Tags: safari

I was impressed with how Safari now allows you to add websites to the dock:

It feels great to have websites that act just like other apps. I like that some of the icons in my dock are native, some are web apps, and I mostly don’t notice the difference.

Trys liked it too:

For all intents and purposes, this is a desktop application created without a single line of Swift or Objective-C, or any heavy Electron wrappers.

Oh, and the application can work offline! Service workers, and browser storage are more than stable enough to handle a variety of offline loading patterns. These are truly exciting times to be building for the web!

There was one aspect that I was particularly pleased with. External links:

Links within a Safari-installed web app respect your default browser choice.

Excellent! Except it’s no longer true. At least not in some cases. The behaviour is inconsisent but I’m running the latest version of Safari on the latest version of Sonoma, and now external links in a Safari-installed web app are broken. They just stay in the same application.

I thought maybe it was related to whether the website’s manifest file has the display value set to “standalone” rather than, say, “minimal ui”. Maybe the “standalone” instruction is being taken literally? But even when I change the value I’m still getting the broken behaviour.

This may sound like a small thing, but it completely changes the feel of using the web app. Instead of feeling like “I’m using an app that just happens to be on the web”, it now feels like “I’m using a web browser but with fewer features.”

I’ve been loving having Mastodon as a standalone app in my dock. It used to be that if I clicked on a link in a Mastodon post, it would open in my browser of choice (Firefox) where I could then bookmark it, or do any other tasks that my browser offers me. Now if I click on a link in Mastodon, I’m stuck in the same “app”. It feels horribly stifling.

I can right-click on a link and get options that still keep me in the same app, like “Open link” or “Open Link in New Window.” To actually open the link in my web browser, I have to select “Copy Link”, then go to my web browser, open a new tab, and paste the link in there.

This is broken. I hope it isn’t intentional. Maybe I’m just at the receiving end of some weird glitch. If this stays this way, I’ll probably just remove the Safari-installed web apps from my dock. They feel pointless if they’re just roach motels.

I’d love to file a bug for this, but this isn’t a Webkit bug, it’s a Safari bug (and the Webkit bug tracker is at pains to point out that Webkit and Safari are not the same thing). But have you ever tried to file a bug with Apple? Good luck!

Anyway, I sincerely hope that this change will be walked back. Otherwise websites in the dock are dead in the water.

WebKit Features in Safari 17.2 | WebKit

Lots of new features landing in Safari, and it’s worth paying attention to the new icon requirements now that websites can be added to the dock:

To provide the best user experience on macOS, supply at least one opaque, full-bleed maskable square icon in the web app manifest, either as SVG (any size) or high resolution bitmap (1024×1024).

Baseline’s evolution on MDN | MDN Blog

These updated definitions makes sense to me:

1. Newly available. The feature is marked as interoperable from the day the last core browser implements it. It marks the moment when developers can start getting excited and learning about a feature.
2. Widely available. The feature is marked as having wider support thirty months or 2.5 years later. It marks the moment when it’s safe to start using a feature without explicit cross-browser compatibility knowledge.

Desktop progressive web applications | Trys Mudford

Following on from my post about websites in the dock, Trys upgraded to Sonoma and added a handy copy’n’paste resource to his dock. It works a treat.

Sit with that for a second, you can write a desktop application with no tooling, launch it from your phone to the internet for free, and seconds later install it on any computer. I didn’t have to ask permission, or jump through any App Store hoops. I wrote a thing, pushed it to the internet, and then I could use the thing. Even better, I could send the link to Chris and he could use the thing. That’s the power of the internet.

I updated my Mac to the newest operating system, Sonoma. I did this to try out the new “add to Dock” feature in Safari. It’s like the “add to Homescreen” action on iOS.

Before I get into what’s good, I have to start by ranting about a big problem on both desktop and mobile: discovery.

First of all, you have to know that a square with an arrow sticking out of it means “share”.

Okay, I can buy it. It’s no better or worse than the three horizontal lines of a hamburger icon, or the three horizontal dots of a kebab icon. And whereas the hamburger and kebab icons are used as a catch-all cupboard to sweep all your rubbish into, at least this icon has a specific meaning. It means share, right?

Well, it used to. But now it’s also home to “add to Homescreen” and “add to Dock”. Neither of those actions are sharing.

Stretching semantics, I suppose you could say you’re sharing something with yourself.

Anyway, this is the biggest issue with progressive web apps on both iOS and Mac. Regardless of how well they work, there’s not much point if most people don’t know the option exists.

(Update: Jen rightly points out that you can also get to “add to Dock” from the file menu. Doh! How did I miss that‽)

Discovery aside, I was interested to see how Safari handles web apps on desktop compared to how Chrome does it.

I’ve had one or two web apps in my dock for a while, installed through Chrome. Google Meet is one of them. I use it quite a bit, and honestly it feels no different to using a native desktop app.

One annoyance is that the Chrome browser also automatically launches whenever I launch the Google Meet icon in my dock. This wouldn’t matter if Chrome were my default browser, but I use Firefox. So whenever I’m using the Google Meet web app, there’s a Google Chrome icon hanging around in my dock, saying “gizza job, I can do that.”

I opened Google Meet in Safari and then selected “add to Dock” from the square with an arrow sticking out of it. Then I quit Safari. I was delighted to see that when I launched the Google Meet web app from the dock, it didn’t automatically launch Safari! Excellent!

Even better, links within a Safari-installed web app respect your default browser choice. What I mean is, previously when I had Google Meet installed via Chrome, if I clicked an external link in Google Meet it opened in Chrome. But now with the Google Meet installed via Safari, external links open in Firefox, my browser of choice. Very good!

But the Safari-installed version of Google Meet is, alas, over-zealous with permissions. I have to grant access to my microphone and camera every single time I launch it. Previously—with the version installed via Chrome—it remembered my choice.

Now I don’t know if the behaviour in the Safari-installed version is a deliberate choice made for security reasons, or if it’s a bug. I suspect it’s a bug. After all, on iOS you get access to more permissions if a site is added to the homescreen—it’s the only way to ask for permissions for notifications, for example.

I added a few more sites to my dock: mastodon.social and thesession.org. They both work really well as standalone apps.

Interestingly, if I click a link to thesession.org from within the mastodon.social standalone web app (or the other way around), the link opens in my default browser. So the web apps don’t “own” the domains. That’s fine, although I wonder if it violates the principle of least surprise—perhaps the expectation is that the installed web app is the preffered owner of that link.

I also tried adding Google Calendar to my dock. Ironically, I can only do this with Safari. For some reason, Google have chosen not to make their calendar a progressive web app …which means there’s no option to install it from Google Chrome.

They’re missing a trick there. It’s the perfect candidate for being a standalone app.

Actually, I take that back. Gmail is the perfect candidate for being a standalone app …and yet it’s not a progressive web app. Very odd!

With Safari, you can add any website to the dock. It doesn’t need to be a progressive web app. But the installation experience works best if there’s a manifest file pointing to some nice icons.

As it turned out, Google Calendar runs like an absolute dog in Safari (and therefore as a Safari-installed web app). Before you cry conspiracy, note that it runs absolutely fine in Firefox. I know because I use it in Firefox every day. But I can’t add it to my dock from Firefox because Mozilla turned their back on progressive web apps a while back. A bad decision.

Google Calendar isn’t the only thing that runs slowly in Safari’s engine. This page on The Session has a very large DOM and a badly-coded in-page search (I know, I know, I need to improve it). It works fine in other browsers but Safari struggles mightily.

(Update: I tried using Google Calendar from Safari again and it seems to be running just fine now. Maybe I caught it on a bad day? In any case, I’ve added it to the dock now and it’s feeling good as a standalone app.)

Still, aside from a few annoying little things around permissions and performance—and the situation with discovery—it feels great to have websites that act just like other apps. I like that some of the icons in my dock are native, some are web apps, and I mostly don’t notice the difference.

I wonder if there’s much point using wrappers like Electron any more? I feel like they were mostly aiming to get that parity with native apps in having a standalone application launched from the dock.

Now all you need is a website.

CSS Nesting and the Cascade | WebKit

As well as a very welcome announcement, Jen has a really good question for you about nesting in CSS.

If you have an opinion on the answer, please chime in.

Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

It’s great to see how (progressive) web apps are being supported on both iOS and macOS …I just wish the discovery were better.

People do use Add to Home Screen – Firefox UX

Oh no! My claim has been refuted by a rigourous scientific study of …checks notes… ten people.

Be right back: just need to chat with eleven people.

Audio Session API Explainer

Jen pointed me to this proposal, which should help smooth over some of the inconsistencies I documented in iOS when it comes to the Web Audio API.

I’ve preemptively add this bit of feature detection to The Session:

if ('audioSession' in navigator) { navigator.audioSession.type = "playback"; }

I documented a weird bug with web audio on iOS a while back:

On some pages of The Session, as well as the audio player for tunes (using the Web Audio API) there are also embedded YouTube videos (using the video element). Press play on the audio player; no sound. Press play on the YouTube video; you get sound. Now go back to the audio player and suddenly you do get sound!

It’s almost like playing a video or audio element “kicks” the browser into realising it should be playing the sound from the Web Audio API too.

This was happening on iOS devices set to mute, but I was also getting reports of it happening on devices with the sound on. But it’s that annoyingly intermittent kind of bug that’s really hard to reproduce consistently. Sometimes the sound doesn’t play. Sometimes it does.

I found a workaround but it was really hacky. By playing a one-second long silent mp3 file using audio, you could “kick” the sound into behaving. Then you can use the Web Audio API and it would play consistently.

Well, that’s all changed with the latest release of Mobile Safari. Now what happens is that the Web Audio stuff plays …for one second. And then stops.

I removed the hacky workaround and the Web Audio API started behaving itself again …but your device can’t be set to silent.

The good news is that the Web Audio behaviour seems to be consistent now. It only plays if the device isn’t muted. This restriction doesn’t apply to video and audio elements; they will still play even if your device is set to silent.

This descrepancy between the two different ways of playing audio is kind of odd, but at least now the Web Audio behaviour is predictable.

You can hear the Web Audio API in action by going to any tune on The Session and pressing the “play audio” button.

A pretty sweet push notification solution for mobile Safari

An entire generation of apps-that-should-have-been web pages has sprung up, often shoehorned into supposedly cross-platform frameworks that create a subpar user experience sludge. Nowhere is this more true than for media — how many apps from newspapers or magazines have you installed, solely for a very specific purpose like receiving breaking news alerts? How many of those apps are just wrappers around web views? How many of those apps should have been web pages?

Web Push on iOS requires installing the web app - Webventures

Instead of doing what the competing browsers are doing (and learning from years of experience of handling Web Push), Apple decided to reinvent a wheel here. What they’ve turned up with looks a lot more like a square.

Push notifications are finally arriving on iOS—hallelujah! Like I said last year, this is my number one wish for the iPhone, though not because I personally ever plan to use the feature:

When I’m evangelising the benefits of building on the open web instead of making separate iOS and Android apps, I inevitably get asked about notifications. As long as mobile Safari doesn’t support them—even though desktop Safari does—I’m somewhat stumped. There’s no polyfill for this feature other than building an entire native app, which is a bit extreme as polyfills go.

With push notifications in mobile Safari, the arguments for making proprietary apps get weaker. That’s good.

The announcement post is a bit weird though. It never uses the phrase “progressive web apps”, even though clearly the entire article is all about progressive web apps. I don’t know if this down to Not-Invented-Here syndrome by the Apple/Webkit team, or because of genuine legal concerns around using the phrase.

Instead, there are repeated references to “Home Screen apps”. This distinction makes some sense though. In order to use web push on iOS, your website needs to be added to the home screen.

I think that would be fair enough, if it weren’t for the fact that adding a website to the home screen remains such a hidden feature that even power users would be forgiven for not knowing about it. I described the steps here:

1. Tap the “share” icon. It’s not labelled “share.” It’s a square with an arrow coming out of the top of it.
2. A drawer pops up. The option to “add to home screen” is nowhere to be seen. You have to pull the drawer up further to see the hidden options.
3. Now you must find “add to home screen” in the list

• Copy
• Add to Reading List
• Add Bookmark
• Add to Favourites
• Find on Page
• Add to Home Screen
• Markup
• Print

As long as this remains the case, we can expect usage of web push on iOS to be vanishingly low. Hardly anyone is going to add a website to their home screen when their web browser makes it so hard.

If you’d like to people to install your progressive web app, you’ll almost certainly need to prompt people to do so. Here’s the page I made on thesession.org with instructions on how to add to home screen. I link to it from the home page of the site.

I wish that pages like that weren’t necessary. It’s not the best user experience. But as long as mobile Safari continues to bury the home screen option, we don’t have much choice but to tackle this ourselves.

Pluralistic: Web apps could de-monopolize mobile devices (13 Dec 2022) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

But you can’t have a web app without a web-app-compatible browser, and you can’t get a web-app-compatible browser in Apple’s App Store. The only browsers permitted in the App Store are those based on WebKit, the browser engine behind Safari. This means that every browser on iOS, from Firefox to Edge to Chrome, is just a reskinned version of Safari.

I wrote recently about making the switch to logical properties over on The Session.

Initially I tried ripping the band-aid off and swapping out all the directional properties for logical properties. After all, support for logical properties is green across the board.

But then I got some reports of people seeing formating issues. These people were using Safari on devices that could no longer update their operating system. Because versions of Safari are tied to versions of the operating system, there was nothing they could do other than switch to using a different browser.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but as long as this situation continues, Safari is not an evergreen browser. (I also understand that problem lies with the OS architecture—it must be incredibly frustrating for the folks working on WebKit and/or Safari.)

So I needed to add fallbacks for older browsers that don’t support logical properties. Or, to put it another way, I needed to add logical properties as a progressive enhancement.

“No problem!” I thought. “The way that CSS works, I can just put the logical version right after the directional version.”

element {
  margin-left: 1em;
  margin-inline-start: 1em;
}

But that’s not true in this case. I’m not over-riding a value, I’m setting two different properties.

In a left-to-right language like English it’s true that margin-inline-start will over-ride margin-left. But in a right-to-left language, I’ve just set margin-left and margin-inline-start (which happens to be on the right).

This is a job for @supports!

element {
  margin-left: 1em;
}
@supports (margin-inline-start: 1em) {
  element {
    margin-left: unset;
    margin-inline-start: 1em;
  }
}

I’m doing two things inside the @supports block. I’m applying the logical property I’ve just tested for. I’m also undoing the previously declared directional property.

A value of unset is perfect for this:

The unset CSS keyword resets a property to its inherited value if the property naturally inherits from its parent, and to its initial value if not. In other words, it behaves like the inherit keyword in the first case, when the property is an inherited property, and like the initial keyword in the second case, when the property is a non-inherited property.

Now I’ve got three CSS features working very nicely together:

1. @supports (also known as feature queries),
2. logical properties, and
3. the unset keyword.

For anyone using an up-to-date browser, none of this will make any difference. But for anyone who can’t update their Safari browser because they can’t update their operating system, because they don’t want to throw out their perfectly functional Apple device, they’ll continue to get the older directional properties:

I discovered that my Mom’s iPad was a 1st generation iPad Air. Apple stopped supporting that device in iOS 12, which means it was stuck with whatever version of Safari last shipped with iOS 12.

My website has different themes you can choose from. I don’t just mean a dark mode. These themes all look very different from one another.

I assume that 99.99% of people just see the default theme, but I keep the others around anyway. Offering different themes was originally intended as a way of showcasing the power of CSS, and specifically the separation of concerns between structure and presentation. I started doing this before the CSS Zen Garden was created. Dave really took it to the next level by showing how the same HTML document could be styled in an infinite number of ways.

Each theme has its own stylesheet. I’ve got a very simple little style switcher on every page of my site. Selecting a different theme triggers a page refresh with the new styles applied and sets a cookie to remember your preference.

I also list out the available stylesheets in the head of every page using link elements that have rel values of alternate and stylesheet together. Each link element also has a title attribute with the name of the theme. That’s the standard way to specify alternative stylesheets.

In Firefox you can switch between the specified stylesheets from the View menu by selecting Page Style (notice that there’s also a No style option—very handy for checking your document structure).

Other browsers like Chrome and Safari don’t do anything with the alternative stylesheets. But they don’t ignore them.

Every browser makes a network request for each alternative stylesheet. The request is non-blocking and seems to be low priority, which is good, but I’m somewhat perplexed by the network request being made at all.

I get why Firefox is requesting those stylesheets. It’s similar to requesting a print stylesheet. Even if the network were to drop, you still want those styles available to the user.

But I can’t think of any reason why Chrome or Safari would download the alternative stylesheets.

My comments to Competition and Markets Authority on mobile browser competition - Alistair Shepherd

A thoughtful response to the current CMA consultation:

The inability to compete with native apps using Progressive Web Apps fully—particularly on iOS—also has a big impact on my work and the businesses I have worked with. Progressive Web Apps are extremely accessible for development, allowing for the creation of a simple app in a fraction of the time and complexity of a native app. This is fantastic for allowing smaller agencies and businesses to innovate on the web and on mobile devices and to reach consumers. However the poor support for PWA features by Safari and by not allowing them in the App Store, Apple forces app development to be difficult, time consuming and extremely expensive. I have spoken with many companies who would have liked an app to compete with their larger competitors but are unable to afford the huge costs in developing a native app.

Get your response in by Friday by emailing browsersandcloud@cma.gov.uk.

The Biggest Thing from WWDC 2022 - Webventures

Web Push on iOS will change the “we need to build a native app” decision.

I agree.

Push notifications are definitely not the sole reason to go native, but in my experience, it’s one of the first things clients ask for. They may very well be the thing that pushes your client over the edge and forces them, you and the entire project to accept the logic of the app store model.

News from WWDC22: WebKit Features in Safari 16 Beta | WebKit

Good news and bad news…

The good news is that web notifications are coming to iOS—my number one wish!

The bad news is that it won’t happen until next year sometime.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t enable notifications on my phone. Text messages are the only exception. I don’t want to get notified if a new email arrives (I avoid email on my phone completely) and I certainly don’t want some social media app telling me somebody liked or faved something.

But the number one feature I’d like to see in Safari on iOS is web notifications.

It’s not for me personally, see. It’s because it’s the number one reason why people are choosing not to go all in progressive web apps.

Safari on iOS is the last holdout. But that equates to enough marketshare that many companies feel they can’t treat notifications as a progressive enhancement. While I may not agree with that decision myself, I get it.

When I’m evangelising the benefits of building on the open web instead of making separate iOS and Android apps, I inevitably get asked about notifications. As long as mobile Safari doesn’t support them—even though desktop Safari does—I’m somewhat stumped. There’s no polyfill for this feature other than building an entire native app, which is a bit extreme as polyfills go.

And of course, unlike on your Mac, you don’t have the option of using a different browser on your iPhone. As long as mobile Safari doesn’t support web notifications, nothing on iOS can support web notifications.

I’ve got progressive web apps on the home screen of my phone that match their native equivalents feature-for-feature. Twitter. Instagram. They’re really good. In some ways they’re superior to the native apps; the Twitter website is much calmer, and the Instagram website has no advertising. But if I wanted to get notifications from any of those sites, I’d have to keep the native apps installed just for that one feature.

So in the spirit of complaining about web browsers in a productive way, I just want to throw this plea out there: Apple, please support web notifications in mobile Safari!

The good news is that web notifications on iOS might be on their way. Huzzah!

Alas, we’re reliant on Maximiliano’s detective work to even get a glimpse of a future feature like this. Apple has no public roadmap for Safari. There’s this status page on the Webkit blog but it’s incomplete—web notifications don’t appear at all. In any case, WebKit and Safari aren’t the same thing. The only way of knowing if a feature might be implemented in Safari is if it shows up in Safari Technology Preview, at which point it’s already pretty far along.

So while my number one feature request for mobile Safari is web notifications, a close second would be a public roadmap.

It only seems fair. If Apple devrels are asking us developers what features we’d like to see implemented—as they should!—then shouldn’t those same developers also be treated with enough respect to share a roadmap with them? There’s not much point in us asking for features if, unbeknownst to us, that feature is already being worked on.

But, like I said, my number one request remains: web notifications on iOS …please!