Safari on mac already supports push notifications, but unlike on chrome/firefox you need a push server certificate (similar to how push notifications work for ios apps)[1] to actually push messages. That obviously requires the $100/year of a developer subscription. It's not a huge deal if you're running a business, but if you're just a hobbyist trying to push notifications to your own devices without a third party app, that sucks.
In other words, Apple only supports a proprietary protocol that notably differs from the standard every other browser uses in that you must pay them a yearly fee and agree to their massive developer ToS in order to use it.
Well, that sucks. The blogspam websites that spam notifications to make money off ads will be able to afford the certificate but getting notifications from your self-hosted services will cost you instead.
Hopefully Apple revises this policy (i.e. give out free certificates limited to a certain amount of notifications or a certain amount of domains) but I wouldn't keep my hopes up.
Luckily, several governments are preparing to add legislation to force Apple to allow alternative browser engines, so there's still a chance this problem might resolve itself in the future.
This stuff shouldn't be used for attention at all to be honest. That's also why most browsers these days disable notification requests silently by default, so you can opt into them manually if you really wish to do so.
I would accept a compromise like "you get to ask for permission if you install the program as a web app through the menu" or something similar.
I'm all for trying to end the shit blog spam and adware that only abuse the notification permission, but I also want to be able to use this tech myself. Notifications on Android and presumably iOS are a solved problem, I don't see why web applications would need to be different.
One of the biggest advantages native apps have had over websites is the ability to send notifications.
This difference has disadvantaged individuals and companies that find themselves needing to invest in both having a website and a mobile app, and discouraged investment into good web experiences. As websites can finally provide experiences and leverage notifications as well as apps have been able to, I think we’ll see the quality of the web improve considerably.
I think the more likely outcome of this is a bunch more grandmas with 12 ads on their lockscreen at all times because users are so conditioned to click "accept" for every prompt they see just to get it out of the way
Web push notifications have basically only been used to make shitty experiences. Random websites sending you ads, every news site you just happened to click to read one article trying to trick you into letting them send notifications for new articles they publish, etc.
Apple has been refining the iOS notification experience to prevent this from being a problem for apps and I’m sure this will apply to websites too.
For example, putting notifications in the scheduled summary or asking users if they want to turn off notifications from an app they haven’t engaged with recently.
On the other hand, why should I have to download an app in order to know when I get outbid on eBay or a notification when a package is delivered. Like any messaging channel, not every business is going to use it in a smart way overnight. But I’m confident Apple will put the right guard rails around it, and it will be a welcome replacement to email. Unlike email, web push is privacy friendly, and has standard opt-in and opt-out methods.
Tangential: I’m not satisfied with the existing control of notifications in iOS. I want to allow ebay to notify me when my shipment gets updated but shut up when it wants to advertise. Not possible in the current setup. I have disabled notifications of many apps whose notifications include useful information but also too much garbage.
It’s a bit ambiguous, but the Apple App Store guidelines seem to require you to be able to opt-out from marketing push notifications, while still keeping other notifications.
From guideline 4.5.4: “Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. (..)” [0]
The developer/user experience guidelines also recommend to have a clear screen to opt-in and out of different types of notifications, and never to abuse privileges (e.g. send marketing notifications with a “time critical” flag to break through focus mode etc.).
I really hated Uber Eats when I thought they were abusing their notification privileges to send spam. But I recently found out that they do allow you to opt out of marketing notifications while still allowing order-related notifications (although they really are pushing it (pun intended) by sending at least two post-delivery notifications asking for tips and ratings, which could easily wait until I actually open the app again or at least be limited to just one delivery confirmation notification). Not sure if they are asking for clear opt-ins for new customers (they probably assumed opt-in based on some general consent I gave before this Apple policy came into effect).
App Store guidelines are only enforced when it's convenient for Apple. This clause has been routinely ignored and even Apple themselves broke it several times. There's no official way to report violations either.
> I want to allow ebay to notify me when my shipment gets updated but shut up when it wants to advertise.
Developers are supposed to clearly separate notifications into groups that users can turn off individually, but right now it's not something that gets apps rejected from the app store review process[0].
Also, iOS 16 introduces managing shipping in Wallet[1], however apps need to use an API to 'ship' their tracking numbers to the Wallet app; wish this included the ability to manually add tracking numbers and/or scan mail from the built-in Mail app for tracking links.
> why should I have to download an app in order to know when I get outbid on eBay or a notification when a package is delivered
What’s wrong with prioritized emails? Of course they prefer to send you push notifications via app because it is an additional (and someway less filtered) channel.
Once also push notifications will get the same spam inbox filtering system (which iOS already has) then we will all scream for the next channel to be filled of spam (retina displayed popups?)
A push is potentially a better experience. You could long press the push notification and the app could increase its bid by 10%. You can't do things like that through email.
To your point, maybe we should innovate on email and add these capabilities to email, instead of building apple/android specific push solutions. I'd love to see that, but we don't live in that world.
It got to the point for a while there where it was like having pop-up ads all over again, except this time the ads were all for the site I was currently reading. This will be abused if it's not opt-in by default (as in I need to specifically enable the feature in the browser before it starts asking me if I want these notifications).
It is not useless for me. I disabled it in Chrome as well, but I can enable it for selected websites. I'm using lots of messengers (discord, telegram, whatsapp, skype) from the browser and notifications are what makes it possible.
It's not so much a chicken-and-egg situation (plenty of sites and browsers already support this), the problem is the sheer number of bad eggs. When the feature rolled out in Firefox, I noticed almost every site I visited wanted to send me push notifications. Rather than reject them one by one, I disabled the feature entirely within Firefox.
Given that it’s opt in (likely by adding the website to your Home Screen I imagine if the Safari storage expiration is any indication) - how’s this any different than apps spamming you?
Is it going to require you to add the site to your home screen, or is it gonna be like Chrome where you just get an "allow/block" button while browsing around, which all casual users will hit "allow" on because they're trying to get to the content?
A website spamming you is very different from an app spamming you. Going to the app store and installing an app takes much more buy-in from a user than just clicking a link. If someone shares a news article from a random site I've never seen before, I might be willing to click it. If that same person told me to install an app to read an article, it's not happening in the first place. I've got a very short list of curated apps I installed on my device. The web is mostly garbage though and most of it shouldn't be sending notifications.
Given that notifications are not alerts and generally notifications are useful in the context of not being on the page, I’m confident it will require the site to be manually added to the Home Screen. I’d be surprised if it works any other way since safari currently freezes all safari pages other than the active one.
Even if that’s not the case though, still dont see how it’s different than app notifications.
I'm glad some people are happy about this. I'm just hoping Apple includes an option to automatically opt out of all web notification requests. The fact that every website asks you to accept notifications has rendered the feature useless, since I feel compelled to disable it entirely at the browser level to block those obnoxious pop-up.
I think it is a red herring to see the lack of push notification support on web as some kind of “big” handicap vs native. There are so many advantages that native brings, push notifications is probably in a second tier list (10th+).
I have notifications disabled on my browser because for every 1 useful notification I got, I get 50 requests to send me notifications because I visited a website once.
Finally! If they add support for persistent offline storage that doesn’t get automatically cleaned up then mobile web apps might finally be a viable alternative to native ones. Less of a need now that react-native is more mature, but the update model of mobile we is still much better.
Persistent or longer than 7 days isn't guaranteed with sites added to home screen, though it rarely happens it can be cleared (has happened to me after iOS updates).
My only problem with the 7day storage limit is that every and any site gets the 7-day limit with no regard to if the user has interacted or actually used it, and to me that fails the privacy test. I've posted some ideas about that here before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30402242)
> Persistent or longer than 7 days isn't guaranteed with sites added to home screen
This was changed.
> My only problem with the 7day storage limit is that every and any site gets the 7-day limit with no regard to if the user has interacted or actually used it
My understanding is that the limit is that local storage is cleared after 7 days of interaction at the browser level (e.g. non-vacation days) without interaction with a top-level origin.
I do not know if merely displaying information counts as an interaction.
Not sure I understand the question. Persistence isn't guaranteed in any browser, but Safari is the only one with a definite 7 day limit. All browser treat these limits the same (e.g. engagement doesn't matter), except for browsers that support persistent storage after a user gives permission for it.
Ah, I mentioned privacy because that's the stated reason for Apple's 7 day limit.
However, when my kid clicks a link in a game, that opens an ad in Safari, which he immediately closes, shouldn't get the same storage limit as the site I built for my town to check on garbage collection days.
In that scenario the storage the ad used should be cleared immediately, to protect privacy and eliminate tracking.
But my garbage collection site, built to be easier than the the PDF from the township, should be allowed the 7 days (preferably more, garbage collection is every 15 days, excluding holidays). And in case the user enters his address I should be able to store it even longer than that in localStorage for his subsequent visit (usually 10-12 days later). For now I store them in cookies I set on the server-side (only for Safari users), though I really don't want to store any data server-side.
Finally. Though I wonder how this will be implemented. How’s this done on android?
The amount of FUD on this post is sad. People commenting on this who have no idea this has already been opt in since 15.3 via advanced safari settings.
I feel like the FUD comes from battling browser-based "allow notifications" requests from websites from whom no one wants to receive notifications--to me that is learned human FUD, as opposed to bullshit-FUD from a competitor trying to manipulate a market.
Notifications suck in browsers. Maybe they turn to to magic in the iOS universe because of the device-ness aspect.
The sites will render a dialog with a button to add notifications, since the browsers require a user interaction as part of the API call.
Basically, you get prompted to add notifications so you can get a prompt to add notifications - while for 90%+ of sites visited, you would _never_ approve notifications.
Remember when everyone started getting Calendar spam because web pages abused being able to easily subscribe to a calendar?
Yeah. I hope they have some safeguards here. At the very least, require an Apple Developer account so abusers can't hide behind anonymity. Also, let me pre-emptively disable this feature across all websites.
> Am I serious that your replies on this topic have been so incredibly dense that one must conclude that either you’re a child, an idiot, or possibly both?
Every other browser has supported these for years, and the sky hasn't fallen. If anything, the iOS implementation will probably be even more conservative than the others.
> Every other browser has supported these for years
And a lot of non-technical people I know had spam notifications coming up on their desktop because they opted into notifications on multiple spam sites over the years.
I think chromium edge have a somewhat conservative one already. Edge now automatically bans sites that spam random notification request that rejected by everyone from pop up new request.
Require user interaction for popping up request isn't really a clearly more strict one than edge currently does (probably equal or a bit more strict?).
More notifications nobody is really asking for. Devs may think it's cool but when like 99% of users are disallowing webpage notifications.... It's just not newsworthy.
No one needs them on random websites, and I agree it's really sucky when you visit a site you've never been to before and the first thing they propose is turning on notifications. (These days, invariably with a fake notification dialog so declining doesn't lock them out from asking again. Yuck.)
There's a lot of web-based applications that could benefit, though.
ya ya, having the feature/capability is a nice to have for some web apps (web, the platform apple's been restricting/hating/building against for more than a decade), and even in that space more notifications is debatably not a good thing, but trying to also say it's not newsworthy, not a feature to dwell on from WWDC etc. Apple has a habit of making flashy announcements for stuff that's either not news/been around, or could just be rolled out in updates (like for example almost all of the silly messaging updates/features?)
Yup. If this isn't allow/disallow by web site, I'll be turning off all Safari notifications. Even so, aside from messaging apps, I pretty much have notifications turned off already.
I will interact with my phone on MY terms rather than have garbage pushed to me at all hours of the day.
Having worked with PWAs I don't get my hopes up anymore when it comes to iOS, they have added and subsequently broken support for key features in the past. I wish they would just fix the current features they claim to support rather than keep adding half-assed features that won't properly work once you install the app in the phone, for example.
> Having worked with <technology> I don't get my hopes up anymore when it comes to iOS
In my experience iOS and Safari in general is an absolute wasteland of buggy, half-implementations of tech that should be table stakes at this point. WebRTC [0] is the most egregious. It's one of the many reasons that Google had to fork WebKit into Blink.
The telegram PWA is shockingly good. It’s not quite as good as the native app but it feels as good as a regular okish native app. It’s useful to get around chats banned by apple as well.
It's been nearly a decade, and we're still talking about PWAs being the next big thing. Mozilla/Firefox has killed them off for good [0], and Safari support is tepid at best. It was ultimately just another push by Google a la AMP to corner the browser market some more, and the rest of the vendors are fed up with it. Devs by and large never bought into it because they are objectively inferior to native, while the tiny number of niche use cases where they do make sense have (rightfully) just avoided the complexity and remained as normal web apps.
As a developer, I am putting my eggs in the PWA basket[0]. I fully maintain my native versions, but actively work on achieving parity on the PWA front. The complexity is definitely not greater than developing native.
It feels a lot safer to develop a PWA than a native app. Developing native apps subjects you to the arbitrary fancies of Apple and Google. And even worse, your life depends on them. For all we know they might crash tomorrow and then what? Developing a PWA frees you from these worries. I am not a developer to make a quick buck, or to go public. I care about the things I make. I want them to live forever and be sustainable. Buying into the "web toolchain" is a lot safer than buying into the latest native fad pushed by a tech giant that owns the platform and only cares about profits. I have come to terms with this. One day, I will only have a PWA version. Don't know when. It's my conclusion of many years
An app that starts out as a web app, but lets you add it to your desktop and it will look just like any other app on your computer. Given that the browser/OS supports it.
I am aware that this website is predominantly web developers. But I’m personally quite disappointed in Apple for this move.
That you can turn a browser into an app platform is not a success for browsers, it’s a failing in application distribution and native application tooling.
As a user I am not looking forward to the inevitable deprecation of native applications to PWAs; because when that happens I will not be able to turn off the push notification feature in the browser.
The same was true of JavaScript: it’s impossible to run a browser without JavaScript, what was originally progressive enhancement is now mandatory code execution; for many web developers that is not an issue at all, as a user: I shouldn't have to trust _all_ the code in the world that my browser can potentially pull in.
The sandbox, as complex as it is, is not infallible.
All of this consolidation on the browser frightens me, personally, and maybe you disagree, but honestly I’d like someone to be pushing back on the “faster horse”[0] requests from web developers.
0: reference to the famous quote by Henry Ford: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.”
Edit: expected result from the hackernews audience. But at least if I managed to convince one person that the browser shouldn’t do everything then it’s worth the karma sacrifice.
> the inevitable deprecation of native applications to PWAs
If that were going to happen it would have happened already, at least on Android. The reality (and I say this as a web developer) is that it's harder to make mobile apps that perform and feel and look as good as native apps. The same is not true on desktop OSes, with their current SDKs and dev experience, which is the reason they've taken over there.
> I will not be able to turn off the push notification feature in the browser
I have no idea what this means either. You already have to opt-in to notifications for each individual web app, which is actually more than can be said for native apps. Web apps are assumed to be user-hostile, vs native apps that are usually just slightly user-hostile but get treated as non-hostile anyway.
> I shouldn't have to trust _all_ the code in the world that my browser can potentially pull in
How is this different from trusting all the code in the world that your native apps pull in? And before you say it's all been screened by Apple- there are various widely-used methods to dynamically load code into an app after the fact
PWAs are especially important on mobile OSes because they put competitive pressure on the walled garden. xCloud only exists on iOS because of a web app. When I used a de-googled Android phone I was only able to use maps and access my bank account by using web apps. The web is an open platform that pierces the veil, and keeps the native ecosystems honest.
> How is this different from trusting all the code in the world that your native apps pull in? And before you say it's all been screened by Apple- there are various widely-used methods to dynamically load code into an app after the fact
The difference is that organizations sign a contract to publish into the App Store, and do so under their legal name. This gives Apple the opportunity to be punitive in the face of abuse. They do not have this ability for the web (for practical and for regulatory reasons).
You lament Google's dominance of the web platform while listing F-droid?
Google's dominance is unfortunate, but their support for the web has been vital in keeping it (sort of) competitive with the proprietary platforms, including their own. Google does this for financial reasons, of course, but it is still a good thing.
And the web is still the only major client platform we have. We can still successfully object when Google promotes changes that are not in the platform's interest. Look how often Mozilla has thwarted Google proposals for the web, like their vision of webasm or web components.
> You lament Google's dominance of the web platform while listing F-droid?
pardon my ignorance, I don't personally use an Android phone, my understanding was that f-droid was essentially a FOSS app-store, built in order to solve distribution for non-playstore .apk's.
I thought it wasn't a store that was in any way controversial on the android ecosystem.
Yes, that is all correct. It is a good thing, but it is not a platform, it is an App Store for a mostly open source but still proprietary platform owned by Google.
How do you figure? The web platform is more or less controlled by the duopoly of Apple & Google, the two dominant browser developers. Toss in Firefox for the outliers and that's the entirety of the platform as is able to exist - the web is too complicated for anyone else to join (case in point, see previously major players, like Microsoft, giving up at it).
If you just mean distribution then that's also not true. Android, Windows, MacOS (although this is eroding), and Linux all have open publishing of native applications.
It’s literally opt-in. Given that this will be relegated to a small niche at best. Most people aren’t going to go into Safari advanced settings and toggle a flag.
Native apps will always be necessary for something that actually needs it.
If anything you should be happy about this as it’ll remove control of everything from Google and Apple exclusively. Funny you talk about consolidation…
For now, I’m not sure how that will be though, if it’s anything like adding a calendar then it’s just hitting “yes” on a prompt.
> Given that this will be relegated to a small niche at best.
How many apps on your phone want to send notifications?
> Most people aren’t going to go into Safari advanced settings and toggle a flag.
Assuming that’s how it will be enabled (and in perpetuity), I can’t see people doing that in the general case either and this the effectiveness of this feature is questionable.
I think everyone in this thread assumes they can deploy PWAs in a generally available way that support push notifications over the web, if you have to go into safari settings (as in, the settings app) then people are not likely to enable it and the this you can’t use them generally.
What I’m saying is: either this is easy to use for users, and it will be abused; or it’s hard for users and the actual usefulness of the feature is dubious.
Surely its either not new and thus not noteworthy, as you imply, or it’s a new feature with a somewhat uncertain future for us mere mortals to fully know.
For me, the biggest problem with the web as an app platform is that many of its advancements in the past 10-15 years have been heavily weighted towards giving total control to the developer rather than the end user. This isn't much of a surprise given the biggest players in this space, but it's disappointing nonetheless.
Here's hoping this signals a tide-shift in their general stance on PWAs. PWAs can and do put really important competitive-pressure on the walled garden, and Apple knows it, and I think that's why they've been hampered for so long. I kinda wonder if this change was motivated by the antitrust stirrings
I am still on team "why haven't these been deprecated by all major browsers yet".
I literally get calls from people who believe their computer has "malware", and it's just dozens of notification subscriptions in their browser spewing adult content ads onto their screen.
Of all the web APIs out there, this is the one most aggressively misused for spam ads, and most rarely actually useful. We literally spent a decade demanding people add a popup blocker into the web browser, and a decade later, injected a popup ad tool back into the browser.
I agree that it's a great feature. It's just actively terrible for 99.9999% of websites.
There is a user-gesture restriction. So now there's an HTML pop-up on dozens of pages.
Imo the user-gesture + permission-modal design is fundamentally bad. We penalize sites by making them have to maim their cover with grotesque user-gesture cutouts, then, once the user clicks (makes a user gesture) they have to click again. Sites should just request push notifications, without user gestures. Something should show up in the awesome-bar, and users can enable it at their leasure. Rather than an active "pull" flow for permissions, we need a "push" flow where users can passively enable/disable some permissions freely, in a more chill way. Conversion rates would plummet, but the whole web would be a much more pleasant place & actually operate for-the-user, which is what the internet is for[1].
Forced by developers that refuse to make the necessary investment in producing native applications, because — with features like web push notifications — the poor web UX is something these developers consider “good enough”.
This thread is about actively facilitating that kind of behavior by developers.
That’s not what forced means. Consider that there are developers who have apps with no notifications at all. For some, something is better than nothing.
Personally I like web notifications, if the site doesn’t implement them well then turn it off for that site.
I don’t think you’ve read the thread you’re replying to, are replying without context, and are countering arguments nobody has made.
We’re discussing the idea that this feature is valuable because it facilitates developers dropping native applications in favor of fully web-based replacements.
The example given by the first poster was Protonmail, which performs client-side encryption, and which they argued would be better served by providing only a web application.
I noted that this would not actually be desirable for most users, especially when the application in question must be trusted to implement client-side encryption for which the server should not have access to the private keying materials, as is the case for protonmail.
There, hopefully you’re all caught up. I understand that you like the idea of this feature, but please read the threads you’re replying to.
I did read the thread - no one is being forced, still. If you or anyone else doesn’t want it then you don’t have to do anything as it’s opt-in only. Hope you’re caught up.
I’m sorry you still clearly don’t understand the thread, but given your response, it’s clear I’m ill-equipped to explain it to you, or you just don’t care to actually listen; perhaps someone else will assist.
If a web standard only works if Google "penalizes" people, it's a bad web standard. I hate having to express this weekly, but Google is not the web.
I really don't think any mail client needs corner of screen popups to be useful: I respond to most emails within 5-10 minutes, have used web email since 2005, and I've never wanted or allowed push notifications on my desktop.
It is, at best, a solution looking for a problem, and at worst, an adtech popup spec maliciously impressed upon the web with a casual justification for building it.
> Why not disable notifications if you don’t like them? Lol
The “Lol” at the end of your comment is misplaced, comes off as condescending.
Not everyone is the same as you, maybe they had considered turning them off and it’s possible that they believe that it may not be an option.
For people outside of tech who do not mess with the settings of their devices, ironically the same people who are likely to be abused by this feature, then having a toggle is not very useful overall anyway.
But, I’m not happy with your tone as it brings down the whole conversation to the same tired old flame war/shit slinging that inevitably happens when someone starts it with mild condescension on the internet.
Notifications is enabled by default on every major browser that supports them. I turn them off, and at work, push a policy to disable them across the org, but it's still something I see and hear a lot afflicting non-technical users, especially seniors.
It's useful for "native" web-based apps, both on mobile devices and things like Electron. But for regular browsers: yeah nah. Although, for some things like Telegram web or email it could be useful; the problem here is (as always): how do you allow the useful uses without the twats moving in to engage in their twattery?
I never heard of this before though, but turns out it's been in Firefox since 2016. I did set "always deny" for notifications a few years ago as I got so tired of all the sites whining about it, so I guess that includes these push things too(?) Sites still whine about it with in-site popups of course if they see that permission is denied... Sigh...
When looking it up a bit for this comment I found this description that I found somewhat amusing:
"Web push notifications allow users to opt-in to timely updates from sites they love and allow you to effectively re-engage them with customized, relevant content."
Yeah I was glad Apple was holding out on this. We've had years now to realize that this API is basically only going to be used to trick users into getting spammed with garbage they don't want. I don't know why Apple chose now to implement them.
The best use of this feature is 'Chrome apps' or "Edge apps" where a web version of an app (like facebook messenger or whatsapp) can live inside the process of the browser instead of their own whole separate process, drastically reducing memory usage and energy consumption. Though it's kind of a workaround for the electron app anti-pattern.
> I literally get calls from people who believe their computer has "malware", and it's just dozens of notification subscriptions in their browser spewing adult content ads onto their screen.
It does. But that is not adequate. Unfortunately Google does not understand users at all, and hence, unfortunately does not understand practical security.
The first thing you have to understand is that users click everything, especially when it isn't doing what they want. So websites throw these prompts up endlessly, hoping users will inadvertently click it. Worse, some sites will abuse alert() and essentially demand the user accept installing an extension or enabling notifications to proceed. (Particularly guilty here is search ads and the garbage ads Edge puts on their new tab page.)
Then the doubly problematic design here is that websites can prompt people to accept these, but users have to find an obscure setting to either remove those approvals or deny new requests. Users by and large don't even know that exists.
I disable notification requests in every browser I put my hands on, but unfortunately I can't put my hands on every browser on Earth. It's really up to web standards bodies and browser vendors to realize the API is doing drastically more harm than good.
I agree that software (especially "platform-y" software like web browsers) vendors have responsibility to provide informative and unobtrusive UI, in order to (among other reasons) protect users from malware. I also agree that Chrome doesn't do a great job here, and that web notifications need a lot of re-thinking across the board. But I don't agree with the leap to "Google Chrome is malware." Chrome isn't doing enough to protect their users from notifications from malicious websites, but I reject the sensationalist conclusion that Google Chrome itself is malware.
We have a number of technical protections to limit abuse potential and will be monitoring the situation. Websites like Twitter, Facebook, Protonmail, Slack, etc seem like they could benefit from push notifications for the same reason their native apps do. It’s true that other websites ask for low value / spammy uses.
True. Although it is nice to have an app be truly cross-platform.
If MS released Windows with pre-installed WSA we would be half way there. The truth is we are still perhaps a decade away from this and everyone running M1's happening so until then PWAs fill the gap
Why do so many find it necessary to downvote my comment?
MediaSourceExtensions are vital for supporting media in Safari (and already available in iPadOS and MacOS [and under the hood on iOS for VP8/9 support]) and the fullscreen API for arbitrary elements is necessary to support video + slides (or other sideloaded material) and to support captions/subtitles that need features not supported with regular textracks.
“Safari is the new IE” has been the meme for years, despite the fact the situation is totally different. Any time Safari is mentioned or gets a new feature it’s just posts from people complaining Safari doesn’t support WebUSB or whatever their pet feature is.
So Safari added the one I see people complaining about more than anything else. The top complaint on HN for literally years.
And you just switched your complaining to something else. Most people here are celebrating they got something they’ve wanted forever.
Personally I’m just tired of all the bitching. There is no escaping it, it seems.
You could have framed your comments much more positively. Perhaps that would have helped.
I certainly know the noise in the comments here when Safari is discussed. And that's why I only gripe on these two features which are available in every Safari for several years now, except on iOS, with no apparent reason.
It doesn't help that apologists have said Apple isn't dragging their feet but just not implementing features that are bad for users. This article is about one such feature. GP points out that Apple is still dragging their feet on features important to them, features that are only not implemented because they threaten Apple's monetization of streaming services, and apologists drag them instead of Apple.
The situation with Safari and IE is very different. What is not different is that they were the most damaging browsers for progress of the web platform in their respective eras.
What made IE damaging was that it raced out ahead of standards and created APIs that no one else supported but companies started to rely on while it was in the lead and couldn't migrate away to standards that didn't exist. Most people today remember the era of IE stagnation and misunderstand: that wasn't the period of danger, that the was consequences of danger.
Safari isn't the new IE, Safari is the new Netscape.
Chrome is the new IE in that danger period. All the web developers complaining about Safari and Firefox "being slow", that's the danger signs. That's the warning flags. That's the new IE damaging browser progress by locking people into single-browser "web standards" that aren't standards. I don't know if the web will reap the same consequences this time, if there will be a Chrome stagnation to follow this Chrome danger time. I do know that the warning signs aren't what a lot of people think they are. The warning signs are the complaints about "Safari holding back the web" because they tend to imply that Chrome is the web when it isn't.
I agree. IE’s biggest sin in my mind is that it was great until it won the war with 70% share (note: roughly where Chrome is today).
Then MS stopped doing anything. For YEARS. Just sat there.
Everybody wanted the web to improve but the browser everyone was using didn’t.
IE 6 was fine at release. But JS didn’t improve. Bugs didn’t get fixed. It just sat there.
Not only has Safari never had that kind of market share, Apple has continue to improve it since the day they released it. Safari seemed to peak around 45% (mobile only) just a few years after the iPhone release.
Safari has never been IE. Unless you mean “that thing that isn’t chrome and doesn’t include every single chrome feature the day it’s announced”.
That didn't make IE damaging. XMLHttpRequest pulled the web forward. What made IE damaging was that after it came pre-installed on Windows, it stopped progressing after IE6.
It didn't implement features that web developers asked for and didn't even join the working group formed to standardize those features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG
It had security issues that made it dangerous for people to use the web.
Safari suffers from the last three of those problems, and Apple makes them even worse by preventing other renderers on its platforms. If I had an iOS device, I'd want to run Firefox. I can't. That's on Apple, and pretending otherwise is absurd.
Right, so you remember and bring up one of the very very few features IE introduced during that period that actually turned out to be helpful and beneficial, and you gloss over the many that were emphatically not.
I notice you don't mention ActiveX as being something that "pulled the web forward".
ActiveX has had no impact whatsoever. How has it harmed the web platform?
XHR, just like MSE, which the person who started this thread is asking for, expands the usability of the web in a vendor-neutral way. MSE, better than XHR, went through a standards process to ensure web publishers wanted it and browser vendors agreed on the API. There is no reason for Apple to drag its feet on implementing MSE on iPhones, aside from protecting Apple's profits. It is ridiculous to see people defending Apple about this.
It wouldn't have mattered if IE stopped progressing after IE6 given migration to other browsers, if there weren't so many "legacy" websites and apps stuck needing IE. Even in the worst days of IE stagnation Firefox and Chrome were only an install away. (And Chrome was busy using bad adware tactics to get as many installs as possible back in those days, but that's a different complaint in a different conversation.) What made IE truly damaging/dangerous was that before it stopped progressing it had lots of great "pull the web forward" features like XHR and CSS box-sizing that yesterday's developers wrote "bleeding edge" apps on that became those very same "legacy" sites and apps when the stagnation hit.
While the web eventually standardized things like XHR and CSS box-sizing, they were done in ways that made migration of those "single browser apps" just slightly uncomfortable enough so companies especially procrastinated staying on the stagnant browser as long as possible to avoid paying down tech debt in their "legacy" apps.
Today's "bleeding edge" apps are tomorrow's "legacy apps", and people aren't building "bleeding edge" apps for Safari [0], but they are building Chrome-only "bleeding edge" apps using all the little things that are like XHR in their own ways (WebUSB, Speech Recognition, what have you). The danger is that there are far too many of them.
Again, I can't predict the future and I can't assume that Google execs are dumb enough to do the exact same thing that Microsoft did: check their (current!) marketshare, declare themselves the winner, and decide to finish Chrome as a project, moving the development team to more important tasks to the corporate bottom line. I want to believe that the pursuant stagnation would be less overall a dark period for the web because plenty of Chromium forks exist, but the install base is huge and convincing them all to switch to a fork would still be a massive marketing effort that wouldn't happen overnight. But stagnation is the consequence of the danger of people building single-browser apps, it's not the danger itself.
The canaries (Safari, Firefox) are dying and blaming the canaries for being weak is avoiding asking hard questions about if the web is currently safe or not.
> Apple makes them even worse by preventing other renderers on its platforms. If I had an iOS device, I'd want to run Firefox. I can't. That's on Apple, and pretending otherwise is absurd.
That is a different, unrelated problem than comparisons to IE. Even when pre-installed on Windows IE never stopped people from installing other browsers or setting them the default. It got real unfriendly about it in some versions of Windows, but it never (could have) blocked them entirely.
That's still a problem to deal with, and maybe even a major problem, though these days iOS and Android are pretty neck-and-neck in the market and iOS does not have the domination it once had even in the US. But it's not at all the same problem as IE was.
[0] Anymore; I will admit there was a brief period early in the rise of iOS with -webkit- prefixed everything where it was a small concern.
I can use the web just fine on Firefox, just like I could use the web just fine on Phoenix during IE's ascendance. You are complaining about a problem that nobody is facing. The problem with Safari (that matches the problem with IE before it) is that there are a lot of apps that don't get built because Safari is so far behind the other browsers and Apple doesn't let users get around this.
It doesn't matter that iOS isn't dominant to the extent that Windows/IE was. The fact that roughly half of users are stuck using a buggy and outdated browser is enough to prevent the web platform from being useful to people like the original commenter.
> You are complaining about a problem that nobody is facing.
Nobody is facing yet.
That is my point. It's a huge danger that people aren't appreciating enough. If we want to use the history of IE as a warning lesson lest we are dumb enough to repeat it, it's a warning on letting a single browser get too much marketshare. It's a warning on relying on "bleeding edge" features that aren't yet stable.
It feels like the problem is "all these other browsers are buggy and outdated", but that isn't the danger, that's the symptom of the danger. People said the same thing about Netscape/Pheonix/Firefox when IE was "winning" that those browsers were too slow and "preventing the web platform from being useful". That's the dangerous cycle here.
Maybe we'll be extremely lucky and the Chrome hegemony will never be the same problem that IE was. But blaming Safari for being "slow" in this scenario is putting the blame on the victim of the hegemony problem.
And nobody ever faced with IE. That wasn't the problem with IE. That is my point.
> It's a warning on relying on "bleeding edge" features that aren't yet stable.
MSE isn't bleeding edge or unstable. Apple itself implemented it years ago on Safari for Mac, where it has no App Store revenue to protect.
The feature this article is about isn't bleeding edge or unstable either. Apple is implementing it exactly the same way all the other browsers already have.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne...