alt Hacker News> The issue isn't any one feature rejection, it's the pattern.
Yes, and this pattern keeps popping up:
- Google wants something
- Google writes a spec.
- Google implements it.
- No other rendering engine wants it.
- It starts popping up on sites like this.
- People complain that it’s Apple’s fault for not implementing the standard.
Google keeps doing this over and over again. This is embrace and extend all over again. Web standards are not whatever Google wants them to be. They need to be arrived at through consensus.
Google gives Mozilla billions and billions of dollars and they still can’t get Mozilla to agree to these things. Google can’t get anybody outside of Google to implement these things.
Stop ignoring the fact that Mozilla is also saying no to a tonne of stuff. Stop ignoring the fact that no other rendering engine wants these things.
This is not “Apple is holding things back”. This is “Google is trying to unilaterally control web standards”.
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Should we really care what the rendering engines want? What about what users and app authors want? If Google was adding things that nobody cared about, it wouldn't be a problem. The problem is that these things are useful.
You're making a fair point about Google and embrace-and-extend, but you didn't actually address the evidence I raised. Let me ask more directly.
Again, the iOS 17.4 situation. Apple claimed building PWA support for alternative browser engines wasn't "practical to undertake" due to security architecture requirements. They removed the feature. Two weeks later they brought it back. I'm asking one more time, what changed in those 14 days? If the architecture work genuinely "created insurmountable security problems that would require building "an entirely new integration architecture" that wasn't practical given DMA timelines", how was it completed so quickly?
Push notifications on iOS versus macOS. 2013 on Mac, 2023 on iPhone, same WebKit engine, same APNs backend. Apple controls the browser and the notification system on both platforms. Why the 10 year gap for what should be the same technical implementation? The thing is, whether or not Google tries to control standards doesn't explain these Apple-specific patterns that are clearly driven by Apple's conflict of interest. Mozilla declining BeforeInstallPrompt doesn't explain why features Apple already built for macOS took a decade to reach iOS. These are implementation decisions about Apple's own technology on Apple's own platforms.
You can argue Google is problematic (I'd also agree on that!) and also admit that Apple's decisions around PWAs are clearly driven by their conflict of interest to protect their $20+ billion dollar App Store business model. Those aren't mutually exclusive. But you haven't explained the iOS 17.4 reversal or the notification delay at all. Could you address those specifically?