Current iOS browser situation is quite a joke.
Recently they added possibility for other browsers to "Add page to Home Screen".
But this shortcut later opens in Safari...
Recently they added possibility for other browsers to "Add page to Home Screen".
But this shortcut later opens in Safari...
I've added many shortcuts to websites from my home screen from within Chrome since this feature was recently added, and they all open in Chrome.
And most frustrating is when you had Safari in private browsing mode, then shortcut (not pwa app) is also opened in private mode as new tab...
It won't give users choice because we as an industry have again and again just chosen what's easiest for us instead of best for the customer.
We'd 100% still be using Flash if Apple hadn't refused to support it because of the battery and performance issues.
This forum spends a lot of time talking about the E**ification of everything and how user hostile many companies business practices are and then cheers tearing down the one walled garden a non-nerd can, by default, have a reasonable experience in.
Eh, it was very much on the way out already, and mostly used for things which didn't have brilliant alternatives at the time (e.g. videos) and sites like YouTube had been experimenting with "HTML5 video". Few people really liked Flash (outside of usage for games, which was and remains a valid use case IMO), but it was just used because browsers just didn't support a lot of things, and once HTML5 took off Flash usage dropped. HTML5 killed off Flash.
This is why Apple could get away with just not supporting Flash, which certainly sped up this pre-existing trend, but the idea that "Apple killed off Flash" is a serious misreading of history.
> We'd 100% still be using Flash
Oh no? I remember that whole thing, and being thoroughly confused. I was able to watch videos on websites on my Android phone that iPhone users couldn't, and it had no noticeable effect on my battery life.
I'm not saying we should all go to defend Flash, but I strongly suspect Apple killing Flash had a lot more to do with the fact that using Flash got around App Store policies (you could do _a lot_ using Flash), than battery life.
It also had to do with Macromedia, at the time the iPhone was released, not giving every platform equal support? So Apple might have been in the position of negotiating with Adobe to get them to support iPhone? I can hardly blame them for pushing open standards like HTML5 and their own app store instead.
I honestly would give them more shit for moves like not supporting WebP seemingly to spite Google.
I mean, that's hyperbole. Even in a flash-dominated web, there was still tons of non-flash technology being developed and distributed. In 2023 it would definitely be obsoleted, if for no reason other than Adobe having no incentive to keep it around. Apple's decision feels tangential relative to the progress of internet bandwidth, delivery technologies and even just the plain advent of YouTube obceleting 90% of the places Flash was used.
Flash would be dead today even if Apple did adopt it, because nobody in the industry wants to pay arbitrary taxes or kiss the proprietary ring. Their freedom on the web let them evolve and pick competitive replacements; Flash's death is hardly a defense of iron-fist ecosystem enforcement.
We're _still_ pumping out solutions that are easier for us and worse for customers on desktop and that's without the problem of software-driven user tracking, which was still just larval when the App Store opened up. In fact the only reason things aren't even _worse_ on desktop is that non-mobile devices are a much smaller % of where people spend their time, and therefore a smaller target with a more technically proficient user base.
There's an open ecosystem available to people where you can load any old crap onto your device. It's even cheaper than iOS. Please just let most of (not all, some crap still gets past App Review) the junk alight there and give people a choice to buy entry into the walled garden.
No, that's Apple's decision. The garden plays by Europe's rules, or people don't get a choice at all.
De-facto monopolies are not inherently justified. Feel any way you will about it as a consumer; Apple uses their power to exercise anti-competitive control over their ecosystems. Governments will now step in to regulate the market Apple has failed to make competitive.
If Steve Jobs hadn't publicly come against Flash and by extension forced the hand of everyone else, I'm pretty sure they'd still be using Flash just because change is hard.
The company went so far as to ship a specific browser to customers that could still run Flash instead of spending resources to rewrite the crappy UI =)
Steve Jobs called where puck was going. Everyone knew the problem; clients were falling behind in capability, and web content was getting more advanced and bigger. 99% of the things we use the modern web for have solved this problem with HTML5 and Javascript. The other 1% got locked behind a novel invention called "The App Store", a new way to pay 30% of your digital revenue to support APIs you ought to have access to in the first place. That sad fact is the reason why every Mac is loaded with Electron apps and WebViews for basic messaging and music players. Apple might even try to fix it if they didn't make so much money selling memory upgrades.
If Apple's goal was to build on the web instead of gimping it for their own exploitation, they would have a leg to stand on.