Over the years I've had my differences with the Chrome team in Waterloo that eventually made this possible; I argued that tools to make this sort of thing possible should have shipped years earlier. And I still think that.
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Over the years I've had my differences with the Chrome team in Waterloo that eventually made this possible; I argued that tools to make this sort of thing possible should have shipped years earlier. And I still think that.
But that's not what's holding the web back; Cupertino is:
https://codepen.io/paulnoble/details/gOVPedz
https://caniuse.com/mdn-css_properties_animation-timeline_scroll
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@bramus @owa Apple's starvation of the Safari/WebKit team hasn't just meant that important features like scroll-linked animations remain AWOL for many years, but that the show-stopping bugs make "available" features a perpetual mine field:
https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show-stoppers/
This is a rolling catastrophe because of the #AppleBrowserBan
If FruitCo were *explicitly* trying to make the web irrelevant, what would it do differently? I struggle to come up with a better strategy.
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@bramus @owa This forced monoculture of failure benefits only one party: Apple.
By requiring every developer to build native apps through a lack of features and reliability, the App Store maximizes rent extraction.
And by preventing real browser competition, Apple ensures that no competitor can ever displace Safari in practice. Turns out that's worth ~$20BN/yr:
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@bramus @owa When I say that "platforms are competitions", this is what I mean.
Requiring that every web developer accommodate their failson engine, while returning a pittance to engine investment, is profit maximizing for Apple.
The bugs you're working around? The polyfill you're adding? They have only one beneficiary.
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@bramus @owa It's easy to memory-hole, but Apple *really did* try to kill PWAs this year, and when it failed, they *really did* try to frame regulators for their dirty deeds:
https://infrequently.org/2024/02/home-screen-advantage/
https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apple-backs-off-killing-web-apps/
All of this is being done to protect rent extraction by app stores.
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@slightlyoff @owa
Your posting about open independent web has devolved into non stop Apple bashing. I think it’s a bad look for a Microsoft browser engineer to constantly attack a single named competitor, but couch it in terms of defending “the open web”. -
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@bramus @owa Yes, Google is doing nasty stuff to prevent the web from breaking out too (and it has the same "strategic inaction" flavour):
https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/google-must-share-the-ability-to-install-web-apps-in-android/
But the difference in the landscape is night-and-day. Apple's suppression of the web is singlehandedly preventing browsers and PWAs from providing an open, interoperable alternative to app stores. And that's intentional.
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@slightlyoff @bramus @owa I can only speak to Chrome, but we're doing a lot of work to make PWAs better/encourage PWA use right now.
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