Comment by debaserab2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by debaserab2 | Hacker News Reader

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Any time I look at the new features in Chrome, I ask myself, "whose actually using this stuff?". Even though Firefox usually keeps pace pretty well it's pretty common for implementations to differ, and thus you're on the hook for browser quirk issues in any new feature you adopt immediately. Not to mention I've always had the anchor that is IE to temper any hastiness to use a feature (even if you simply don't implement the feature for IE, that's still an extra error state to handle unless you're willing to drop IE support altogether).

It can't even be 1% of websites out there embracing this stuff. I'm guessing the biggest consumer for most of the new features in Chrome is probably Google web developers. There's quite a lot of things that only end up half implemented, too.

Although the RFC these days seems to just be a design spec doc for Google, I suspect you could carve it down to less than half of what it is and render 99.9% of websites out there just fine.

> It can't even be 1% of websites out there embracing this stuff.

This is all good but it's also a chicken and egg problem.

The lack of web push notifications for one of the two major mobile platforms will prevent that feature from being used + any adjacent features that would be used in more viable web apps.

In my opinion, nearly all good-guy arguments for Apple in this debate are negated by them not implementing that single feature. It is not new, obviously useful, obviously not a privacy concern and obviously blocked because it might impact their app store revenue.

Many thanks to everyone who is actively slowing down the advances in web push notifications. 1% valid use cases, 99% spam.

Then Apple should tie it strictly to PWA / installed to homescreen, require an apple Dev account to send notifications and use the DUNS number and other stuff they collect plus lawyers, to hold asses to the fire over any misuse/spam.

I want Apple in this game implementing this stuff in a privacy concious way, rather than saying lol no make native apps and ceding the web to Google.

100% agreed, notifications are another method to spam users.

I can't think of a single website that has prompted me to sign up for desktop notifications that I've ever wanted desktop notifications for.

My argument isn't really a "good guy" Apple argument but more of an observation of the current kidnapped state of the web RFC's.

There's actually a lot of very useful and surprisingly "basic" improvements in recent releases. Things like String.replaceAll(), optional chaining operator, private attributes/methods in classes. These features allow you to write cleaner code. On the CSS side "content" family of declarations help with optimizations.

I usually adopt latest pretty quickly since I can afford ignoring Safari.

I've started building a little app that uses the serial port API. It's a little widget for collecting and processing data from a pretty custom piece of hardware. It'd be a total dream if we could just send people to a web page to use the product , compared to the nightmare which is developing, maintaining and supporting 3 GUI apps.

By IE you don't mean Edge I'm guessing. Do you still develop with support for IE? I haven't seen it as a requirement for some time. I hardly even look at sites in it these days. At most I add a Browser not supported banner and test that in IE.

It called progressive enhancement. You test whether you have a feature and then code around it if you don't.

e.g. When createObjectUrl was a new thing. I ended up doing something using AJAX and doing some processing server side for IE and Edge. Now I could have done all the processing server-side. However 80%+ of the users use Chrome. So instead of checking everything on the server, I could offload 80% of that to the browser.

"Coding around it" means handling an additional error state, which can be in varying degrees of complexity depending on what the feature is doing for your app.

Yes, obviously.. It really depends on how much time you have, what browsers they care about supporting etc.

There is a tooling out there to assist you and most of the compatibility issues are well documented now. 10 or so years ago when I started that really wasn't the case.

>whose actually using this stuff?

Some Google engineer’s promotion case.

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