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Comment by Fogest | Hacker News Reader

I have a browser based game I play that makes use of many userscripts and browser extensions to further improve/enhance the game. However mobile users suffer from a problem of not having such extras. There is a very nice app someone made on Android and iOS that uses in-app browsers in order to be able to add a lot of custom things.

There are many useful instances for the in-app browsers and I don't think they should be removed because of some bad actors. It's similar to how Android has had password managers making use of autofill tools via accessibility tools. Android was butchering that access, but luckily started adding some official autofill support.

I don't think removing capabilities in the favour of "safety" is usually the right approach in my opinion.

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Most of the usecases mentioned in this thread wouldn't suffer if the in-app browser had to be invoked with a whitelist of approved domains/urls. Perhaps apps could request permission to run an unrestricted in-app browser, and that could be used to facilitate parental controls.

As an aside, is giving parents the option to disable in-app browsers removing a capability or adding one?

Yes I think in app browsers should still follow parental controls, and I don't see why that wouldn't already be a thing on devices. If I can use a VPN on my phone and have that block sites for me, it seems like it should be pretty trivial for the phone to respect parental controls across all apps, not just specifically web browsers.

That would be an additional capability. But having to force a website to give specific apps permission to display them in-app seems like a removal. Some people are also suggesting removing in-app browsers which also seems silly.

Mind if I ask what game?

Kiwi on Android is a Chromium fork that re-enables extensions on mobile. Works well for userscripts/extensions, though often times those UIs don't scale well to mobile.

Yeah, sure! The game is called Torn. It is a text-based MUD style game. People use lots of tools/scripts when playing it to improve things. Some mobile exclusive users do actually make use of apps like Kiwi on their Android phones in order to install userscripts and extensions. However some people have Apple devices (probably regretably) and as such are limited to less powerful solutions. Luckily someone made Torn PDA [1,2] which helps bridge this gap and give you some powerful tools that you can even use on iOS. If Apple was less restrictive with their browser it may be possible to do more in the browser without needing to resort to these in-app "hacks".

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/torn-pda/id1510138514 [2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manuito.to...

Woah, Torn as in Torn City?

One of my first freelance jobs was for that game, fixing some bug or other in the website. This must have been 15 years ago ish?

Yeah most people just call it Torn right now, but yeah the game is still going fairly strong. They released a mobile app which helped drive some more popularity to the game again. The mobile app is really just an in-app browser wrapper for the mobile version of their site, but it helped get them some extra visibility for the game via the app stores. Especially with how popular idle style games are right now on the app stores, Torn kinda fits in well with them.

It's pretty neat how long this game has been going for and how they still keep hiring more devs to work on the site! I'm sure if you checked out the game now it would look a bit different from when you worked on it 15 years ago! Though I'm sure some elements would still be a bit similar.

Ok guys, you’ve heard it, there’s an app that uses in-app browser to let you play some browser-based game! I guess we’ll just have to accept the status quo, otherwise the mobile players of this niche browser-based game would be inconvenienced!

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