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Comment by dartos | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but we’re not in a simple web. Safari isn’t trying to make it simple for you, they just use it to keep you in their walled garden.

PWAs are a great example of this. The general idea was even a product of the Jobs era of Apple, before the App Store.

Safari and iOS’s poor support of PWAs is exactly a result of Apple wanting to prevent app distribution channels other than their App Store.

Choosing safari is choosing a more closed web, where missing standards means that you, as a safari user, are unable to access certain features or apps that Apple doesn’t want you to access.

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I get that Apple shouldn't be allowed to dictate which features belong on the web, but you're just letting Google to it instead if you opt to use Chrome.

Maybe I don't care about PWAs (which I don't), maybe I don't feel like the majority of APIs introduced lately belongs in the browser. There's very little of what you should be able to do on the web that you could not do 10 years ago. Yes, flexbox is awesome, let's have that, so is the dialog tag. WebGL, Blutooth, USB, device memory, battery status... No, the browser doesn't need to support that.

The browser doesn't need to support WebGL?! Together with Web Audio and Web Assembly, they are exactly the kind of technologies allowing desktop-class apps like Figma to run in the trustworthy browser sandbox.

I don't want to have to install more apps, and more web APIs means more things can be done inside of the browser shell without having to install software that could literally do anything on your computer (and is often hard to remove completely when you're done).

> exactly a result of Apple wanting to prevent app distribution channels other than their App Store

Nah, it's because PWAs were a standard created by Google, with Google being the primary market driver, solely with the interest of advancing Google's own interests (both in undermining Apple, and making lower-end devices more usable in developing markets). Don't think Google invented PWAs, or heavily pushed them, out of some charity. Notice also that as the ultra-cheap phones (~$100) have become more powerful, and as Apple refused to take the bait, that Google's efforts behind PWA have mostly ended.

The same goes for RCS, even though it was initially made by a neutral vendor forum. Google became the heavy pusher of RCS, not just for the sake of Android, but because they had carrier deals to use Google's own infrastructure (Jibe) for RCS, and forcing Apple to accept and integrate with their own infrastructure is a better position to be in.

This is also, let's be clear, not the first time that Google has tried an "open" standard to advance their interests and bludgeon competition. AMP is what happens when the standard catastrophically fails.

Out of curiosity, what's bad about Safari's PWA support? I use it for a bunch of things from Plex to my NAS, and never ran into any issues. In fact, it works better than Windows, in that Safari will open external links in PWAs in my default browser (on Windows, if you use Edge for PWAs, it will insist on opening itself for external links as well).

Missing standards like Manifest V3 that everyone was crying out for?

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