- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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?
- 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
by strogonoff
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by matthewfcarlson
1 subcomments
- 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.
- I built https://pwascore.com/ several months ago.
Where pwa.gripe cherry-picks and has an axe to grind, pwascore.com is intended to be a more thorough and dispassionate evaluation. I will add desktop browsers soon.
Click "Expand All" for a complete and detailed list. Click "How Scores Work" to understand the scoring heuristics.
by FormularSumo
1 subcomments
- It's a cool page, although somewhat limited in scope. If you want a more complete picture of all the web progress Apple is holding back, not "just" PWA and more advanced capabilities, this is probably a better site for comparison:
https://ios404.com
It includes dates for when these things were first shipped, explanations for that they do, and what kind of standards (or not) they are.
- 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.
- The advocates of ChromeOS Platform keep pushing their agenda.
Chrome APIs and Electron crap, and then everyone complains about Microsoft.
- To be fair, some of these features are security issues some users don’t want to have in their browser.
by raw_anon_1111
2 subcomments
- Yes I want more shitty web apps. Also you can’t imagine how much I love cross platform Electron apps.
I have no desire for random websites to have that much access to my phone.
- Yeah, I don't want background sync. I mean, iOS is built upon the idea that any task in the background might be killed at any time and without warning by the OS. This is so the OS is able to manage battery and memory effective.
You can of course dislike this, but not even native apps allow background sync anyway, so of course web apps would not be allowed to do this either.
by politelemon
2 subcomments
- 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.
- Also WebUSB, WebMIDI. Not to mention that you can’t develop an app for you (and your family and friends) without have developer subscription :(
- I feel like the vast majority of these are features of an operating system? Not a web browser?
- Ragebait page.
I left after seeing Contact Picker API listed. Contact Picker API is, per the MDN link in the OP, marked as "This is an experimental technology." It is "not Baseline because it does not work in some of the most widely-used browsers."
by weedhopper
0 subcomment
- 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.
- This is the current choice developers face - build for the app-store or build for the web. Or both.
For me, I honestly don't care if Mobile Safari seems 'crippled' when everything I use works exactly the same on devices as on Firefox/Desktop. If anything I'd be more annoyed if it worked better on my fringe devices, but maybe I'm the outlier here - I only use mobile for comms/banking, tablet for light browsing, and it's more often I'll be on Desktop.
Do I think it should have less functionality in Mobile Safari - yes if I get more battery life. Conversely no, if those features could give me more battery life back through intelligent apps.
by Levitating
0 subcomment
- Websites don't need any of that. If you want to make software for an iPhone you can make an app.
by ymolodtsov
0 subcomment
- Google never really cared about Chrome on iOS. They barely care about Chrome on Android to be honest, that app still looks and feels more or less the same it did 10 years ago.
Yes, they can't bring their own engine, but it's in their interest to lock users in and ensure they continue using Chrome on iOS. But it took them years to implement available APIs like passwords (AFAIR it was out for 3-4 years before they allowed Chrome iOS to supply your passwords).
- 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.)
by boomskats
1 subcomments
- This isn't about browsers, it's about Apple spending the last decade blocking PWAs on their platform by intentionally breaking something new with every new OS release, thus forcing people to build and ship bloated pointless 50meg webview packages through their aPp StOrE every time they update the width of their sidebar.
PWAs are great. They were literally Steve Jobs' original vision for the iPhone. I don't know why people are arguing about Firefox or the individual features - that's not the point, they're not the ones that matter. It's the decade of sabotage.
- “Catholics think Protestants are kooky” is a news headline that would work anytime in the last 509 years.
- 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.
- 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.
by SkySkimmer
1 subcomments
- This table could stand to have a desktop safari column. For instance folliwing the "shortcuts" link https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web... says "safari: yes (17.4), mobile safari: no".
So it's not like Apple is fully against at least some of these APIs.
by Darkstryder
2 subcomments
- 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).
by samlinnfer
0 subcomment
- 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.
- The irony of this webpage being terribly optimized for mobile clients…
Nested scrollbars! Horizontal and vertical scroll!
by diebeforei485
1 subcomments
- I want location permissions for web apps installed to the home screen to be separate from Safari.
I want to auto-deny websites asking me for location permissions. But I want to be able to grant location permissions to installed web apps on a case-by-case basis just like with regular apps.
by DroneBetter
0 subcomment
- hey the AR/VR entry is wrong, right? Apple demonstrates it in the keynote webpages by having a 3D model relating to the keynotes' themes that can be placed and rotated in space, I doubt it would be for their own pages only.
unless it means having the webpage itself render in VR and not just an isolated model
- 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.
- For me, the biggest hurdle to writing a PWA is the insane installation process [1]. There are also a ton of quirks, eg I don’t think you can update the icon if it’s installed as a PWA. It is hard to argue that this whole process has not been hobbled intentionally.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/s/yVERKqoJgb
by MantisShrimp90
1 subcomments
- 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.
by kylehotchkiss
0 subcomment
- Apple's intentional protection of me from unsavory developers boundary pushing of the listed items by Mobile Safari
- I just want less ads.
- It'd be nice if desktop safari was a column.
- the author puts a lot of unchecked boxes to the top, trying to make their point.
by traceroute66
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Yeah sorry but as an end user I’d rather have an actual app than some PWA thanks.
Keep going Apple.
by ubermonkey
0 subcomment
- This is just Google/Chrome apologia. Big nope from me, dog.
by luxuryballs
0 subcomment
- there’s a .gripe TLD now? this is the form feeling old comes in for me
by ocdtrekkie
0 subcomment
- 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.
by functionmouse
0 subcomment
- Thank God. Thank God! Too much going on these days.
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