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piliftoday at 3:45 PM1 replyview on HN

Firefox is not in a position where it is the only browser allowed to run on a platform.

On iOS, you’re either doing a native app, sharing 30% of your income with Apple, or you’re restricted to Safari’s feature set. No browser in iOS can use anything but WebKit


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mort96today at 4:17 PM

Even so, conflating "Safari is holding the web platform back by not implementing standardized web features" with "Safari is holding the Google platform back by not implementing non-standard Google features" is kind of disingenuous.

Going through some of the list from the top:

* Shortcuts in the manifest: This seems to be standard. Would be nice if mobile Safari supported it.

* Protocol Handling: This is non-standard.

* File Handling: MDN doesn't contain a reference to a standard, and it has this caveat: "At present this feature is only available on Chromium-based browsers, and only on desktop operating systems". So not only does it seem to be non-standard; Chrome on Android doesn't even support it!

* Contact Picker: This seems to be moving through the standardization process and is not yet standardized, if I understand MDN's "experimental" label correctly.

* Face Detection: This seems to be yet another not-yet-standard API.

* Vibration: This is standard, it's a shame Safari doesn't implement it.

I'll stop here but you get the point. 2/6 are actual standards; 4/6 are just features Chromium implemented even though they aren't standard.

I'm glad mobile Safari doesn't follow every Google whim. Google has enough power over the standardization process as it is; we don't want them to control which features browsers add outside of the standard too.

In addition, parts of the list seems to be extremely outdated: Safari on iOS does support the Web Push API and most of the Notifications API (at least for apps added to your home screen as PWAs). These APIs have been supported since iOS 16.4, according to MDN.

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