zlacker

>>samwil+(OP)
I’m truly scared of Chrome.

It pushes proprietary features, from what I know it starts enforcing some analytics/ads without possibility to block it out and there are other thing too, but since I’m not really an user I don’t track them deeply.

Based on my personal experiences with IE, ActiveX, Adobe Flash and not being able to fill my taxes without Microsoft license (that was around 800$ back then for me not adjusted for inflation) I am afraid the same will happen with Chrome once it gets enough ground.

“Hey, sorry but we can’t sell you toothbrush because you’re using Safari/Firefox/Vivaldi/whatever. Please switch to Chrome and continue with your tracked and dissected purchase route.”

Is there any other anti-Chrome bastion than iOS’ Safari?

Old E2E runner installed Google Chrome on my machine (didn’t even ask but that’s user space on dev machine so whatever) which grew into my MacOS machine. It cannot run in background but there is another daemon that constantly updates it. Multiple times a day I get notification that new service has been installed to run in background.

I’m not sure if that’s something I want to fight for.

>>xlii+5h
If Apple was forced to compete on iOS for the dominant position that Safari holds, it would receive greater investment, add support for vital missing PWA features and potentially as a result grow its desktop market. I believe competition in the long run would break Blinks dominant position, and be better for both consumers and developers.

>>samwil+ei
Here's what Safari users don't get. Can you be precise about which ones are vital?

1. Install prompt (the user has to start with the "Add to Home Screen" command)

2. Link interception (i.e. browsing in the normal browser switching to the PWA rather than continuing normally)

3. Shared storage between the normal browser and the PWA

4. Ability to start fullscreen

5. SVG icons

6. Background sync

7. Push notifications

The rest of that is largely a list of things like "Web Bluetooth" which are non-standard Chrome features which Firefox also doesn't implement and often have significant privacy or security concerns.

>>acdha+B31
I would say every one of those except the SVG icons put PWA's at a huge disadvantage, to the point of being borderline unusable.

Do you feel like the current state of PWA's in iOS presents a viable alternative to publishing an app for any real usecase?

>>BeefyS+Pa1
Having played with several PWAs on Android and Windows where support is better, I’m not sure that they’d be any more popular even if Safari filled those feature holes. The average PWA experience sits somewhere between underwhelming and uncompelling, primarily because SPAs in general are anything but consistently good. For PWAs to not be bad, SPAs need to stop being bad first.

>>kitsun+zp1
A ton of "Native Apps" are SPA's using React native, Cordova, et al. The problem is not the tech, the problem is the arbitrary feature gating (including the kinds of tricks that React Native is able to leverage when packaging an app vs running in a mobile browser).