A deep and important piece by @rgadellaa that documents the gobsmacking history of showstopping bugs on iOS Safari:
-
A deep and important piece by @rgadellaa that documents the gobsmacking history of showstopping bugs on iOS Safari:
An Abridged History of Safari Showstoppers - Webventures
TL;DR: iOS Safari is more than an inconvenience for developers, it's the fundamental reason interoperability has been stymied in...
Webventures (webventures.rejh.nl)
Normally, a browser sucking would be a problem just for that vendor, who would lose share. But because of the #applebrowserban, Apple has nothing to fear. Instead, Apple continually breaks essential functionality it would *never* break for native developers.
The result? A web that can't compete, even when Apple *finally* gets around to adding features.
-
Alex Russellreplied to Alex Russell last edited by [email protected]
@rgadellaa Read alongside my piece from 2021 on Apple's delaying tactics on adding features at all[1], we can see the full arc of incredibly effective efforts to forestall an open, interoperable, standards-based competitor to the App Store.
Apple won't disrupt its own rent extraction and won't let others try. Neat. Tidy. Anti-competitive.
There's a HN thread to upboat if you think this is as important as I do:
-
Alex Russellreplied to Alex Russell last edited by [email protected]
@rgadellaa For normies, understand that the APIs in question aren't "nice to have", they're foundational. Things as core as typing, scrolling, and even *app booting* have been broken for *multiple releases*, with no recourse.
Developers can't recommend better browsers when Apple breaks the web because Cupertino won't allow any on iOS.
It's straight-up anti-web and anti-user.
/cc @owa @pluralistic
-
@slightlyoff @rgadellaa I develop an app that depends on WebAudio, and Safari 17 on iOS/iPadOS has regressions which make for intermittent failures and very confusing behaviour for the end users, for which there seems to be no workaround other than to reload the page. macOS Safari has bugs in this area too.
-
@hmoffatt @slightlyoff Hi! Do you have any WebKit Bugzilla tickets for those I can look at?
-
@rgadellaa @slightlyoff Hi, yes see for example https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=276016 and https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=276687 and https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=263627 . There's a little engagement from Apple developers there but no confirmation of it being fixed in the next release.
-
@hmoffatt @rgadellaa Dumb question: does it also do this in a stand-alone PWA?