I am curious why Safari in particular is getting a lot of the hate here when firefox supports even less of the features which leads me to believe that the reason many of these features have not been accepted is because they have not been accepted by the larger ecosystem and is just google pushing their own things as standard (Feels like IE days in many ways).
That being said, I am not sure why I would actually want most of these features in the browser? Many of these things feel like they further complicate what a browser is supposed to be doing and opens up security concerns at the same time.
I think the idea of using a web app for many tasks instead of apps is fine, but I don't think the idea that a web app can do everything is the way to go.
Edit: To be clear about the Firefox comment, notice that many of the features that are not supported non chromium browsers don't support on any platform. So the question on whether these are considered web standards is outside of whether iOS allows other engines.
Edit again: Apparently the third column is based on your current browser instead of always comparing chrome, mobile safari, and firefox like I assumed. I am currently on Firefox on Windows, and there are more red X's under Firefox for me. Seems like a weird choice to not always compare all major browsers.
Firefox is not in a position where it is the only browser allowed to run on a platform.
On iOS, you’re either doing a native app, sharing 30% of your income with Apple, or you’re restricted to Safari’s feature set. No browser in iOS can use anything but WebKit
Even so, conflating "Safari is holding the web platform back by not implementing standardized web features" with "Safari is holding the Google platform back by not implementing non-standard Google features" is kind of disingenuous.
Going through some of the list from the top:
* Shortcuts in the manifest: This seems to be standard. Would be nice if mobile Safari supported it.
* Protocol Handling: This is non-standard.
* File Handling: MDN doesn't contain a reference to a standard, and it has this caveat: "At present this feature is only available on Chromium-based browsers, and only on desktop operating systems". So not only does it seem to be non-standard; Chrome on Android doesn't even support it!
* Contact Picker: This seems to be moving through the standardization process and is not yet standardized, if I understand MDN's "experimental" label correctly.
* Face Detection: This seems to be yet another not-yet-standard API.
* Vibration: This is standard, it's a shame Safari doesn't implement it.
I'll stop here but you get the point. 2/6 are actual standards; 4/6 are just features Chromium implemented even though they aren't standard.
I'm glad mobile Safari doesn't follow every Google whim. Google has enough power over the standardization process as it is; we don't want them to control which features browsers add outside of the standard too.
In addition, parts of the list seems to be extremely outdated: Safari on iOS does support the Web Push API and most of the Notifications API (at least for apps added to your home screen as PWAs). These APIs have been supported since iOS 16.4, according to MDN.
> why I would actually want most of these features in the browser
The page is about PWAs, applications that can be installed by the browser rather than the platform's App Store. Native applications already have those capabilities and a lot more.
I think anything that mentions Apple in a negative light gets reflexive upvotes.
I use both Apple and Android ecosystems, so I’ll occasionally participate in normal user conversations about features, how-tos, etc. Posting anything about the Android ecosystem, unless I was talking about Samsung features I disliked using, is no more or less likely to get down/upvoted than anything else I post about any other technology. Using any tone more positive than a negative-leaning neutral when referring to any Apple product reliably collects a handful of downvotes, and often a negative comment or two. Same thing with negative sentiment and upvotes. I’ve never seen such a passionate dislike of a corporation among a small number of people. Even with famous brand loyalty rivalries like Ford/Chevy in the 80s and 90s it was more mutual, rather than 98% of their customers not giving a shit, and 2% of Chevy drivers just being super mad at a product they don’t own.
The third column is your current browser and platform, and for me it's showing Firefox on macOS missing a lot of features. When I switch over to Brave, I see Chrome on macOS. Interestingly, Chrome on macOS apparently supports vibration, despite the hardware for it being nonexistent.
But on macOS you can switch to a browser that can do all these things. A company could ask you to use a different browser (not ideal, but if the web app requires a specific API, it's not an unreasonable).
Safari is in a very special position because it controls what the web can do on iOS (all browsers on iOS have to use Apple's WebKit engine, they can't add web features). Apple is not just gatekeeping native (through the app store), but its competition, too (the open web, through the webkit requirement)
While true, that does not seem to align with what the checkboxes for firefox, looking at many of the ones that Safari does not support other non chromium browsers don't support on any OS. Mobile or not
The difference is that, on iOS, you can't switch to a different browser that does support these features. Om very other OS you can.
A web app could ask you to use a different browser (not ideal, but if the web app requires a specific API, it's not an unreasonable).
Safari is in a very special position because it controls what the web can do on iOS (all browsers on iOS have to use Apple's WebKit engine, they can't add web features). Apple is not just gatekeeping native (through the app store), but its competition, too (the open web, through the webkit requirement)
It would be useful if the site listed whether these had been standardized outside of Chrome yet.
It’s hard to delineate which of these are Chrome features or actual web standards. And it’s therefore hard to blame either Safari or Firefox for not supporting them if they’re not standardized yet.
This is a huge list of "features from Chromium", which aren't really standard or even a thing outside of its ecosystem (the fact that both Firefox and Safari lack them is the obvious giveaway).
I'm happy that Firefox doesn't expose Bluetooth, NFC or similar stuff to websites: the browser is huge enough without needing to mediate even more access to local hardware.
It's unclear how some of these would even work for other Browser. E.g.: contacts. What data source would you use? I keep my contacts as vcard files in ~/contacts, but other folks might use a remove CalDAV server, a web-based GUI, or data stored in SQL which can be read by some other native client (I think KDE does this).
Here’s what Mozilla has to say about Web NFC, for example:
> We believe Web NFC poses risks to users security and privacy because of the wide range of functionality of the existing NFC devices on which it would be supported, because there is no system for ensuring that private information is not accidentally exposed other than relying on user consent, and because of the difficulty of meaningfully asking the user for permission to share or write data when the browser cannot explain to the user what is being shared or written.
And here’s what they have to say about Web Bluetooth:
> This API provides access to the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) of Bluetooth, which is not the lowest level of access that the specifications allow, but its generic nature makes it impossible to clearly evaluate. Like WebUSB there is significant uncertainty regarding how well prepared devices are to receive requests from arbitrary sites. The generic nature of the API means that this risk is difficult to manage. The Web Bluetooth CG has opted to only rely on user consent, which we believe is not sufficient protection. This proposal also uses a blocklist, which will require constant and active maintenance so that vulnerable devices aren't exploited. This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.
The fact is that Google wrote these specifications, couldn’t convince any other rendering engine to implement them, and somehow it’s Apple’s fault the rest of the world rejected their idea.
These are not web standards, they are Blink-only APIs that Google decided to build unilaterally. The web is not defined by whatever Google wants. Web standards are supposed to be arrived at through consensus, and the consensus is that these things should not be part of the web.
You might want your browser to do Bluetooth, NFC, Background stuff, Face Detection but I don't.
I like to use Apple products for things that are commodities to me because I am not gonna look into the details of those and when I do Apple reasoning often make sense to me (just like this list).
There is a lot more we can criticize about these big tech corps (including Apple) than a product decision for a company that is known for making polarizing decisions on behalf of their customers. If people buy it... they must like it, no?
I'm writing this in Safari now, I'm a huge fan. There are several "features" that I actively dislike and disable in other browsers. I wonder if not being implemented in mobile safari is preventing them from being required in some webpages.
Notifications struck me as odd. I aggressively disable notifications in my apps because they are often just ads or engagement focused. But as a developer, it would be cool to have a way to notify an iOS user other than building a native app and paying the iOS tax. There's a bunch of utility apps not getting built because of this limitation.
According to this, notifications are possible if you add the app to the home screen, which I didn't know.
A feature more devs should use- I've been surprised how much websites behave like native apps if you just "add to homescreen" instead of downloading an official app, e.g. twitter, instagram.
When you open the shortcut, it doesn't launch as a tab in safari, but appears independently in the app switcher. They are often indistinguishable from official apps!
Seems like a great way for devs to avoid app store pains
iOS actually does support notifications in webapps, but only ones that have a homescreen icon. Furthermore, the notification support is different enough that I can't get my iPad to work with Android Messages for Web. So I have no clue if the API is neutered or if Google is being Google and insisting every browser be Chromium. Probably both.
But why not Bluetooth or NFC? I can’t imagine any way those could be annoyances, or even why websites would want them outside of some extremely specialized applications.
I'm personally a WebUSB, WebBT etc hater but I totally get why PWA developers want those features. For example, let's say you're manufacturing some sort of USB device and you need a way to flash drivers. The idea of being able to just make a webpage that can update your drivers is so appealing compared to having to ship apps on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.
Similarly, if my bank website could do NFC tap-to-pay securely, that would be pretty cool. I can imagine lots of interesting opt-in uses for NFC in a webapp.
Arguments that these features are held back by Apple specifically in order to keep apps on the app store where they can control things and take 30% at least hold water, I think, even if that reasoning doesn't apply to Mozilla rejecting features.
> The idea of being able to just make a webpage that can update your drivers is so appealing compared to having to ship apps on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.
I suspect like many here, at $work we use a shit-ton of Flexoptix SFPs.
Flexoptix are not a $megacorp, they are a (very) small German company.
They manage to ship cross-platform apps to flash the SFPs. So its really not that difficult.
I would think a web app would be more of a pain the the butt to maintain because you have to deal with CSS reactive UI etc.
For little utility apps where you don’t care to deviate from UI default appearance and behavior (and, as a user, it’s much better if you don’t anyway, though it’s very trendy to make UX worse by customizing everything) iOS and Android both are dead simple, very easy to write and maintain a utility app for either of them.
An enormous amount of the cost of developing a lot of native apps is customizing the appearance and behavior, to match some slide deck mockup or to make it “on-brand” or whatever. It’s better for the user, and way cheaper, if you just… don’t do that. Hell a lot of common UI elements are easier in native than web if you just don’t try to customize them a ton (data-backed tables and list views and such are sooooo nice)
I like WebUSB in Chrome to update my Meshtastic radios. I also like that I have to go out of my way to launch Chrome for that, and other websites can’t request permission to access local hardware in my normal browser.
I’m not sure why web-midi can’t be available behind a permission to control finger printing.
I can think of several light weight patch editors I’d like be able to use. There’s probably not enough demand for someone to make a stand alone app for them.
I can’t see any reason why this needs to be controlled by apple’s app store.
As far as I can see based on pwa.gripe data, between 26.3 (my version) and the newcoming 26.4 Safari on iOS gains support for five new APIs:
— Offline support
— Media capture
— Picture-in-picture
— Storage
— Speech synthesis
As well as five more APIs with caveats:
— Installation
— Notifications
— Web Push
— Barcode detection
— Speech recognition
Even taking into account that it also evidently loses support for one (audio session; I wonder if that that has to do with potential for fingerprinting), framing this feature differential between two minor(!) releases as “intentional crippling of Mobile Safari continues” strikes me as somewhat loaded.
Gotta meet your audience where they are. As a Mobile Safari user, the foremost way I feel my use of the web is crippled is that pages assume a bigger screen or are just poorly arranged.
This of all web pages ought to be easy to read on an iPhone screen, but the way it's constructed prevents it. You can't zoom the whole page out to see the entire table width because the table is in a scrolling frame and wider than its box. You can only scroll the nested frame sideways to see how row labels relate to iPhone cells. If you give up and use landscape, it still scrolls vertically in its frame. You have to aim for the margin or else you'll scroll just an inch and be halted because you caught the table.
Because it's critical that the web be as free as it is:
• It's natural that some pages turn out like this
• So it's natural the web is a little bit shitty all over
• So it's natural the demand for richer web features is low
For those of you who believe support for PWAs is critically important: in what way does it impact you? What kind of solution are you providing (or, put another way, what problem are you solving) for customers, and why would a PWA app be better than a native one for them? (As opposed to, say, convenience for you.)
Like most people (at least on this thread). I’m okay with the vast majority of these things not supported in mobile safari. But man, Bluetooth would be nice. I often provision esp32 devices for various things and either I need an app or a laptop when my phone is perfectly capable.
Google has become the developer-focused company that Microsoft used to be, and I don’t mean that positively. Developers are lazy and want to inflict low-effort crap on users. Microsoft always made it easier to do that. Google is now doing the same thing. Offering developers more and more ways to cobble together box-checking functionality in web apps instead of developing proper native apps.
I argue that developers enable the egregious behaviour by supporting safari in the first place. Just as IE was called out and shunned for its shenanigans, before they started behaving better, so too does safari need to be treated. However, it does also feel too late, they have crippled other browsers too with their platform abuse masquerading as requirements while we celebrated it.
Is it really egregious that Apple doesn’t support everything Google decides to push? Most of these are features I don’t care about, or in some cases actively do not want.
I’m also not sure how accurate this page is. They claim Chrome on Android supports registerProtocolHandler while MDN says it’s not supported there.
Worth noting that Apple doesn't just cripple iOS Safari, it cripples all iOS browsers because it also forces them to use WebKit, the crippled browser engine underneath Safari.
It would be fine if they just made Safari bad, that's their choice. But they don't stop there: they make the entire web bad on iOS purposely to promote the native apps they can tax.
Firefox was planning a native gecko based ios app. But Apple decided to limit it to EU forcing developers to choose to maintain seperate projects for a limited users.
The Brussels Effect takes care of a lot of hardware changes for the better, for the world (think USB-C).
But for software, not so much.
Examples:
* Windows N (no media player stuff) and KN (no media player stuff, no messenger)
* Windows installed in the EEA (ability to disable / change start menu search with Bing, ability to remove Edge, ability to add widget providers)
* iOS with only allowing 3rd party app stores and 3rd party browser engines in the EEA.
* Google only allowing certain things when the phone is in the USA.
And it's gonna get worse with age verification. All of the sudden the manufacturers have even more data.
How many of these features that chrome offers have been fully flushed out and in a true working stable state? Google Chrome has a habit of pushing features out before they're really ready and Safari is usually on par with Firefox for features from what I have seen.
It's not a question of readiness or capability. It's an MBA with a spreadsheet explaining to a room full of people how much money Apple will lose if they allow X feature to work in Safari. This is user-negative behavior from a company that has so much money the best thing they can think of to do with it is to bank it offshore in a tax haven.
Conversly, there is an MBA at google saying how much money they can make for each extra piece of data they can extract off the user’s phone.
I agree an open web platform is good. But i also think some of the things added to the browser don’t belong in the browser. Face detection? i don’t need that.
I am much more partial to attempts to force apple to enable installing 3rd party apps than i am forcing them to bloat the browser with more ways for websites to monitize me.
I’ll ask the dual question: how many of the mobile safari checkmarks are fully fleshed out? Media Session has a check, but I have absolutely fought obvious Media Session implementation bugs in my own PWAs when designing for mobile safari
To be honest, I'm really surprised they let PWAs have notifications. That's literally the only use case we have on that entire page and it actually works.
I'm not sure the other commenters claiming all these features are attack vectors actually read the list?
How is the barcode detection API a security risk for example? Having it implemented would be amazing for web apps.
Also there's features like deep linking into PWAs that ought to be pretty basic PWA functionality that's not on this list that even Safari on Mac OSX has but Safari on iOS doesn't. Even the add to home screen menu option is deliberately made hard to find.
Apple doing this for the benefit of the user is one of the less likely hypotheses.
As a daily Safari on iOS user, I don’t care about any of this, but since iOS 26 basic Safari features such as bookmarks and text search have become so buried deep underneath, they are basically unusable at this point.
It infuriates me a lot more than all the liquid glass stuff (on which I’m neutral overall).
I had to double check i’m running ios 26 because none of those things have moved for me recently.
Search is where it always was (type in the search bar, scroll past the google results to the in-page results) and bookmarking is also where it’s always been (share button “add bookmark”)
Damn. I never knew that way to search things. I used to do « Share / Search on this page » which was already obnoxious, which has now become « … » / « Share » / « Search on this page ».
Either I’m dumb or there is a discoverability problem with all these features. Probably a bit of both.
Used to have Firefox as a content filter for Safari on iOS (adblocking), but have since switched to Brave. It's a great option if you ignore all the crypto spam.
I recently posted about how I refuse to buy apple products because of stuff like this. The lock in has made iPhone users dependent on a app ecosystem when we could have had most of our functionality through the open web.
People saying they don't want these features are missing the point. Its about control and if developers have the option to make something as a website that actually works that gives them less incentive to make an app that apple can take 30% of your profit from while you are forced to write in their proprietary language for the stuff that only works on their devices.
So much engineering duplication of effort and waste just to satisfy a bottom line.
These are not features of functional websites, these are features that make every website an "app" and deprecate the idea of a traditional website. Google is embrace, extend, extinguishing the web as we know it. If Apple gives in, it's over, every website will just be an app and want access to your contacts, and your family history, and whether or not you are on Santa's naughty list or whatever.
Better PWA support gives users (and developers) more optionality with app distribution. Apple building out these APIs would not take away from their native apps.
The UX of visiting a site and with a single click of a button having an app on my home screen sounds great. I'd also like to have the option of side loading a native app too. And if those options sound unappealing, you can keep using the App Store if you want the assurance of using an 'officially approved' app.
A lot of very prominent apps are written using web technologies anyways. Take a look at the continued popularity of React Native (and Flutter as well).
> A lot of very prominent apps are written using web technologies anyways. Take a look at the continued popularity of React Native (and Flutter as well).
And it shows through their laggy interfaces and non-native UI/UX. The people don't like apps built with web tech; developers and LLMs like them because they're a shortcut.
I would gladly give up all those “features” to use Safari over Chrome on Android. I don’t even know what kind of dumbass on Hacker News voluntarily raw dogs the internet on Chrome Android. Pathetic that Safari has had extension support for multiple years now while Chrome is still ass.
Absolutely nothing listed on that site as unsupported by Safari has any business being part of the web. In fact several supported APIs should be chucked too. Fuck giving websites motion data or push notifications.
I don’t care what your website does, not one tiny bit. I care that the majority of websites are shit, and therefore the web platform should be as minimal and isoltated from the device as possible.
I very much appreciate the secure baseline Safari settles on. The entire ecosystem is protected by Safari being slow and reasonable.
My only peeve is that Apple resets the feature flags with every update. So the one experimental feature I use I have to reenable each and every time I get a phone update.
yeah I'm using mobile Firefox and it has an awfully high overlap with Safari. Almost like a bunch of the stuff Chrome supports isn't actually a standard at all yet...
I am curious why Safari in particular is getting a lot of the hate here when firefox supports even less of the features which leads me to believe that the reason many of these features have not been accepted is because they have not been accepted by the larger ecosystem and is just google pushing their own things as standard (Feels like IE days in many ways).
That being said, I am not sure why I would actually want most of these features in the browser? Many of these things feel like they further complicate what a browser is supposed to be doing and opens up security concerns at the same time.
I think the idea of using a web app for many tasks instead of apps is fine, but I don't think the idea that a web app can do everything is the way to go.
Edit: To be clear about the Firefox comment, notice that many of the features that are not supported non chromium browsers don't support on any platform. So the question on whether these are considered web standards is outside of whether iOS allows other engines.
Edit again: Apparently the third column is based on your current browser instead of always comparing chrome, mobile safari, and firefox like I assumed. I am currently on Firefox on Windows, and there are more red X's under Firefox for me. Seems like a weird choice to not always compare all major browsers.
Firefox is not in a position where it is the only browser allowed to run on a platform.
On iOS, you’re either doing a native app, sharing 30% of your income with Apple, or you’re restricted to Safari’s feature set. No browser in iOS can use anything but WebKit
Even so, conflating "Safari is holding the web platform back by not implementing standardized web features" with "Safari is holding the Google platform back by not implementing non-standard Google features" is kind of disingenuous.
Going through some of the list from the top:
* Shortcuts in the manifest: This seems to be standard. Would be nice if mobile Safari supported it.
* Protocol Handling: This is non-standard.
* File Handling: MDN doesn't contain a reference to a standard, and it has this caveat: "At present this feature is only available on Chromium-based browsers, and only on desktop operating systems". So not only does it seem to be non-standard; Chrome on Android doesn't even support it!
* Contact Picker: This seems to be moving through the standardization process and is not yet standardized, if I understand MDN's "experimental" label correctly.
* Face Detection: This seems to be yet another not-yet-standard API.
* Vibration: This is standard, it's a shame Safari doesn't implement it.
I'll stop here but you get the point. 2/6 are actual standards; 4/6 are just features Chromium implemented even though they aren't standard.
I'm glad mobile Safari doesn't follow every Google whim. Google has enough power over the standardization process as it is; we don't want them to control which features browsers add outside of the standard too.
In addition, parts of the list seems to be extremely outdated: Safari on iOS does support the Web Push API and most of the Notifications API (at least for apps added to your home screen as PWAs). These APIs have been supported since iOS 16.4, according to MDN.
> why I would actually want most of these features in the browser
The page is about PWAs, applications that can be installed by the browser rather than the platform's App Store. Native applications already have those capabilities and a lot more.
I think anything that mentions Apple in a negative light gets reflexive upvotes.
I use both Apple and Android ecosystems, so I’ll occasionally participate in normal user conversations about features, how-tos, etc. Posting anything about the Android ecosystem, unless I was talking about Samsung features I disliked using, is no more or less likely to get down/upvoted than anything else I post about any other technology. Using any tone more positive than a negative-leaning neutral when referring to any Apple product reliably collects a handful of downvotes, and often a negative comment or two. Same thing with negative sentiment and upvotes. I’ve never seen such a passionate dislike of a corporation among a small number of people. Even with famous brand loyalty rivalries like Ford/Chevy in the 80s and 90s it was more mutual, rather than 98% of their customers not giving a shit, and 2% of Chevy drivers just being super mad at a product they don’t own.
KNOW THE BROWSER RULES
Firefox refusing to implement a web standard: APPROPRIATE
Safari refusing to implement a web standard: INAPPROPRIATE
Firefox on iOS is just a wrapper around Safari, since that is all Apple allows.
The third column is your current browser and platform, and for me it's showing Firefox on macOS missing a lot of features. When I switch over to Brave, I see Chrome on macOS. Interestingly, Chrome on macOS apparently supports vibration, despite the hardware for it being nonexistent.
But on macOS you can switch to a browser that can do all these things. A company could ask you to use a different browser (not ideal, but if the web app requires a specific API, it's not an unreasonable).
Safari is in a very special position because it controls what the web can do on iOS (all browsers on iOS have to use Apple's WebKit engine, they can't add web features). Apple is not just gatekeeping native (through the app store), but its competition, too (the open web, through the webkit requirement)
While true, that does not seem to align with what the checkboxes for firefox, looking at many of the ones that Safari does not support other non chromium browsers don't support on any OS. Mobile or not
The difference is that, on iOS, you can't switch to a different browser that does support these features. Om very other OS you can.
A web app could ask you to use a different browser (not ideal, but if the web app requires a specific API, it's not an unreasonable).
Safari is in a very special position because it controls what the web can do on iOS (all browsers on iOS have to use Apple's WebKit engine, they can't add web features). Apple is not just gatekeeping native (through the app store), but its competition, too (the open web, through the webkit requirement)
It would be useful if the site listed whether these had been standardized outside of Chrome yet.
It’s hard to delineate which of these are Chrome features or actual web standards. And it’s therefore hard to blame either Safari or Firefox for not supporting them if they’re not standardized yet.
This is a huge list of "features from Chromium", which aren't really standard or even a thing outside of its ecosystem (the fact that both Firefox and Safari lack them is the obvious giveaway).
I'm happy that Firefox doesn't expose Bluetooth, NFC or similar stuff to websites: the browser is huge enough without needing to mediate even more access to local hardware.
It's unclear how some of these would even work for other Browser. E.g.: contacts. What data source would you use? I keep my contacts as vcard files in ~/contacts, but other folks might use a remove CalDAV server, a web-based GUI, or data stored in SQL which can be read by some other native client (I think KDE does this).
Here’s what Mozilla has to say about Web NFC, for example:
> We believe Web NFC poses risks to users security and privacy because of the wide range of functionality of the existing NFC devices on which it would be supported, because there is no system for ensuring that private information is not accidentally exposed other than relying on user consent, and because of the difficulty of meaningfully asking the user for permission to share or write data when the browser cannot explain to the user what is being shared or written.
— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-nfc
And here’s what they have to say about Web Bluetooth:
> This API provides access to the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) of Bluetooth, which is not the lowest level of access that the specifications allow, but its generic nature makes it impossible to clearly evaluate. Like WebUSB there is significant uncertainty regarding how well prepared devices are to receive requests from arbitrary sites. The generic nature of the API means that this risk is difficult to manage. The Web Bluetooth CG has opted to only rely on user consent, which we believe is not sufficient protection. This proposal also uses a blocklist, which will require constant and active maintenance so that vulnerable devices aren't exploited. This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.
— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth
The fact is that Google wrote these specifications, couldn’t convince any other rendering engine to implement them, and somehow it’s Apple’s fault the rest of the world rejected their idea.
These are not web standards, they are Blink-only APIs that Google decided to build unilaterally. The web is not defined by whatever Google wants. Web standards are supposed to be arrived at through consensus, and the consensus is that these things should not be part of the web.
It's not even features - basic stuff like input handling/focus is broken on iOS PWAs it's an obviously ignored tech.
You might want your browser to do Bluetooth, NFC, Background stuff, Face Detection but I don't.
I like to use Apple products for things that are commodities to me because I am not gonna look into the details of those and when I do Apple reasoning often make sense to me (just like this list).
There is a lot more we can criticize about these big tech corps (including Apple) than a product decision for a company that is known for making polarizing decisions on behalf of their customers. If people buy it... they must like it, no?
I'm writing this in Safari now, I'm a huge fan. There are several "features" that I actively dislike and disable in other browsers. I wonder if not being implemented in mobile safari is preventing them from being required in some webpages.
* Vibration
* Background Sync
* Bluetooth
* NFC
* Notifications
* Web Push
Looking down the list I can find more features that I'd like to yank out of Safari, and Chrome, than features I'd like to see added.
Things that should be removed, according to me:
* Audio recording
* Geolocation
* Motion
* Media capture
Notifications struck me as odd. I aggressively disable notifications in my apps because they are often just ads or engagement focused. But as a developer, it would be cool to have a way to notify an iOS user other than building a native app and paying the iOS tax. There's a bunch of utility apps not getting built because of this limitation.
According to this, notifications are possible if you add the app to the home screen, which I didn't know.
A feature more devs should use- I've been surprised how much websites behave like native apps if you just "add to homescreen" instead of downloading an official app, e.g. twitter, instagram.
When you open the shortcut, it doesn't launch as a tab in safari, but appears independently in the app switcher. They are often indistinguishable from official apps!
Seems like a great way for devs to avoid app store pains
iOS actually does support notifications in webapps, but only ones that have a homescreen icon. Furthermore, the notification support is different enough that I can't get my iPad to work with Android Messages for Web. So I have no clue if the API is neutered or if Google is being Google and insisting every browser be Chromium. Probably both.
Yeah, I see that list of disabled features as being a feature in and of itself.
Same here. The first thing I do when I install a browser on my desktop is block all that crap in the privacy settings of the browser.
I can understand notifications and vibration.
But why not Bluetooth or NFC? I can’t imagine any way those could be annoyances, or even why websites would want them outside of some extremely specialized applications.
I'm personally a WebUSB, WebBT etc hater but I totally get why PWA developers want those features. For example, let's say you're manufacturing some sort of USB device and you need a way to flash drivers. The idea of being able to just make a webpage that can update your drivers is so appealing compared to having to ship apps on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.
Similarly, if my bank website could do NFC tap-to-pay securely, that would be pretty cool. I can imagine lots of interesting opt-in uses for NFC in a webapp.
Arguments that these features are held back by Apple specifically in order to keep apps on the app store where they can control things and take 30% at least hold water, I think, even if that reasoning doesn't apply to Mozilla rejecting features.
> The idea of being able to just make a webpage that can update your drivers is so appealing compared to having to ship apps on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.
I suspect like many here, at $work we use a shit-ton of Flexoptix SFPs.
Flexoptix are not a $megacorp, they are a (very) small German company.
They manage to ship cross-platform apps to flash the SFPs. So its really not that difficult.
I would think a web app would be more of a pain the the butt to maintain because you have to deal with CSS reactive UI etc.
For little utility apps where you don’t care to deviate from UI default appearance and behavior (and, as a user, it’s much better if you don’t anyway, though it’s very trendy to make UX worse by customizing everything) iOS and Android both are dead simple, very easy to write and maintain a utility app for either of them.
An enormous amount of the cost of developing a lot of native apps is customizing the appearance and behavior, to match some slide deck mockup or to make it “on-brand” or whatever. It’s better for the user, and way cheaper, if you just… don’t do that. Hell a lot of common UI elements are easier in native than web if you just don’t try to customize them a ton (data-backed tables and list views and such are sooooo nice)
I don't know much about Win32, but GTK, QT, Cocoa (Apple),... have nice customization options, and creating custom components is easy.
I like WebUSB in Chrome to update my Meshtastic radios. I also like that I have to go out of my way to launch Chrome for that, and other websites can’t request permission to access local hardware in my normal browser.
Agree and I’d add WebUSB and WebMIDI. Want to interface with USB? Go through the OS.
I’m not sure why web-midi can’t be available behind a permission to control finger printing.
I can think of several light weight patch editors I’d like be able to use. There’s probably not enough demand for someone to make a stand alone app for them.
I can’t see any reason why this needs to be controlled by apple’s app store.
As far as I can see based on pwa.gripe data, between 26.3 (my version) and the newcoming 26.4 Safari on iOS gains support for five new APIs:
— Offline support
— Media capture
— Picture-in-picture
— Storage
— Speech synthesis
As well as five more APIs with caveats:
— Installation
— Notifications
— Web Push
— Barcode detection
— Speech recognition
Even taking into account that it also evidently loses support for one (audio session; I wonder if that that has to do with potential for fingerprinting), framing this feature differential between two minor(!) releases as “intentional crippling of Mobile Safari continues” strikes me as somewhat loaded.
Gotta meet your audience where they are. As a Mobile Safari user, the foremost way I feel my use of the web is crippled is that pages assume a bigger screen or are just poorly arranged.
This of all web pages ought to be easy to read on an iPhone screen, but the way it's constructed prevents it. You can't zoom the whole page out to see the entire table width because the table is in a scrolling frame and wider than its box. You can only scroll the nested frame sideways to see how row labels relate to iPhone cells. If you give up and use landscape, it still scrolls vertically in its frame. You have to aim for the margin or else you'll scroll just an inch and be halted because you caught the table.
Because it's critical that the web be as free as it is:
• It's natural that some pages turn out like this
• So it's natural the web is a little bit shitty all over
• So it's natural the demand for richer web features is low
For those of you who believe support for PWAs is critically important: in what way does it impact you? What kind of solution are you providing (or, put another way, what problem are you solving) for customers, and why would a PWA app be better than a native one for them? (As opposed to, say, convenience for you.)
Like most people (at least on this thread). I’m okay with the vast majority of these things not supported in mobile safari. But man, Bluetooth would be nice. I often provision esp32 devices for various things and either I need an app or a laptop when my phone is perfectly capable.
Yeah it's killing me too. I make a product that's MFI certified and I still can't use a browser to talk to it.
Google has become the developer-focused company that Microsoft used to be, and I don’t mean that positively. Developers are lazy and want to inflict low-effort crap on users. Microsoft always made it easier to do that. Google is now doing the same thing. Offering developers more and more ways to cobble together box-checking functionality in web apps instead of developing proper native apps.
To be fair, some of these features are security issues some users don’t want to have in their browser.
I argue that developers enable the egregious behaviour by supporting safari in the first place. Just as IE was called out and shunned for its shenanigans, before they started behaving better, so too does safari need to be treated. However, it does also feel too late, they have crippled other browsers too with their platform abuse masquerading as requirements while we celebrated it.
Is it really egregious that Apple doesn’t support everything Google decides to push? Most of these are features I don’t care about, or in some cases actively do not want.
I’m also not sure how accurate this page is. They claim Chrome on Android supports registerProtocolHandler while MDN says it’s not supported there.
Ah yes, let’s break our site for 1.56 billion people to stick it to apple.
Also WebUSB, WebMIDI. Not to mention that you can’t develop an app for you (and your family and friends) without have developer subscription :(
Worth noting that Apple doesn't just cripple iOS Safari, it cripples all iOS browsers because it also forces them to use WebKit, the crippled browser engine underneath Safari.
It would be fine if they just made Safari bad, that's their choice. But they don't stop there: they make the entire web bad on iOS purposely to promote the native apps they can tax.
This is clearly for reasons of security.
I don't think Apple is terribly interested in market share for Safari. What they are interested is preserving their competitive advantage in privacy.
Firefox was planning a native gecko based ios app. But Apple decided to limit it to EU forcing developers to choose to maintain seperate projects for a limited users.
The Brussels Effect takes care of a lot of hardware changes for the better, for the world (think USB-C).
But for software, not so much.
Examples:
* Windows N (no media player stuff) and KN (no media player stuff, no messenger) * Windows installed in the EEA (ability to disable / change start menu search with Bing, ability to remove Edge, ability to add widget providers) * iOS with only allowing 3rd party app stores and 3rd party browser engines in the EEA. * Google only allowing certain things when the phone is in the USA.
And it's gonna get worse with age verification. All of the sudden the manufacturers have even more data.
The advocates of ChromeOS Platform keep pushing their agenda.
Chrome APIs and Electron crap, and then everyone complains about Microsoft.
How many of these features that chrome offers have been fully flushed out and in a true working stable state? Google Chrome has a habit of pushing features out before they're really ready and Safari is usually on par with Firefox for features from what I have seen.
It's not a question of readiness or capability. It's an MBA with a spreadsheet explaining to a room full of people how much money Apple will lose if they allow X feature to work in Safari. This is user-negative behavior from a company that has so much money the best thing they can think of to do with it is to bank it offshore in a tax haven.
Conversly, there is an MBA at google saying how much money they can make for each extra piece of data they can extract off the user’s phone.
I agree an open web platform is good. But i also think some of the things added to the browser don’t belong in the browser. Face detection? i don’t need that.
I am much more partial to attempts to force apple to enable installing 3rd party apps than i am forcing them to bloat the browser with more ways for websites to monitize me.
> It's an MBA with a spreadsheet explaining to a room full of people how much money Apple will lose if they allow X feature to work in Safari.
You forgot to mention the long mustache your cartoon villain MBA is twisting while they sabotage Safari.
Crippling web apps is a user-positive behavior. It just so happens that user’s incentives and apple’s incentives are aligned.
I’ll ask the dual question: how many of the mobile safari checkmarks are fully fleshed out? Media Session has a check, but I have absolutely fought obvious Media Session implementation bugs in my own PWAs when designing for mobile safari
I just want less ads.
None of this is an issue, the real issue is webpages not working in safari due to large part of the web being made exclusively for chromium.
To be honest, I'm really surprised they let PWAs have notifications. That's literally the only use case we have on that entire page and it actually works.
“Catholics think Protestants are kooky” is a news headline that would work anytime in the last 509 years.
I'm not sure the other commenters claiming all these features are attack vectors actually read the list?
How is the barcode detection API a security risk for example? Having it implemented would be amazing for web apps.
Also there's features like deep linking into PWAs that ought to be pretty basic PWA functionality that's not on this list that even Safari on Mac OSX has but Safari on iOS doesn't. Even the add to home screen menu option is deliberately made hard to find.
Apple doing this for the benefit of the user is one of the less likely hypotheses.
As a daily Safari on iOS user, I don’t care about any of this, but since iOS 26 basic Safari features such as bookmarks and text search have become so buried deep underneath, they are basically unusable at this point.
It infuriates me a lot more than all the liquid glass stuff (on which I’m neutral overall).
I had to double check i’m running ios 26 because none of those things have moved for me recently.
Search is where it always was (type in the search bar, scroll past the google results to the in-page results) and bookmarking is also where it’s always been (share button “add bookmark”)
Damn. I never knew that way to search things. I used to do « Share / Search on this page » which was already obnoxious, which has now become « … » / « Share » / « Search on this page ».
Either I’m dumb or there is a discoverability problem with all these features. Probably a bit of both.
Yes. "Add to homescreen" is in the "Share" menu.
That's where they burry all bodies.
Isn't that where it's been for ages?
there’s a .gripe TLD now? this is the form feeling old comes in for me
Used to have Firefox as a content filter for Safari on iOS (adblocking), but have since switched to Brave. It's a great option if you ignore all the crypto spam.
> if you ignore all the crypto spam
you can disable all those "features"
I recently posted about how I refuse to buy apple products because of stuff like this. The lock in has made iPhone users dependent on a app ecosystem when we could have had most of our functionality through the open web.
People saying they don't want these features are missing the point. Its about control and if developers have the option to make something as a website that actually works that gives them less incentive to make an app that apple can take 30% of your profit from while you are forced to write in their proprietary language for the stuff that only works on their devices.
So much engineering duplication of effort and waste just to satisfy a bottom line.
Break the app store monopoly, don’t make the web browser into a buggy leaky bloated mess.
And you can write iOS apps in objective c, swift, kotlin, jacascript, rust, ruby, and a few dozen other languages.
This is just Google/Chrome apologia. Big nope from me, dog.
Yeah sorry but as an end user I’d rather have an actual app than some PWA thanks.
Keep going Apple.
This is the first time I've actually heard the opinion that someone thinks we need more apps instead of more functional websites.
These are not features of functional websites, these are features that make every website an "app" and deprecate the idea of a traditional website. Google is embrace, extend, extinguishing the web as we know it. If Apple gives in, it's over, every website will just be an app and want access to your contacts, and your family history, and whether or not you are on Santa's naughty list or whatever.
I think it reflects the general HN sentiment that native apps > progressive web apps.
Functional websites would be wonderful.
Instead we get “webapps”.
Better PWA support gives users (and developers) more optionality with app distribution. Apple building out these APIs would not take away from their native apps.
The UX of visiting a site and with a single click of a button having an app on my home screen sounds great. I'd also like to have the option of side loading a native app too. And if those options sound unappealing, you can keep using the App Store if you want the assurance of using an 'officially approved' app.
A lot of very prominent apps are written using web technologies anyways. Take a look at the continued popularity of React Native (and Flutter as well).
> A lot of very prominent apps are written using web technologies anyways. Take a look at the continued popularity of React Native (and Flutter as well).
And it shows through their laggy interfaces and non-native UI/UX. The people don't like apps built with web tech; developers and LLMs like them because they're a shortcut.
I would gladly give up all those “features” to use Safari over Chrome on Android. I don’t even know what kind of dumbass on Hacker News voluntarily raw dogs the internet on Chrome Android. Pathetic that Safari has had extension support for multiple years now while Chrome is still ass.
Frankly I am very happy indeed for Apple to "cripple" Safari.
99.9% of the things listed in that stupid table in the blog just stink of being potential attack vectors.
And we know just how heavily smartphones are targeted and how smart and sneaky some of the latest vectors are.
Related: Firefox stance on Google's web proposals: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
Absolutely nothing listed on that site as unsupported by Safari has any business being part of the web. In fact several supported APIs should be chucked too. Fuck giving websites motion data or push notifications.
They should just ban unsolicited prompts. That's it.
Push notifications are the #1 featured requests of my online community. Some even switched to Android over it.
And people don't understand adding sites to their homescreen, especially since Apple buried that feature in the Share menu.
No Android user of my website ever complained about the WebPush notifications.
I don’t care what your website does, not one tiny bit. I care that the majority of websites are shit, and therefore the web platform should be as minimal and isoltated from the device as possible.
Does android still give you a push notification to dismiss whenever you take a screenshot?
No.
I very much appreciate the secure baseline Safari settles on. The entire ecosystem is protected by Safari being slow and reasonable.
My only peeve is that Apple resets the feature flags with every update. So the one experimental feature I use I have to reenable each and every time I get a phone update.
Well at least you can set a custom search engine URL – oh no, you can't, that would probably endanger some children or something !!
Imagine if these countless of "Safari bad" sites didn't shill for Chrome by pretending that Chrome-only APIs are essential and standard web apis.
> Chrome by pretending that Chrome-only APIs are essential and standard web apis
Reminds me of the days when all the corporate coders thought the IE apis were the only ones worth using.
So if you accessed $megacorp website on a non-IE browser it was your fault for not using IE and not their fault for failing interop.
I noticed how they've marked the features that only Chrome supports (e.g. installation) but not the feature that only Firefox supports (orientation).
(tbh I don't know if the list is simply Chrome-centric or if there's a good reason behind, but it struck me as interesting)
yeah I'm using mobile Firefox and it has an awfully high overlap with Safari. Almost like a bunch of the stuff Chrome supports isn't actually a standard at all yet...
Thank God. Thank God! Too much going on these days.