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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

moving forward we can expect Apple to start systemically hindering web apps

They have been doing this for quite some time now. Always ostensibly to protect users but always also conveniently putting webapps at a permanent disadvantage to native apps.

For my part I'm not interested in being a user of a platform so hostile to the web that it disallows any third party browsers.

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> Always ostensibly to protect users but always also conveniently putting webapps at a permanent disadvantage to native apps.

This isn't always a bad thing though. For example, Safari has prohibited some obnoxious behavior that Chrome has allowed: Autoplaying videos, tab suspension, push notifications. These hog CPU and destroy battery life, worsening the user experience.

Remember, making everything a web app is Google's agenda because they benefit most from it.

I would just point out there are very valid use cases for these things, i.e. push notifications are very useful to me (from certain apps). The problem is one of consent.

MacOS Safari autoplays YouTube videos with now way to disable...

Interesting. I can tell Safari to not autoplay videos on YouTube in its preferences, but that doesn't seem to do anything. Seems more like a bug on Safari's part and/or workaround on Google's part than anything deliberate.

You mean Safari team accidentally forgot to test a video feature on a largest video website?

Safari uses some sort of algorithm to determine whether you actually want the autoplay to happen.

For example I've noticed that if you play a video on a website during that session, it will allow autoplay from scripts on that page (not 3rd party) for the rest of that session. Same for unmuting an autoplaying video.

This is all undocumented though and through personal observations, as Apple seemed to stop posting Safari documentation years ago.

By your logic they should just remove push notifications completely from iOS because it uses power. Wouldn't that be bad?

Web push is better than native app push when it comes to power consumption as web push is stricter on what you can do.

If an app on the app store abuses push notifications though, they can get kicked. Apple can’t kick a website off the web.

Technically they could blacklist certain behaviors from certain sites. They and all other major browsers already do this in a privacy-preserving way for Safe Browsing, certificate revocation, etc.

Blacklisting is a losing game, especially from the malicious sites most likely to abuse this. Notice how those malware and fake Chrome extension ads have a new URL every day.

Sure they can, Apple would still have full control over push functionality. Web or native doesn't matter.

Technically it's disallowing third-party JITs / executable data. Which is a good thing all-in-all.

Eh, I'm not completely sold on that.

Actually the guidelines specifically ban non-webkit rendering engines.

> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.

At a minimum we can be thankful that Apple's rules force web developers to care about one additional browser.

Lucky us. We web developers really want to care about specific browsers like it's 2006 again.

IE6 must have been a great inspiration for Apple judging by their behaviour when it comes to Web.

One can always rely on cordova/phonegap type of app with a C++ plugin to address this issue.

Personally, not having web app storing large amount of data is a good thing.

Apple disallows third-party web rendering engines. Google Chrome on iOS uses own networking stack.

It is still a significant restriction, but it is rather understandable. Without it it could be just Blink everywhere at this point.

> Without it it could be just Blink everywhere at this point.

In what reality-distortioned universe is that worse than having a crippled web?

Please don't call anything that's not Blink "a crippled web".

I believe that OP is saying it would be preferable to have blink-everywhere than to have a deliberately-crippled Apple web browser with all other choices banned.

I'm the OP and I am a Mozilla volunteer. I prefer a web with many engines, I want it to have WebKit, Blink, Gecko and more.

Agreed. There is no choice with IOS: you choose the same WebKit that they've chosen, or Safari. One engine and version, or one browser using that one engine.

Android is a web monoculture too. Non-Blink browsers on Android are at <1%.

You can install any browser you want from playstore or outside of playstore. There are no restrictions on what you can and cannot have on your phone on android.

Yet non-default browsers on Android are non-existent. So in practice Android has the same web-engine mono-culture as iPhone. Given how successfully Google was able to ensure Blink domination on desktop and even more so on Android it is very understandable what Apple has done. And for me having at least 2 web engines on mobile is better than 1.

In what reality-distortioned world is that worse than 0%? Also, several of those Blink-based browsers include additional non-Google-approved features, like Mozilla's own Firefox Focus, Samsung Browser, Edge, and Brave. I'd hardly call that a monoculture just because they share the same lineage.

Then you also prefer not to have those options banned.

So it's not about what's best for the user but what's best for Apple? I wouldn't call that "understandable". All this is doing is contributing to webkit monoculture.

There's some irony that Apple forcing the use of Safari on iOS is creating a monoculture when, were the restriction lifted, everyone would be using Chrome.

If so it would be because users chose it and it would also help keep Firefox in the game which important to the long term health of the web.

> everyone would be using Chrome.

I'd be amazed if there were more than a tiny fraction of iOS/iPadOS users (of which there are hundreds of millions) who weren't perfectly ok with Mobile Safari for their everyday usage.

[I'm probably the "target market" for Chrome (backend, occasionally frontend developer) and there's no way I'd have it on my phone. I only suffer the GMail app because they've made IMAP usage of gmail unreliable.]

It doesn’t matter what users choose, devs would badger users into using Chrome for their own convenience. It’d be the return of the “viewed best in” badges from the late 90s and early 00s.

Remember, making everything a web app is Google's agenda because they benefit most from it.

Remember, harming webapps is Apple's agenda because only they benefit from it.

On the other hand, the web is mostly open for all, so most people benefit from it, not just Google.

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