alt Hacker NewsEven 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In addition, parts of the list seems to be extremely outdated: Safari on iOS does support the Web Push API and most of the Notifications API (at least for apps added to your home screen as PWAs).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.
>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.
You missed the point completely.
Apple >forbids< any browser engine on iOS other than their own Safari. So you can't just install Chrome on iOS, because when you do you get Safari instead.
I would not care how Apple cripples their own web browser if they didn't force other browsers on iOS to use their browser engine. They are forcing me to write a native app instead of just tell my customers to install Chrome to have access to the APIs my product needs (web bluetooth).
I am not an iOS app developer, I'm a web developer. I don't have the resources to support that kind of code when I already have a perfectly working web app on the competing platform. I also do not plan to sell anything through my webapp, which is why Apple wants to force developers to create a native app, where they can collect 30% (or whatever % it is now) of anything sold through the app.
It doesn't matter what the standards are or aren't. Apple are just being greedy assholes and what they are doing is absolutely worse than what Microsoft did to get sued in an antitrust case when they simply bundled IE in Windows.
And to make it worse, Apple is on the board that decides what standards get into W3C, so they are blocking useful APIs based on their own greed.
This is part of the reason Apple is currently being sued by the DOJ
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline