Discussion

hx8: 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

traceroute66: 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.

traceroute66: 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.

troupo: 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.

CamJN: 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.

gib444: Well at least you can set a custom search engine URL – oh no, you can't, that would probably endanger some children or something !!

dgxyz: Yeah sorry but as an end user I’d rather have an actual app than some PWA thanks.Keep going Apple.

MostlyStable: This is the first time I've actually heard the opinion that someone thinks we need more apps instead of more functional websites.

functionmouse: 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.

pjmlp: The advocates of ChromeOS Platform keep pushing their agenda.Chrome APIs and Electron crap, and then everyone complains about Microsoft.

mrtedbear: 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.Apple is clearly trying to stop PWAs becoming a thing

Darkstryder: 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).

spiderfarmer: Yes. "Add to homescreen" is in the "Share" menu.That's where they burry all bodies.

genthree: Functional websites would be wonderful.Instead we get “webapps”.

mrmanner: 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)

traceroute66: > Chrome by pretending that Chrome-only APIs are essential and standard web apisReminds 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.

easeout: 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 simply assume a bigger screen.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.

spiderfarmer: 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.

vscode-rest: Does android still give you a push notification to dismiss whenever you take a screenshot?

samlinnfer: 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.

hk1337: 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.

doomrobo: 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

rayiner: [delayed]

politelemon: 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.

jjmint: 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.

nickalekhine: This is a weird take. 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).

sethops1: Yeah, I see that list of disabled features as being a feature in and of itself.

notatoad: 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.

agust: 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.

tugten: 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.

dagmx: 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.

nerdjon: 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.

halapro: > why I would actually want most of these features in the browserThe 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.

gardnr: 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.

rayiner: [delayed]

reustle: Firefox on iOS is just a wrapper around Safari, since that is all Apple allows.

kennywinker: 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.

strogonoff: 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 the following features:— Offline support— Media capture— Picture-in-picture— Storage— Speech synthesisAs well as the following features with caveats:— Installation— Notifications— Web Push— Barcode detection— Speech recognitionEven though it also evidently loses support for one feature (audio session), phrasing this news as “intentional crippling of Mobile Safari continues” strikes me as a somewhat loaded angle.

michalpleban: No.

nozzlegear: Isn't that where it's been for ages?

kg: 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.

dpark: 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.

kstrauser: 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.

chuckadams: The third column is your current browser and platform, and for me it's showing Firefox on macOS missing a lot of feature. 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.

WhyNotHugo: 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).

kennywinker: 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”)

traceroute66: > 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.

dpark: > 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.

pokot0: 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?

Darkstryder: Damn. I never knew that way to search things. I used to do « Share / Search on this page » which was already obnoxious, which have 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.

nerdjon: 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

rejhgadellaa: 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)

luxuryballs: there’s a .gripe TLD now? this is the form feeling old comes in for me

DrewADesign: 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.

rejhgadellaa: 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)

3oil3: I just want less ads.