS can use anything but WebKit

Your statement is true only outside of EU countries.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#190

Post by troupo »

rejhgadellaa wrote: post #135
troupo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep asking: Android doesn't have all these perceived limitations. Where are all the amazing native-like PWAs on Android?

If a web app doesn't work on iOS, a business builds a native app instead. iOS is too important. So that fantastic native-like PWA never gets built in the first place. Apple is not just holding back PWA on iOS, they're holding back the entire web everywhere. Compare that with desktop, where web apps (maybe not PWAs, strictly speaking) are dominating: Gmail, Office/Docs, GitHub, Figma, you basically do everything in we…

> If a web app doesn't work on iOS, a business builds a native app instead. iOS is too important. So that fantastic native-like PWA never gets built in the first place.

So, instead of hiring a team to build an amazing PWA for Android, and an app for iOS, business hires three teams? One building a web app, a native app for iOS, and a native app for Android?

> Compare that with desktop, where web apps (maybe not PWAs, strictly speaking)

Indeed, these are not PWAs, not even strictly speaking. Also, they all depend on full desktop browser to work (often due to sheer fact that they are complex apps that don't work well on mobile screens), and none of them including Google have an amazing native-like PWA experience on Android.

I mean, you're bemoaning iOS crippling PWAs on iOS. It should be so easy to show amazing non-crippled PWAs on Android. After all, we've been told for the better part of the decade that PWAs are amazing native-like now. Android's market share is 68-70% worldwide. You'd think someone would finally be able to show the full power of a PWA? Anyone?

> And if you count Electron [1]: VSCode, Slack, Spotify, etc, etc.

One of them has millions of man-hours and millions of dollars of investment to make it somewhat performant. The others struggle to show a few pages of text and images in less than 1GB or RAM. Not the flex you think it is.

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