Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

pwa.gripe

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 343 posts

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#61

Post by pilif »

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

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#62

Post by nozzlegear »

nickalekhine wrote: post #41
dgxyz wrote: post #3

Yeah sorry but as an end user I’d rather have an actual app than some PWA thanks. Keep going Apple.

Better PWA support gives users (and developers) more optionality with app distribution. Apple building out these APIs would not take away from their native apps. The UX of visiting a site and with a single click of a button having an app on my home screen sounds great. I'd also like to have the option of side loading a native app too. And if those options sound unappealing, you can keep using the App Store if you wan…

> A lot of very prominent apps are written using web technologies anyways. Take a look at the continued popularity of React Native (and Flutter as well).

And it shows through their laggy interfaces and non-native UI/UX. The people don't like apps built with web tech; developers and LLMs like them because they're a shortcut.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#63

Post by kennywinker »

MantisShrimp90 wrote: post #35

I recently posted about how I refuse to buy apple products because of stuff like this. The lock in has made iPhone users dependent on a app ecosystem when we could have had most of our functionality through the open web. People saying they don't want these features are missing the point. Its about control and if developers have the option to make something as a website that actually works that gives them less incenti…

Break the app store monopoly, don’t make the web browser into a buggy leaky bloated mess.

And you can write iOS apps in objective c, swift, kotlin, jacascript, rust, ruby, and a few dozen other languages.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#64

Post by rayiner »

Google has become the developer-focused company that Microsoft used to be, and I don’t mean that positively. Developers are lazy and want to inflict low-effort crap on users. Microsoft always made it easier to do that. Google is now doing the same thing. Offering developers more and more ways to cobble together box-checking functionality in web apps instead of developing proper native apps.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#65

Post by nerdjon »

reustle wrote: post #58
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 on iOS is just a wrapper around Safari, since that is all Apple allows.

While true, that does not seem to align with what the checkboxes for firefox, looking at many of the ones that Safari does not support other non chromium browsers don't support on any OS. Mobile or not

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#66

Post by traceroute66 »

kg wrote: post #52
notatoad wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-pa…

> 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.

I suspect like many here, at $work we use a shit-ton of Flexoptix SFPs.

Flexoptix are not a $megacorp, they are a (very) small German company.

They manage to ship cross-platform apps to flash the SFPs. So its really not that difficult.

I would think a web app would be more of a pain the the butt to maintain because you have to deal with CSS reactive UI etc.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#67

Post by kennywinker »

Darkstryder wrote: post #16

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).

I had to double check i’m running ios 26 because none of those things have moved for me recently.

Search is where it always was (type in the search bar, scroll past the google results to the in-page results) and bookmarking is also where it’s always been (share button “add bookmark”)

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#68

Post by WhyNotHugo »

dagmx wrote: post #37

It would be useful if the site listed whether these had been standardized outside of Chrome yet. 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.

This is a huge list of "features from Chromium", which aren't really standard or even a thing outside of its ecosystem (the fact that both Firefox and Safari lack them is the obvious giveaway).

I'm happy that Firefox doesn't expose Bluetooth, NFC or similar stuff to websites: the browser is huge enough without needing to mediate even more access to local hardware.

It's unclear how some of these would even work for other Browser. E.g.: contacts. What data source would you use? I keep my contacts as vcard files in ~/contacts, but other folks might use a remove CalDAV server, a web-based GUI, or data stored in SQL which can be read by some other native client (I think KDE does this).

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#69

Post by chuckadams »

reustle wrote: post #58
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 on iOS is just a wrapper around Safari, since that is all Apple allows.

The third column is your current browser and platform, and for me it's showing Firefox on macOS missing a lot of features. When I switch over to Brave, I see Chrome on macOS. Interestingly, Chrome on macOS apparently supports vibration, despite the hardware for it being nonexistent.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#70

Post by kstrauser »

kg wrote: post #52
notatoad wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-pa…

I like WebUSB in Chrome to update my Meshtastic radios. I also like that I have to go out of my way to launch Chrome for that, and other websites can’t request permission to access local hardware in my normal browser.
Post reply on HN