Apple keeps the web second-class on iOS | Hacker News Reader

Apple keeps the web second-class on iOS

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27 pointsjudah8 comments

The market power that iOS gives Apple in the browser market is the only thing that keeps the web from being shaped by an ad company.

I am going to disagree on this. I for one am very grateful that garbage like notifications are not supported on Safari and that developers are forced to create native apps and go through review instead of just making a slow as hell PWA and calling it a day.

Totally agree with everything say. Also want to add that most websites are not designed with accessibility in mind. The default font tends to be small and websites block reader view for ad revenues. The same experience is carried over to poorly built mobile apps - I can name and shame the Wells Fargo app. It just spins for 10 seconds after logging in for no good reason.

If anything we should have more review process around these and make accessibility and latencies hard requirements and not optional.

I agree. Most of the points are just complaints about how Safari is not Chrome. Just stop creating bloated web applications trying to mimic a native experience with inefficient tools, and just build a solid native experience with the tools available to the platform. App developers like to fantasize about our devices as glorified web browsers, whereas as a user, I want a tailored solution. Web apps don’t suffice.

Apple makes several billions from Google to keep it the default search engine including on Safari. So Apple does have a strong business reason to keep increasing Safari usage.

That said, web standards have become super convoluted and hard to implement things consistently. If anything we should aim to reduce this complexity and slow it down a bit.

Safari on iOS really is total garbage. Everything this person said is true, but he forgot a few things: It's really inconsistent. Adding a webpage to the homescreen usually makes the experience even worse as apple usually have two webkit versions for iOS. One for browsers and an even worse one for pages added to the homescreen.

Not only that, but the browser is so insanely full of bugs, with race conditions, keyboard that won't show up if you press the address bar (requiring people to quit the browser), scroll that isn't always working and so on. The amount of strange bugs are really impressive.

I’ve been using Mobile Safari since the first iPad launched and haven’t run into any of the bugs you mentioned.

Safari has been solid for me for the last several years. I very rarely run into a bug like you’ve mentioned.

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