I mean, where are service workers? Give me a nice, cross-platform way to handle offline-first and I'll be happy. But hey, it isn't like there's some kind of browser monopoly on iOS or anything, like there was in windows.
I’m pretty sure you'd be wrong. Apple announced that it's paid over $70 billion to app developers since the App Store became a thing in 2008 at today's WWDC keynote. This is the 30% Apple pays developers; so we're talking about $233 billion in gross transactions in less than 10 years.
Apple is likely to be the first trillion dollar valuation company; I seriously doubt it's worried about web apps encroaching upon a fairly small part of it's revenue: http://fortune.com/2017/03/31/apple-trillion-dollar-company/
If they enabled more progressive webapp features, we'd start to see a lot more cross platform webapps. That would not be in Apple's interest.
That argument might have worked in back in the day when the iPhone was only available on AT&T but not in a world where the iPhone is available to more people than it ever has been before.
The iPhone is perhaps the single most successful product ever, with over 1 billion sold: http://www.asymco.com/2016/07/28/most-popular-product-of-all...
The total marketshare of Android is around 2 billion, but that's the total of Samsung, Motorola, HTC, LG, etc. None of them have individually sold a billion Android phones themselves.
If they enabled more progressive webapp features, we'd start to see a lot more cross platform webapps. That would not be in Apple's interest.
Do you think Apple cares more about selling a $700 iPhone or a 99¢ app? They have over a million native apps for iOS; what keeps that ecosystem strong is how Apple is able to innovate each year on new features for the iPhone, iPad and iOS, not by restricting what web apps can do.
The most compelling features are things web apps aren't very good at anyway. I seriously doubt Tim Cook is losing sleep worrying about Service Workers and the like.
People said the same thing about WebRTC and how it would compete with FaceTime. And now we have WebRTC in the new versions of macOS and iOS, so it's time to create reasons why other web features aren't there.
Web apps have made a lot of progress but for the average user in a developed country, the user experience pales in comparison to native apps.
They can ignore it exactly because of their appstore and aura of exellence.
But in real world i know so many people who dont have single app on iphone. They cant even imagine what simple link could give them. This could go very wrong way for apple. Imagine their excelent app devs start to make webap version of their apps. Many of the beatifuly designed ones could work very easily on web platform. Suddenly it becomes trend and iphone app exclusivity is gone. Plus apple looses control over the market.
I for one would like to be able to opt in for notifs for events of certain clubs, galleries etc. It feels like sms for your fans. Much faster than newsletter much less busy than social networks.
Safari 11 supports WebRTC, Media Capture API, WebAssembly, WebCrypto API, drag-and-drop, and other interesting new features. If a crippled browser is their goal, they're doing quite an awful job of it.
Ah, thank you for explaining the difference.
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Ne...
Hmm, not the open web I'm familiar with.
If the only possible market is desktop Safari users then it's usually a rounding error not worth the development time.
I emailed the guy in charge of Safari on iOS and he said they have no plans to implement web push notifications on iOS!
Now when we are super close to really supporting progressive web apps, apple is holding back (potentially to protect that golden calf of an app store).
Every discussion about anything in Safari on HN, even if not at all related, for the last year or two has included multiple people complaining about the lack of WebRTC.
Now it's here and there is a new complaint /s
I agree with threeseed that it probwont come and frankly I don't see why I'd want it (or web notification, or even WebRTC). They only seem to support the use case of replacing real apps with webpages which I don't want to do and makes no sense to me as an end user (I understand the freedom motivations).
The general point isn't about any one feature in particular. It is about a history safari has with not implementing (or half-heartedly implementing, as with indexeddb for so long) APIs that are important to making the web a useful platform.
Reasonable people can disagree whether or not those features are good, but it seems basically true that my mobile web work is constrained by what iOS safari outright refuses to do, more than anything else.
Most importantly, though, you can't simply disable HTTP caching when you notice that you're back online. Those cache entries are there now, and they're hard to get out. Service Workers, on the other hand, will just transparently stop intercepting stuff.
With respect to localStorage, I think the idea is that you absolutely can do almost an entire offline mode with it, with the caveat that your content (html, js, css, images) won't get stored there, so you can't load the page at all!
Also I think there are considerations about how difficult it is for many front end architectures to implement this transparent fallback themselves. If you're a Redux or ClojureScript type of programmer it might be utterly obvious and even trivial to implement (just add a simple middleware), but sadly not everyone is, and a lot of the offline logic would have to be implemented everywhere in your codebase. A service worker lets you do it all in one place.
It's a toss-up whether to use localStorage or a service worker if you could viably do either. Blanket logic over all your HTTP calls would be easier in a service worker, and more customized logic would be easier in localStorage, I'm guessing.
Using HTTP caching for saying how long online clients should keep a value becomes impossible if you want to tell browsers to store things forever in offline mode. HTTP caching makes no distinction between whether you're online or offline.
But I'm still failing to see why you can't pull the local data from local storage and show it, then render the data from the server (should you get new data)?
and
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
?
"finally" seems wrong here :)
I'll also note that Safari 10.1 was first with SharedArrayBuffer ;)
You can't do anything about your top level index.html file (or the main js and css assets) though. If the user starts offline the second time they use your app, there's no guarantees about those bootup assets being loaded into cache, you'll just get the "you're offline" screen instead.
Since we are talking about hooking the lifecycle of a page, there's no good way to polyfill this with a library. That initial request needs to be serviced, offline, before you can load your polyfill library.
That said I do understand that avoiding this could be desirable.
This is especially useful in non-us, non-eu countries, where people pay a lot for data, relative to their income. Being able to successfully launch and run without any data usage is pretty rad.
Service workers are designed to be run independently of your web page. I.e. Your service worker can run in the background and update your apps resource files (or even cached xhr data) when your website isn't open, so that it's ready when the user accesses your site.
This means your site goes from remotely delivered to locally served. Which reduces the load times to super low.
IMO it's also nice and clean because it lets you completely separate your app and network logic. Your web app itself can be built as if it is always online, and all the offline logic is in the separate code package in a separate thread.
You are privileged to be able to work with Safari.
Imagine if you had to work with its bastard deformed brothers WKWebView and UIWebView.
(That said, the complaint was always lack of WebRTC and ServiceWorker support.)
You have a source for that? To me nobody really started caring about ServiceWorker until the big push recently for PWAs w/ launch of Lighthouse etc. Whereas devs have always wanted browsers to keep up with JS/ES/CSS language standards.
Also "development doesn't really work like that". Who's to say the same devs implementing ES6 features could take on ServiceWorker. Maybe there's something in the codebase blocking ServiceWorker. You just don't know. Assuming one thing is being neglected in favour of the other is a huge assumption.
I feel like the internet getting angry that 'feature 1' is released whilst the 'feature 2' they want isn't, and being all 'why are they spending all their time on feature 1 instead of working on my thing' is such an old trope there should be a term for it.
(But yeah I'd like to see ServiceWorker in Safari too, though please let's not bite the hand that feeds)!
Well, same as yours: I've seen people ask for that on Hacker News in the past. Of course, there will also have been people asking about WebRTC :) My beef has mostly been with SW though.
Of course, with many developers, there will always be some that have asked for one, and some for the other. I highly doubt that someone will chime in saying that they've seen people complaining about lack of ES6 support in Safari, though :)
> Maybe there's something in the codebase blocking ServiceWorker. You just don't know. Assuming one thing is being neglected in favour of the other is a huge assumption.
Yes, this is true. That's why it's mostly "baffling", i.e. I wonder if something like you described is actually the case, or whether it's a case of different priorities or something.
> Now it's here and there is a new complaint /s
WebRTC is 6 years old and it's been implemented in Firefox and Chrome for 5 years now ! Since then there's plenty of other DOM API that where introduced and are not supported in webkit, for instance :
- service workers
- push API
- Fetch API
- User Timing API
- Subresource Integrity
On the JavaScript side, the JSC team has been doing a great job for the past two years, leading the way in term of performance and ES2015+ support, but on the DOM side, Safari is really lagging far behind (which is, I guess, probably because they don't want the compete with there native mobile apps).
They also already have Custom Elements v1 support, which is still in progress in Firefox.
Timing and SRI they announced in this release (11).
Service Workers is THE big gap, at this point it feels like they're actually very afraid of progressive web apps.
Speed is great and all, really great for some people. I just wish they had different priorities.
But webrtc support is cool.
My room, on the other hand, is definitely not tidy. Haven't cleaned that shit in ages.
But seriously, we have a bunch of developers asking for JavaScript improvements. Maybe OP doesn't want them, fine that's useful feedback... but it would be more easily received if it came in a nicer package :)
Only one popular consumer OS has prevented the installation of alternate browsers and everyone looks the other way.
On the other hand, it is objectively true that there is only one browser platform for iOS. WebKit or nothing. If they actually supported chrome or Firefox instead of requiring them to be wrappers on webkit renderers, I would not have this complaint.
Of course, the reason this isnt being taken up by anti-trust folks is that iOS doesn't dominate the market the way windows did. So: i guess the answer is to convince my users to stop buying idevices. Whee.
No. Monopolies themselves aren't illegal, especially when they're natural monopolies.
It is illegal for a company to use its monopoly to stifle competition in other, unrelated markets.
The classic case is Microsoft using its monopoly in operating systems when Windows had 95% marketshare in the emerging browser market. Remember that Microsoft threatened to cancel HP and Compaq’s Windows licenses if they continued to ship Netscape Navigator instead of IE. That's illegal.
It's not illegal to have a rules and guidelines for a platform a particular company owns. Game consoles are way more restrictive than the iOS App Store and nobody is suing them.
If you can't see the difference, you are only deceiving yourself.
iOS doesn't prevent the installation of alternate browsers. It prevents alternate browsers from running their own HTML renderer. Preventing alternate browsers might be legally actionable if Apple had a monopoly; preventing alternate HTML renderers is decidedly not.
Developer Tools > Application > Service Workers
chrome://inspect/#service-workers
If there was a rogue web site launching service workers to do something nefarious how would I know diagnose what's happening ? How would my grandmother ? Where is the transparency the web is supposed to provide ?
Is there UX work to be done? Sure. But the fundamental problem is that they fill a need that is not met at all by Apple, and not even in a silly "use metal instead of vulkan because reasons" kind of NIH but we'll support some other similar standard fashion, but in a "nope" way.
So, kudos for the speedy es6. I'm still not going to tell people to use safari on macos, and I'm still going to build crazy DIY caches for safari on iOS because I can't do stuff with service workers in a standardized way.
What exactly are you supposing a service worker would be doing? They can't do huge downloads (the worker is shut down when there are no pages using it and it can only be reactivated by another browsing session or push message), can't receive push messages without showing a notification... there really is very little a service worker can do nefariously.
It can, however, help improve battery life by allowing you to better control the offline experience, and not needlessly activate cell radios.
The service worker spec was carefully and deliberately designed to give the browser, not the site, control over resource consumption. The browser is allowed to stop any service worker at almost any time. See https://github.com/w3c/ServiceWorker/blob/master/implementat...
How does your grandmother check if the website she visits isn't doing something nefarious without service workers? Does she run the CPU profiler to see all the JS being executed? That's pretty badass, I wish my grandmother was this cool.