> As mentioned, the seven-day cap on script-writable storage is gated on “after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site.” That is the case in Safari. Web applications added to the home screen are not part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use. Their days of use will match actual use of the web application which resets the timer. We do not expect the first-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted.
> If your web application does experience website data deletion, please let us know since we would consider it a serious bug. It is not the intention of Intelligent Tracking Prevention to delete website data for first parties in web applications.
So, while adding it to the home screen still involves this mechanism, the "first-party"--which I understand to be the website which was actually added to the home screen, differentiating it from all of the third-party websites that it might link you to--is presumably going to be used every time you use that icon on the home screen and since that icon also has its own usage counter it won't ever be counting up when you aren't using it, so you are "good" (unless the user manages to use your home screen added app for seven days without ever ending up back at the "first-party" site somehow, which seems like an oddity and maybe one they mitigated directly).
Firefox is not a serious competitor at this point and its tiny 4% of the market has already slipped to 3% in the last year.
That’s inching close to the “can we please drop IE11” sort of numbers from some years ago.
This makes users feel like they're never logged into a website when they need it, unless they're using it almost daily.
That high-friction experience pushes users towards apps, which of course are always ready to go.
EDIT: source: https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki...
> Back in February 2019, we announced that ITP would cap the expiry of client-side cookies to seven days
> ...
> Now ITP has aligned the remaining script-writable storage forms with the existing client-side cookie restriction, deleting all of a website’s script-writable storage after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site. These are the script-writable storage forms affected (excluding some legacy website data types):
> Indexed DB
> LocalStorage
> Media keys
> SessionStorage
> Service Worker registrations and cache
EDIT 2: That page indicates web apps on the home screen get some variation for this behavior, but the difference isn't clear to me.
Also, I don't see how fighting a potential monoculture with an actual monoculture is a solution.
For further reading: https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-brow...
[0]https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti... [1]https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection#trackers-we-block
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
Safari (WebKit) is the only one competing against the Chrome ecosystem, especially on mobile devices market. The EU Digital Markets Act will just declare Chrome the winner and will increase Chrome's dominance and will make Mozilla even more irrelevant.
> “Looking back five years and looking at our market share and our own numbers that we publish, there's no denying the decline,” says Selena Deckelmann, senior vice president of Firefox
But I'm not certain that this is the case. https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection claims to link to lists that show which trackers are only identified and which are identified and blocked, but those links just go to https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti..., where I do not see such a distinction being made.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34501173#34504508
This is slightly hyperbolic. Google is buying a default¹. It can be changed.
https://appletoolbox.com/change-default-search-engine-iphone...
With Safari, yes, but Firefox for iOS (for example) allows you to add arbitrary search engines.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-your-default-sea...
My idea was primarily based on my experience is something like this:
I know (meaning I know what they use) around 15-20 devs on MacOS.
Almost all of them have FF installed. Some may open it occasionally but just as an alternative to open in private mode or check some weird behavior to see if it is cross-browser or cache related.
- personal usage: except maybe 2, all the others are using Safari (most of them) and Chrome few
- professional usage: except for the same 2, here I think Chrome is more used and Safari less
Thus in these developers' case, I don't think they will recommend FF to their friends or relatives even if FF is installed on their machine as it is not their daily driver.
I am in the same category regarding usage: I forced myself multiple times to use FF. Still try to do that couple of times per year.
But fallback to Safari because the battery lasts so much longer and because it is integrated with the MacOS keychain.
One might think that with M1, people might afford to lose a bit of battery but it is the reverse. Seeing how long it lasts one barely thinks of cutting those hours short :) Could mean starting to carry again the power adapter or always looking for a table near a power socket.
Here is a browser that I installed not long ago and start to like it more and more: https://browser.kagi.com
You can test behavior on this tracker here: https://www.jefftk.com/test/statcounter
Many other browsers are available for iOS too. (Not to be confused with rendering engines, of course.)
That wikipedia page has a support table saying IOS supports PWAs as YES and Firefox as NO is odd considering Apple requires Mozilla to ship a crippled form of safari on IOS, if Firefox could ship their own true application, I suspect they would have better PWA support as a differentiator with Safari.
[1] https://thenewstack.io/owa-takes-on-apples-browser-ban-for-p...
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
<html><head></head><body><img src="https://statcounter.com/" vt9kpu8nj="">
</body></html>
It can’t be that afraid, because you can use the Firefox version of uBlock Origin in the WebKit-based iOS browser Orion[0] right now.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
There's a case to be made that they handicap PWA features, but I don't see their team directly implementing features incorrectly.
--- sart quote ---
Back fifteen years ago IE held back the web because web developers had to cater to its outdated technology stack. “Best viewed with IE” and all that. But do you ever see a “Best viewed with Safari” notice? No, you don’t. Another browser takes that special place in web developers’ hearts and minds.
--- end quote ---
I understand your frustration that you can't use the browser you want on the devices you want. That is annoying. However, *now* is the wrong time to go after Apple. Get more people using other browsers on other platforms first.
Wikipedia suggests this breakdown:
> As of November 2022, Android, an operating system using the Linux kernel, is the world's most-used operating system when judged by web use. It has 42% of the global market, followed by Windows with 30%, Apple iOS with 18%, macOS with 6%, then (desktop) Linux at 1.0% also using the Linux kernel.[1][2] These numbers do not include embedded devices or game consoles.
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... )
Android and Windows make up 4x the number of iOS users on the web. When the % of Chrome users on those platforms goes down, and Firefox and others go up, to a level where any of them could temporarily steer the direction the HTML/W3C standards take, _that's_ the time to go after Apple. Until then, lean on the fence Apple are holding up for you (and getting Google to pay for).
Android and Windows make up four times the number of web users as iOS. That's almost the same ratio (Chrome:others) as browser use across the web. Get a significant proportion of those user to move onto to other browser platforms first, then go after Apple give the final 20% of users more choice.
(based on stats from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste... )
With Firefox's declining usage and market share, they are essentially on life support with Google's money since they know they would be completely irrelevant without it.
It appears that [0] has not aged well at all.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
The moment Firefox implemented one of the many hardware APIs aggressively pushed and promoted by Google, they immediately discovered it was used for fingerprinting: https://twitter.com/denschub/status/1582730985778556931
Chrome doesn't even show a prompt in this case. So much for "control".
Said nothing about "anti-Apple". I'm just agreeing with the poster above saying that people being vehemently anti-Apple actually haven't learned anything from history. At all.
> Apple's leverage is being used in many of the same ways, just much more aggressively than 'best viewed in IE'
Of course this is bullshit. Again. There's probably not a single site out there that is "best viewed in Safari". And there are numerous sites that are "best viewed in Chrome". Including, especially, the ones that Google themselves (#1 search, #1 mail, #1 video hosting, #1 web ad business in the world) creates.
And to quote again:
--- start quote ---
Regardless of where you feel the web should be on this spectrum between Google and Apple, there is a fundamental difference between the two.
We have the tools and procedures to manage Safari’s disinterest. They’re essentially the same as the ones we deployed against Microsoft back in the day — though a fundamental difference is that Microsoft was willing to talk while Apple remains its old haughty self, and its “devrels” aren’t actually allowed to do devrelly things such as managing relations with web developers. (Don’t blame them, by the way. If something would ever change they’re going to be our most valuable internal allies — just as the IE team was back in the day.)
On the other hand, we have no process for countering Google’s reverse embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy, since a section of web devs will be enthusiastic about whatever the newest API is. Also, Google devrels talk. And talk. And talk. And provide gigs of data that are hard to make sense of. And refer to their proprietary algorithms that “clearly” show X is in the best interest of the web — and don’t ask questions! And make everything so fucking complicated that we eventually give up and give in.
--- end quote ---
Google releases 400 new APIs a year with little to no oversight and with complete disregard of any objections or concerns from the other browser vendors: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
The things that you think Safari is lacking in are largely Chrome-only non-standards.
--- start quote ---
Chrome still allows web developers to enumerate attached MIDI devices without user consent or even a notification, btw.
--- end quote ---