Counterpoint: Your whole narrative is just Apple PR talk in disguise.

If Safari were even remotely close to being "the best mainstream browser" as you claimed, it would manifest itself in Safari capturing a dominant market share i.e. people would naturally gravitate towards Safari without Apple forcing it upon users. Apple would also invest much more into Web technology, but they don't have any interest in doing that since it would threaten their App Store business model.

"Pushing back on features" translates directly to "preventing web apps from becoming a viable threat" and none of this is about UX, which is just one of the convenient pretexts to make Apple's devious and self-serving behavior more palatable. No matter how often Apple shills try to rephrase and euphemize it, anyone who has recognized Apple's conflict of interest in this regard will see through it.

FWIW, Mozilla seems to share the same sentiments about many of the standards that Google has been pushing for. They may have different incentives, but Apple does not sit alone on every one of their views.

Mozilla doesn't have a multi-billion dollar App Store creating a direct conflict of interest. Their motives aren't comparable. A few overlapping concerns don't refute the primary evidence of Apple's self-serving behavior. The key decisions that hobble web apps and protect the App Store moat are specific to Apple's conflict of interest.

Of course there's conflict of interest. I'd prefer we address all the things their actions motivated by that conflict of interest are shielding me from before we smack them down, though. After that, yeah, I'll take up a pitchfork, too.

For now, they're my AnCap-approved optional private enforcement regime against a bunch of the antisocial and market-capturing behavior of the rest of tech, since public regulators are asleep at the wheel. I'd much prefer real, very aggressive (by modern standards, if not historical) enforcement of meaningful consumer protection, standards mandates, and trust-busting across the board, but this is the only option I've got (aside from "just use less tech, and far less-usefully")

All hurting them now does is hand more control of the tech ecosystem to Google.

Meanwhile: yes they in fact have the best mainstream browser, and it's not even close.

>Meanwhile: yes they in fact have the best mainstream browser, and it's not even close.

You have lost all credibility. I mean, you had very little to begin with using a 5-day old Apple-shill account, but now you have zero.

Safari is the absolute worst browser, by far, approaching Internet Explorer levels of wtf. On iOS it implements touch gestures completely differently than other browsers, because Apple does what Apple wants - forcing developers to buy a real iPhone just to debug their shitty browser. Their lack of webAPIs is absolutely to push developers to their App store - and I know this first hand because I have a web app that works on every other browser but Safari due to its lack of APIs. So if I want to support apple, I have to pay them for the privilege to develop said app, as well as pay them to buy their hardware to develop and test the app. Fuck all of that. I don't have to do that for any other browser or platform.

My initial suspicion of you being a bad faith actor who is just regurgitating "Apple PR talk" has been proven true.

1) Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813704 you regurgitate the classic Apple propaganda of "web apps are akshually not 'real' apps" - what makes apps 'real' for Apple propagandists is clearly when everybody is forced to pay Apple 30% tax.

2) The hallmark of the irrational Apple shill is also how increasingly bizarre and contradictory the apologia in defense of the trillion dollar company's anti-competitive business practices becomes, as you've just proven: "private enforcement regime against a bunch of the antisocial and market-capturing behavior of the rest of tech" - what kind of absurd logic is that?

Apple should be allowed to break the law according to you, so they can pretend to oppose something they are also guilty of themselves!? Then you disingenuously claim that "I'd much prefer real, very aggressive enforcement of meaningful consumer protection, standards mandates, and trust-busting across the board, but this is the only option I've got", but that's clearly not the "only option you've got" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... ) since you are literally opposing the other option by fighting regulators through spreading of disingenuous talking points in defense of Apple's unlawful business practices.

Accounts like these have me wondering if Apple marketing has some guerrilla marketing branch to spam the internet.

>You've got some serious biases sending you some weird places in evaluating my posts.

You are talking about a "serious bias" after spamming the same debunked Apple propaganda, with a 5 days old account? lol.

>> 1) Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44813704 you regurgitate the classic Apple propaganda of "web apps are akshually not 'real' apps" - what makes apps 'real' for Apple propagandists is clearly when everybody is forced to pay Apple 30% tax.

>Yeah, that's my opinion on every platform, including back when I used Android. It's my opinion on Void Linux. It's my opinion everywhere, whether or not Apple's getting a cut (why would I possibly care that they make more money? Hell I'd love for them to have actual competition in their specific niches, to put downward pressure on their profitability, as far as their actual products they sell go). I've come to it through extensive engagement with the Web and various native ecosystems over decades, as both a user and developer. Webtech is a steaming pile of ass. It's so bad it makes the prior standard-setters for "steaming pile of ass" in its field look good.

Well your opinion is biased nonsense and conveniently regurgitates propaganda designed to defend anti-competitive business practices. Web Apps do an excellent job despite being actively sabotaged and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about since your rhetoric is drenched in misinformation.

>Frankly, fuck off. You're being a dick for absolutely no reason. That's the flat-out truth. I could wrap that in HN-friendly passive-aggression, but screw that, you need to chill the fuck out, to be blunt.

I get that you're not used to getting called out on your dishonest and manipulative rhetoric, but you should have anticipated that before spamming the same debunked Apple propaganda for the 1000th time with a fresh account, because you know that it's bullshit propaganda.

Oh stop this fake incredulity. You're shilling for Apple and did such a bad job of it that you were found out while your account is still green. Take it on the chin instead of lashing out. Better luck with your next shill account.

Humans aren’t perfectly logical. The free market and the best options rising to the top is made up liberal hegemony propaganda.

There's a grain of truth to it — Apple has learned from Microsoft's history that making the whole browser shitty is too obvious and annoys users. Apple was smart enough to keep user-visible parts of the browser in a good shape, while also dragging their feet on all the Web platform features that could endanger the App Store cash cow.

90% of real apps are 95% web views. Let go ahead and be for real. Even on desktop most apps are Electron these days.

>I don't want web apps on my phone (or, in an ideal world, anywhere else) so that's also a good thing. If they're not viable, it forces developers to make real apps or else just make a web page instead of whatever awful-UX nonsense they were planning.

Well what you personally want is irrelevant to the law and what regulators judge to be unlawful, so that's the real good thing.

>If they're not viable, it forces developers to make real apps or else just make a web page instead of whatever awful-UX nonsense they were planning.

They are perfectly viable and it has nothing to do with UX, but you have already exposed your bias and made clear that you are arguing in bad faith by spreading misinformation in your other comments.

I remember there was a time years back when there were "light" variants of apps, usually intended for underpowered or older Android phones, but that also came in handy if you were in a situation where you had shitty cell service, or if you needed to preserve your battery. You could run the Opera Mini browser on a trash phone and it was blazing fast without wrecking your battery. Maybe 5% of sites would have a rendering issue, but you could always switch back to your main browser if you needed to use it.

Nowadays, I think the trend is more toward putting a battery-saver or data-saver mode inside an existing app, rather than creating an entirely new app, and I don't see any reason why Apple couldn't do something like this in Safari if they wanted to.

Counterpoint: Safari uses more battery than Chrome while providing less functionality: https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...