Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025

I kinda feel like "Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025" is an inaccurate title.

More like "+40 reasons to ignore iOS as a target when making your HTML game"

> The web has supported these basic functions for over a decade. Surely in the year 2025, I thought, HTML5 is a good choice for these simple needs.

> What really happened was, I hit over 50 surprising problems related to gaps in web standards, requiring me to spend over half of the total development time

The half part might be surprising, but the fact that the web is broken in all the big and little places shouldn't really be, isn't that part of deep web lore that you get even by looking at the omnipresent dom tree, but especially if you're a druid and forest-native?

Like, "No you can't control the real size of anything" has been one of the many fundamental cascading flaws of that peculiar joke of a design system since forever, no?

I feel like there are a lot of iOS/iPadOS 17 and below devices holding things back right now. Desktop browsers are in a really good standards space now with their constant and frequent nagging for users to update.

this felt not as a "50 problems in web api" list, but more like "50 reasons to stop caring about iOS and just leave it rotting"

I think the lesson is that writing a mobile game using HTML is still tricky. Few of these issues would come up when writing a web page.

Safari - Internet Explorer of 2025

I'm so glad every time I see something like this that I don't do webdev for a living.

I've cross-compiled code for mobile before, and I've made personal websites before. I sure wouldn't want to do that for a living.

Ok, the complaints about Apple being behind the Google "standard" are probably legitimate, as long as we keep in mind Chrome isn't a standard.

But the part about a virtual mouse cursor so you have hover... no. No no and no. No on Apple, no on Android, no on any touch only device.

The iPhone took the world by storm because they designed their UI for fat finger touch only. Back then, Google speed redesigned their unreleased Android along the same paradigms when they saw how easy the Apple solution was to use.

If you have a mouse heavy game, no matter if you do it in native code or html, you have to have different interfaces for touch and mouse/kb if you want it to be playable.

Interesting article which reinforces my decision to never engage with web development in any manner other than throwing WASM paint on a Canvas.

> But a purpose-built game framework like Unity would have polyfill to protect you from more of these layout and audio problems

Unity doesn't polyfill, it just relies on WASM for everything which results in significantly more consistent behaviour provided your browser supports WASM to begin with.

> Unity and Godot might be better choices, but I have no experience with them and I assume they only make sense for games.

Unity has been used for non-game purposes successfully, and there are also other WASM-compatible frameworks specifically targeting non-game GUI use cases.

It sounds like they were testing with iOS 12? In practice that has fallen out of use and doesn't need to be supported any more. Yes, a bunch of problems are to do with Safari specifically, but if you target relatively modern versions only (iOS 16+ is pretty reasonable IMO) it'll save a lot of pain.

Yeah, fifty reason why Web hasn't yet fully turned into ChromeOS Platform.

Standard Web in 2025 is whatever Google decides to implement on Chrome, and all existing forks downstream from it, including Electron crap.

I could probably give another 50 as could everyone else reading

Biggest peev for me is inconsistent support for transparent (alpha channel) video

The full screen thing -- have you tried saving the SPA to the home screen?

Together with some meta tags, that launches full screen and stays full screen, like an app.

The bashing on apple for this "to sell more apps" is nonsense, Apple originally designed and intended for HTML5 apps to beat Flash.

One of the earliest games for iPhone was PacMac, it was a SPA web app saved to home screen, it worked great.*

OTOH, in 30 years of web dev, I never got pages about raccoons to work either.

* Haven't checked this lately to see if they deprecated this.

Honestly I gave up trying to support apple products a while ago - the fact that iOS and Mac lock the browser version to the os version makes it such a royal pain in the ass to support.

While this list is accurate enough, I assume the developer doesn't have to support older Android phones, because ... yeah. That's hell.

But it is interesting that most of the listed issues that are genuine bugs are fairly minor, while the show-stoppers are largely Apple trying to protect user's from bad actors.

Which, as a developer, I hate. But as a user, I appreciate.

Surfing the web on my Android devices is absolute madness in certain segments of the web.

At which point to you just go "fuck Apple" and choose to display a passive-agressive "This game only works on browsers with reasonable compatibility" instead? That's probably what I'd have done.

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