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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

#91

Post by kmeisthax »

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…

KNOW THE BROWSER RULES

Firefox refusing to implement a web standard: APPROPRIATE

Safari refusing to implement a web standard: INAPPROPRIATE

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#92

Post by skydhash »

genthree wrote: post #73
traceroute66 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

I don't know much about Win32, but GTK, QT, Cocoa (Apple),... have nice customization options, and creating custom components is easy.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#93

Post by kmeisthax »

8organicbits wrote: post #77
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.

iOS actually does support notifications in webapps, but only ones that have a homescreen icon. Furthermore, the notification support is different enough that I can't get my iPad to work with Android Messages for Web. So I have no clue if the API is neutered or if Google is being Google and insisting every browser be Chromium. Probably both.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#94

Post by mrweasel »

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

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#95

Post by slashdave »

agust wrote: post #25

Worth noting that Apple doesn't just cripple iOS Safari, it cripples all iOS browsers because it also forces them to use WebKit, the crippled browser engine underneath Safari. It would be fine if they just made Safari bad, that's their choice. But they don't stop there: they make the entire web bad on iOS purposely to promote the native apps they can tax.

This is clearly for reasons of security.

I don't think Apple is terribly interested in market share for Safari. What they are interested is preserving their competitive advantage in privacy.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#96

Post by lachlan_gray »

8organicbits wrote: post #77
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.

According to this, notifications are possible if you add the app to the home screen, which I didn't know.

A feature more devs should use- I've been surprised how much websites behave like native apps if you just "add to homescreen" instead of downloading an official app, e.g. twitter, instagram.

When you open the shortcut, it doesn't launch as a tab in safari, but appears independently in the app switcher. They are often indistinguishable from official apps!

Seems like a great way for devs to avoid app store pains

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#97

Post by FormularSumo »

It's a cool page, although somewhat limited in scope. If you want a more complete picture of all the web progress Apple is holding back, not "just" PWA and more advanced capabilities, this is probably a better site for comparison:

https://ios404.com

It includes dates for when these things were first shipped, explanations for that they do, and what kind of standards (or not) they are.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#98

Post by kennywinker »

Darkstryder wrote: post #79
kennywinker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you go to settings > apps > safari, and scroll to the “tabs” secttion, then turn off “compact” you get rid of the “…” button and go back to what it used to look like before.

Which is why i didn’t notice the change, as i had already set this setting to put the url back at the top an update or two ago.

And yes, definitely discoverability issues.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#99

Post by nerdjon »

rejhgadellaa wrote: post #89
nerdjon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The difference is that, on iOS, you can't switch to a different browser that does support these features. Om very other OS you can. A web app could ask you to use a different browser (not ideal, but if the web app requires a specific API, it's not an unreasonable). Safari is in a very special position because it controls what the web can do on iOS (all browsers on iOS have to use Apple's WebKit engine, they can't add…

True, but putting aside that limitation on iOS for a moment.

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.

Which is where whether or not any non chromium browser supports any of these on any platform. Which many of these features they don't.

That completely changes the conversation here, from Apple purposefully ignoring standards to Google pushing things that are not standards yet. Which I will admit that the reality is a bit of both here, but it should not be considered a negative when a browser does not support a feature that is non standard... we heavily criticized IE for exactly this and yet we celebrate Chrome for it?

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#100

Post by chuckadams »

rejhgadellaa wrote: post #86
chuckadams wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But on macOS you can switch to a browser that can do all these things. A company could ask you to use a different browser (not ideal, but if the web app requires a specific API, it's not an unreasonable). Safari is in a very special position because it controls what the web can do on iOS (all browsers on iOS have to use Apple's WebKit engine, they can't add web features). Apple is not just gatekeeping native (through…

I'm not trying to defend Apple's decisions, I'm merely pointing out that the site is showing the feature support that Firefox has or doesn't have on macOS, or whatever other platform someone is using to access the site.
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