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Comment by Diti | Hacker News Reader

Why is it restricted to Safari on iOS? I’m using Orion, which is Webkit-based too.

Hi Diti, are you talking about the inapp link to Safari? If so - it's the only reliable escape link for ios. It should work on other WebKit browsers as well but no reliable inapp escape link is available for the default browser on ios anymore. There use to be another ios workaround but they closed it. Basically downloads don't work on inapp browsers and I need some way to get you out of them.

I'll take a look. Perhaps my inapp detection is throwing false positives. I also detect for SFSafariViewController because of the bad UX downloading experience there. Maybe it is catching your browser as well.

Oh wow both Orion + Arc on iOS have the same UA as Safari and are testing positive for SFSafariViewController (an experimental test).

I'll look into other ways to not confuse SFSVC with these browsers.

Interestingly - downloads on Arc work really well but they are poorly done in Orion (open in a new window without clear option to download).

I use inappdebugger.com for testing exit links, UA, downloads etc.

I am curious: what about SFSVC interferes with the functionality of the site?

Downloads are really clunky in SFSVC. You can do them, but it takes like 3 actions compared to iOS Safari. I've gotten lots of complaints on another site I have that does on-the-fly blob (Object URL) downloads that users don't understand it.

Here's a snapshot: https://bsky.app/profile/shalanah.bsky.social/post/3las76tpl...

Thanks for the response!

Same problem with brave on ios! Cool app though

Thanks for the tip! Added it to an issue: https://github.com/shalanah/inapp-spy/issues/37

It complains in Arc on iOS, too. It‘s such a bad joke that browsers on iOS are still only a wrapper around WebKit…

I'll take a look, thanks for the heads-up!

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