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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

#71

Post by dpark »

politelemon wrote: post #43

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.

Is it really egregious that Apple doesn’t support everything Google decides to push? Most of these are features I don’t care about, or in some cases actively do not want.

I’m also not sure how accurate this page is. They claim Chrome on Android supports registerProtocolHandler while MDN says it’s not supported there.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#73

Post by genthree »

traceroute66 wrote: post #66
kg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

For little utility apps where you don’t care to deviate from UI default appearance and behavior (and, as a user, it’s much better if you don’t anyway, though it’s very trendy to make UX worse by customizing everything) iOS and Android both are dead simple, very easy to write and maintain a utility app for either of them.

An enormous amount of the cost of developing a lot of native apps is customizing the appearance and behavior, to match some slide deck mockup or to make it “on-brand” or whatever. It’s better for the user, and way cheaper, if you just… don’t do that. Hell a lot of common UI elements are easier in native than web if you just don’t try to customize them a ton (data-backed tables and list views and such are sooooo nice)

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#74

Post by dpark »

gardnr wrote: post #50
hk1337 wrote: 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.

> 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.

You forgot to mention the long mustache your cartoon villain MBA is twisting while they sabotage Safari.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#75

Post by throwaway613746 »

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…

[dead]

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#76

Post by rafaelmn »

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.

It's not even features - basic stuff like input handling/focus is broken on iOS PWAs it's an obviously ignored tech.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#77

Post by 8organicbits »

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

Notifications struck me as odd. I aggressively disable notifications in my apps because they are often just ads or engagement focused. But as a developer, it would be cool to have a way to notify an iOS user other than building a native app and paying the iOS tax. There's a bunch of utility apps not getting built because of this limitation.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#78

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#79

Post by Darkstryder »

kennywinker wrote: post #67
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”)

Damn. I never knew that way to search things. I used to do « Share / Search on this page » which was already obnoxious, which has now become « … » / « Share » / « Search on this page ».

Either I’m dumb or there is a discoverability problem with all these features. Probably a bit of both.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#80

Post by pokot0 »

You might want your browser to do Bluetooth, NFC, Background stuff, Face Detection but I don't.

I like to use Apple products for things that are commodities to me because I am not gonna look into the details of those and when I do Apple reasoning often make sense to me (just like this list).

There is a lot more we can criticize about these big tech corps (including Apple) than a product decision for a company that is known for making polarizing decisions on behalf of their customers. If people buy it... they must like it, no?

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