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Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

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Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#81

Post by diebeforei485 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #72
3np wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your app is a rare exception, but apart from chat apps, any use of notifications I’ve seen are undesirable and abused to spam users. Even those that do have a legit use-case still abuse it by pushing non-desirable (from user perspective) messages. I think apart from Gitter I’ve never wanted a notification, as a user.

This app helps sick patients navigate the healthcare system. Notifications were requested by users so that they don't need to continuously go back to the web app to see if there are any updates.

Great. Take their phone number and text them. Amazon charges what, $0.00645 per SMS?

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#82

Post by ksec »

olliej wrote: post #52
adrr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People choose to install chrome it doesn't come with Windows Machines or Macs yet is a very popular CHOICE of browser. IOS we have no choice and forced to to use Safari.

you mean safari - a minority browser on a minority platform - is a monopoly? There's a browser that has almost absolute domination of the market, chooses what features become standards simply by shipping them, is aggressively anti-competitive, and yet you're complaining about safari?

>you mean safari - a minority browser on a minority platform - is a monopoly?

With All due respect, this is a very Apple view.

Today, the iPhone has 66% market share in the United States, 75% of U.S. App Store revenues, and over 80% of time spent on the mobile internet. We can debate whether that fit anyone's definition of monopoly. But it is definitely not on a minority platform, nor a minority browser.

Safari's current features set doesn't have much problem as a Web Page browser. And wouldn't be a concern if it wasn't for App Store's policy. But when Apple is the majority or dominant platform in a market these can no longer be looked at as an individual case. And will very likely be used as a weapon in AntiTrust issue.

To be quite frankly honestly I dislike PWA and Chrome and I wish Safari stay the way it is and only Apps Store changes its policy. But right now Apple seems to be willing to fight that at all cost. And there are no middle ground to balance things out.

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#83

Post by Spartan-S63 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #40
userbinator wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I see posts like this that complain about other browsers lacking features and essentially encouraging the "Google-isation" of browsers, the more convinced I am of the power of Google's gigantic monopoly-enhancing propaganda-machine. Firefox unfortunately has no choice but to be dragged along by Google.

I'm a mobile and desktop Firefox user, and Firefox has supported the features that are missing from iOS Safari like the Web Notifications API since 2013, and the Web Push API since January 2016.

Why should a web browser be able to send notifications? Why are we overloading web browsers to do more and more things? I get that transferring data over the internet is king, but surely we can devise better user interfaces than bloated browsers, etc?

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#84

Post by heavyset_go »

asaddhamani wrote: post #77
heavyset_go wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This app helps sick patients navigate the healthcare system. Notifications were requested by users so that they don't need to continuously go back to the web app to see if there are any updates.

How about sending notifications over email?

See this post[1]. We already do text and email notifications. Not all phones and tablets get texts, and email notifications are unreliable. Many users wanted desktop and mobile notifications, hence why we implemented them on top of texts and emails.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26520303

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#85

Post by hyperrail »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #74
hyperrail wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Edge team - first engineering alone, now both eng. and product - has been led for 3 years by Rajesh Sundaram, a Microsoft lifer who has never worked for Google. [1] And Chromium-based Edge has tracking prevention through filter lists, while Chrome does not. [2] Microsoft is no one's privacy hero these days, I will concede that. But some of these specific claims are just wrong. [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/raje…

Your [1] is apparently not public or "does not exist". It's possible I was confused by Microsoft's horrible titling scheme, as I would assume a guy who goes by "Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Edge", Eric Lawrence, is well-placed in the org, especially since he's quoted in every major article around every new Edge news: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18527550/microsoft-chromiu... It is true Microsoft ported s…

Hmm maybe I can see Rajesh's LinkedIn when I log in because I'm some number of degrees away from him. Or maybe just logging in is enough. Anyway, you can search the web for him if you want to see that he has indeed been at Microsoft a long time (nearly 25 years now).

As for Eric Lawrence, if Eric gets quoted a lot that's probably because he wrote the first versions of Fiddler, the debugging localhost proxy that many Windows developers use, so tech journalists that specialize in Microsoft have heard of him through their developer acquaintances. Plus his Microsoft email address is easy to guess: [his Twitter username]@microsoft.com

Eric left Microsoft after over 10 years, went through 2 companies including Google, then came back within about 6 years. I consider him closer to Microsoft in outlook than Google, though one could plausibly disagree given how rude he was about his old team's products IE and Edge while he was away.

As for "Principal Program Manager," that being misleading about scope is news to me, and if it is, that's on the journalists to clarify, because this kind of title is commonplace and implies very little. At any tech company "Program/Product Manager" is not necessarily a people leader. "Principal" doesn't change this. "Principal" at Microsoft and other tech companies is just a rank like "Senior," albeit a hard-to-earn and usually well-deserved one. If I say I am a "Principal Product Manager, HotTechCo BlahBlah," I don't think anyone in the industry will assume I run the entirety of that product.

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#86

Post by saurik »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #80
nexuist wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS dev since 2014 here. So many of my app ideas would have been completed 2-5x quicker if mobile Safari supported push notifications. It is unreasonable gatekeeping.

It is very reasonable gatekeeping. People would be inundated with notifications on their phones.

No: you would--at worst--be asked more often than you would like to approve notifications for random websites, all of which you would click no on; this feature doesn't just magically cause notifications... hell: it already even exists on desktop Safari and I just click "no".

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#87

Post by saurik »

chrisseaton wrote: post #23
heavyset_go wrote: post #17

> (Conversely, if Safari refuses to implement some alleged 'feature', it becomes much less useful even if Chrome does implement it.) The fact that Apple refuses to implement basic features in mobile Safari that Firefox and Chrome have had for years now, and the fact that they refuse to allow other browser engines on iOS is the reason why we can't have nice things like progressive web apps. I recently worked on a heal…

What is Safari on iOS missing specifically?

In addition to the issues other people are bringing up, there are a ton of decentralized video use cases crippled by the lack of Media Source Extensions on iPhone (they finally I think decided to deign to include it on iPad, just not iPhone).

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#88

Post by imwillofficial »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #80
nexuist wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS dev since 2014 here. So many of my app ideas would have been completed 2-5x quicker if mobile Safari supported push notifications. It is unreasonable gatekeeping.

It is very reasonable gatekeeping. People would be inundated with notifications on their phones.

And I don’t wanna click no all the time. Nobody does.

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#89

Post by genericstorage3 »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #81
heavyset_go wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This app helps sick patients navigate the healthcare system. Notifications were requested by users so that they don't need to continuously go back to the web app to see if there are any updates.

Great. Take their phone number and text them. Amazon charges what, $0.00645 per SMS?

What a terrible ux

Re: Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy

#90

Post by jfoster »

3np wrote: post #61
heavyset_go wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this specific use case, it's missing the Web Push API[1], which can be used to implement push notifications, and the Web Notification API[2], which can also be used for the same thing. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...

Maybe your app is a rare exception, but apart from chat apps, any use of notifications I’ve seen are undesirable and abused to spam users. Even those that do have a legit use-case still abuse it by pushing non-desirable (from user perspective) messages. I think apart from Gitter I’ve never wanted a notification, as a user.

There's nothing stopping Safari having a less annoying implementation of notifications. They have full control of the experience.
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