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On one hand you have people complaining Chrome kills their batteries and on the other you want to have a browser that does push notifications, Bluetooth and usb. I want my browser to be fast and light. These complaints seem to come more from companies wanting to save money and developers too lazy to develop native apps. I don’t want to load a 200Mb progressive web app that goes through 20 layers of abstraction to show a list of news items just because developers are lazy and companies want to make more money. This is not for the users, at least let’s be honest about that.

> because developers are lazy and companies want to make more money

I think that Apple don't implement these features because they want to make more money and have developers make apps for their platform for free (and actually collect a fee from the developers that are improving the Apple ecosystem).

> I don’t want to load a 200Mb progressive web app

And I don't want to download your 200Mb native app that I will only use once. Besides that, the average webpage size is 2Mb which IMO is still too big, where as the average iOS app size is 34.3Mb.

Nailed it - basically everyone here saying safari should do these things is app devs vs a ton of people going nope no thank you I don’t want that

Web Bluetooth and Web USB, along with other useless things like Web Battery that Google loves don't make the web more powerful. It only serves to make the web more bloated and user hostile. And making new browsers that much harder to implement while taking the time of existing competitors.

As a user I have never needed or wanted web bluetooth or web usb, and I have never seen a person in real life that uses these either. For all I know, it's just mythical users mentioned in HN comments that want those.

The Web is gone, ChromeOS it is.

I want them. I’ve wanted to build out hardware interactive controls, and use them in a web app. Building a web app is an easy and universal platform.

I have a Ledger Nano X I use for storing an ADA wallet on. It interfaces over webUSB with most ADA wallet managers. I also have a Pax Era Pro vape pen that can only interface over web Bluetooth because Apple banned their native app. These two uses alone require I always have at least one Chromium browser installed. Niche, yes, but I also know I’m not alone here in finding uses for these APIs.

>to exist in their own little world.

Today, the iPhone has 66% market share in the United States, 75% of U.S. App Store revenues, and over 80% of time spent on the mobile internet.

Apple sell phones globally, so really you should be using global statistics to determine what Safari needs to implement.

Are we going to include stats from Africa and India where the target market are not within the current pricing bracket of entry level iPhone?

And even if you do, it is still 25%+, hardly a minority.

> Web Bluetooth and webUSB are ignored by Safari and unsupported.

Web Bluetooth: A Chrome only feature. Not a standard or standards track. Firefox and Safari both said that they will not implement due to the security issues.

Web USB: A Chrome only feature. Not a standard or standards track. Firefox and Safari both said they will not implement due to the security issues.

Web Bluetooth and webUSB

Hard to tell without looking if these things are real or a parody!

Seriously, these top level complaints make me very happy Safari isn’t doing this stuff.

I’m pretty sure they exist only for Chromebooks. Nobody else supports them, nobody else ever will.

Thanks, you just said what I was going to comment on.

One additional thing: over use of devices is also a problem. Apple tracks use for you and I find the weekly reports useful. Apple does not need us to be addicted to social media and marginally useful stuff on the web, their business model doesn’t require it.

I don’t want many apps on my devices and I don’t want every web site to effectively be an app on my device. If I do spend time on a digital device, I either want to be doing something useful, or working on a book project that hopefully some people might find useful. It takes some care to not waste time, and since I am approaching my 70th birthday, I have stronger feelings about not wasting time than I had when I was younger.

In this sense, it’s actually a good thing Chrome and others aren’t allowed on Apple. As someone whose fought against the App Store lockdown, I think I’ve come around a bit. The web is in a weird way a better place for apple locking down the browser choice.

But Chrome/etc are totally “allowed” on both macOS and iOS...? Not sure what you mean here.

they are not allowed to use their engine on iOS, they are just a customized skin over safari/webkit (and I honestly think that’s the right way, as google has no interest in saving iPhone battery).

The problem with browser engines is that they require just-in-time compilation to be fast, and Apple wants all code in an app to be signed and available to inspection. JIT compilation requires a way to add new, unsigned code to the process.

That’s a rabbit hole of DLC, plug-ins and vulnerabilities they don’t want to go into.

If that's true then why do they have safari? What's the difference in this regard between safari and other browsers?

They control that the Safari JIT doesn’t enable DLC or plugins because the web view control it runs in can’t be used to implement this.

With regards to vulnerabilities, they are mitigated as much as possible by making sure the JIT runs in separate, unprivileged processes. And anyway it is easier to secure one Javascript engine that is included in OS updates than it is to keep a multitude of engines up to date which came with apps most people don’t even think of as a browser.

The only thing I really miss on Safari is a good adblocker. Everything else is fine, I don't use my mobile browser the way I do on desktop.

You might want to give the combination of 1Blocker (https://1blocker.com/) and NextDNS (https://nextdns.io/) a try. Personally using both on all my Apple devices and they work great IMO.

Will definitely give 1blocker a try. I hadn't thought of going with the route of tampering with DNS but that's a good idea, same basic idea as pihole.

Was a 1blocker user, but I recall there was some discrepancy between iOS and macOS that broke it.

Moved to AdGuard, seems good for now.

Also, try Hush on iOS, I don’t know the magic behind it but it seems to be much more potent at killing nagging questions.

I think they fixed those issue with the latest version. I just checked and I'm running 3.14.1 on iOS and 3.13 on Mac and they're both getting updates regularly.

Hush looks excellent. Thanks for the tip.

Wipr is really good.

https://giorgiocalderolla.com/wipr.html

I use Wipr and I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad.

> Web Bluetooth and webUSB are ignored by Safari and unsupported. Notification support is lacking last I checked. No PWA functionality to speak of and webNFC won’t be added.

Very good, none of those webCVE features deserve to be potentially accessible from malicious scripts on the web.