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Comment by TheKarateKid | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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