Asked an entire room full of webdevs yesterday if any of them knew that FF/Chrome/Opera/Brave/etc. for iOS weren't allowed to compete on engine quality. Zero hands up.
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The consequences of being forced into WebKit WebView on iOS are massive. Every browser there faces a Sophie's Choice: fast JS or no netstack pluggability. They all choose not losing benchmarks by a huge amount. And that's only one in the long line of constraints.
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Alternative browsers on iOS can never *really* be the default. And they can't use their own engines. And they can't use Service Workers, which means no Push Notifications or offline support. And no PWA installability. Etc. etc.
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Apple dramatically under-invests in WebKit, which means that the richest users have the jankiest web, and switching browsers doesn't help. Business decision makers don't think the web can deliver the experiences they want to give users because, on iOS (which they use), it can't.
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Replying to @slightlylate
I agree with all of this but have to say that Apple has made the web able to reach parity with native in terms of performance. In a way that has given the web a huge lifeline. We see this every day with just how capable iOS is for performant web apps compared to Android
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Replying to @maxlynch @slightlylate
If it wasn’t for that, Ionic wouldn’t work, and that would mean (millions?) of fewer web apps in the App Store. That would suck
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Replying to @maxlynch
Technically, Apple doesn't allow *any* web apps in their store. Actively hostile to the real web vs. their owned-and-operated closed stack.
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Replying to @slightlylate @maxlynch
Literal anti-web policy: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#minimum-functionality …
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Replying to @slightlylate
More like an anti-packaging up a website that doesn’t look nor feel like an app and requires an internet connection to run in the first place (as opposed to being bundled in the binary)
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...and they aren't collaborating on the Web Packaging design AFAICT. If you wanted to make the optimistic case for their motives, you've gotta ignore basically all of the past decade and current state.
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