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Comment by teruakohatu | Hacker News Reader

History is just repeating itself. If you capture enough browser market share, there is no incentive improve handling of web content that does not materially help the bottom line.

IE gave us wonderful features (XMLHTTPRequest) but as soon as MSFT found they had a monopoly, development stalled and the world got stuck with IE6, which lacked even basic features like PNG image alpha transparency.

When/if a court orders Apple to allow alternative web engines on iOS, and they start losing market share to Firefox, Chrome or Edge because they are including features that Safari does not, Apple will finally put some effort into Safari.

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Apple _does_ put effort into Safari.

It’s just not on the parts that you and other developers want it to be on. It’s definitely on the parts that I (as a user) want it to be on (security, privacy, and battery life in roughly that order).

It is unlikely that a court will be able to force Apple to expose OS APIs that would allow for the insecurity of WebUSB or WebMIDI on iOS, even if they do force other engines. And that’s a good thing.

You’re talking as if it’s an either/or situation. For a company the size of Apple it definitely isn’t. They could fix long-standing bugs, implement web standards others have had for years and improve security, privacy and battery life. They just don’t.

Not necessarily. There are “web standards” pushed by Google that are inherently inimical to increased privacy and cannot be implemented with sufficient security for a billion devices. I have to use Chrome and Chromium-based browsers for a lot of what I do, and the very first thing I do when I have to set it up or configure a new profile is _disable_ crap like:

- Web USB - Web MIDI - Web HID - Web Push - Web Motion Sensors - Site protocol handlers - Web Serial Ports - Web local file editing - Payment handlers - VR - Attention

That is, I make it so that sites aren’t even allowed to ASK me for those permissions. I know that a regular did a Web MIDI site recently that is sort of neat, but the protocol is essentially impossible to secure.

Each and every single one of those things provides additional security risk, fingerprinting opportunities, and privacy leaks BY DESIGN, and I can’t ever see turning them on.

I feel like Web USB and Web MIDI always come up in conversations like these and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that cares too deeply about either. Don’t get me wrong, I know there’s a market for them, but in the context of this conversation they just feel like diversions.

When I talk about Apple dedicating resources to Safari I mean that IndexedDB was broken for years. And was broken again just last month:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/16/apple_safari_indexedd...

This isn’t engineering that priotisises battery life. This is flat out neglect. Aren’t there unit tests for these kind of things pre-release?

I don’t want to be able to interface with a MIDI keyboard on my site, I just want to be able to store data reliably.

To pile on, several other APIs have little or no privacy issues, when done right.

Push notifications: no, obviously I don't want seo-loaden-adwords-stuffing.blog to send me push-notifications. But I do want m.twitter.com, weatheralerts.app or m.issuetracker.local to send me those. I don't want cdn.random-ad-network.com to read my location. But I do want weatheralerts and publictransport.planner to read them. bird.watcher is free to use my camera and littlealchemy.app is free to use localstorage.

Apple decides for me that I don't want this. Protecting users' privacy would mean research and innovation in how to make those choices. Anything from centralised whitelists to better UX for those permissions. Apple invests in none of these and instead denies it to all.

I don't agree. Microsoft seriously tried with Edge, but the pace of change set by Chrome was too much for them. The only group even close to keeping pace with Google is Mozilla—and their market share numbers are starting to look concerning. Given the current trajectory, we can't place long term hopes in Mozilla.

If neither Microsoft nor Apple can keep up, and the Hacker News crowd thinks that's okay, we might as well give up on the notion of an open web and rename it the Chrome Platform.

Apple chooses not to keep up. They obviously would have the resources and technical competence to do it if they wanted to.

But cui bono? Apple benefits directly from crippling the web since it protects their App Store monopoly, they happen to have the perfect means of crippling the web by ensuring there will be no browser competition on iOS, and it is the area where theyre shipping their worst software. It is hard to believe that it is a coincidence rather than a cynical corporate optimization game.

> Apple chooses not to keep up.

Is that an opinion or do you have insider knowledge?

The level of profit Apple achieves every year is public, not insider knowledge. They could very obviously hire some more engineers to work on WebKit without bankrupting themselves.

> Apple _does_ put effort into Safari.

I did not say they did not. What I said was...

> that does not materially help the bottom line.

Security, privacy, and battery life sell phones. Better PWA and WebRTC would cost them money because those modern Web technologies compete with the App Store.

> Security, privacy, and battery life sell phones.

Because that's what people want.

No they want Security, privacy, and battery life. Yes, I know there's no difference to the quote (copy&paste). The difference is that what Apple says is security and privacy is often fluff and done for PR and isn't actually what people want when the say they want security and privacy. Look no further than what Apple call end-to-end encryption in iMessage. It is on par with VW saying their diesel engines had such and such emission when in reality they both have huge and multiple asterisks.

> The difference is that what Apple says is security and privacy is often fluff

In the context of Apple's Safari engineering priorities, which is the context of this discussion, Apple has delivered real security, privacy and battery life wins. This isn't even disputed by Apple's detractors.

Sure, let's have competition in the browsers on apple platforms then? Let the User choose what they want?

I think you misunderstood what I said.

Even if a court does something like “you must allow alternative browsing engines”, it’s going to be a very difficult thing for a court to rule _successfully_ that “you must allow unrestricted USB access to alternative browsing engines”, as that will completely destroy security.

It’s also what would be required to make people who hate Apple for not implementing the same privacy-busting and security-nullifying APIs that Chrome has done.

Hey, IE6 had PNG alpha, as long as you did some black magic to your PNG files to make the alpha work, which is really the story of IE6.

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