Stuck in the dock

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.

Why Safari does not need any protection from Chromium – Niels Leenheer

Safari is very opinionated about which features they will support and which they won’t. And that is fine for their browser. But I don’t want the Safari team to choose for all browsers on the iOS platform.

A terrific piece from Niels pushing back on the ridiculous assertion that Apple’s ban on rival rendering engines in iOS is somehow a noble battle against a monopoly (rather than the abuse of monopoly power it actually is). If there were any truth to the idea that Apple’s browser ban is the only thing stopping everyone from switching to Chrome, then nobody would be using Safari on MacOS where users are free to choose whichever rendering engine they want.

The Safari team is capable enough not to let their browser become irrelevant. And Apple has enough money to support the Safari team to take on other browsers. It does not need some artificial App Store rule to protect it from the competition.

WebKit-only proponents are worried about losing control and Google becoming too powerful. And they feel preventing Google from controlling the web is more important than giving more power to users. They believe they are protecting users against themselves. But that is misguided.

Users need to be in control because if you take power away from users, you are creating the future you want to prevent, where one company sets the rules for everybody else. It is just somebody else who is pulling the strings.

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.

Open Web Advocacy

A grassroots coalistion of web developers lobbying to get Apple to allow fair competition on iOS.

We have identified the #AppleBrowserBan as the number one threat to the future of the open web.

Design for Safari 15 - WWDC 2021 - Videos - Apple Developer

There’s a nice shout-out from Jen for Resilient Web Design right at the 19:20 mark.

It would be nice if the add-to-homescreen option weren’t buried so deep though.

Progressive Web Apps have leapfrogged the native install model … but challenges remain

While many challenges remain, the good news is … it’s progressive. Developers can already see the benefits by sprinkling in these technologies to their existing websites and proceed to build on them as browsers and operating systems increase support.