Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

hx8

I'm writing this in Safari now, I'm a huge fan. There are several "features" that I actively dislike and disable in other browsers. I wonder if not being implemented in mobile safari is preventing them from being required in some webpages. * Vibration * Background Sync * Bluetooth * NFC * Notifications * Web Push

dgxyz

Yeah sorry but as an end user I’d rather have an actual app than some PWA thanks. Keep going Apple.

gib444

Well at least you can set a custom search engine URL – oh no, you can't, that would probably endanger some children or something !!

CamJN

Absolutely nothing listed on that site as unsupported by Safari has any business being part of the web. In fact several supported APIs should be chucked too. Fuck giving websites motion data or push notifications.

troupo

Imagine if these countless of "Safari bad" sites didn't shill for Chrome by pretending that Chrome-only APIs are essential and standard web apis.

traceroute66

Frankly I am very happy indeed for Apple to "cripple" Safari. 99.9% of the things listed in that stupid table in the blog just stink of being potential attack vectors. And we know just how heavily smartphones are targeted and how smart and sneaky some of the latest vectors are.

pmdr

Used to have Firefox as a content filter for Safari on iOS (adblocking), but have since switched to Brave. It's a great option if you ignore all the crypto spam.

functionmouse

Thank God. Thank God! Too much going on these days.

Darkstryder

As a daily Safari on iOS user, I don’t care about any of this, but since iOS 26 basic Safari features such as bookmarks and text search have become so buried deep underneath, they are basically unusable at this point. It infuriates me a lot more than all the liquid glass stuff (on which I’m neutral overall).

mrtedbear

I'm not sure the other commenters claiming all these features are attack vectors actually read the list? How is the barcode detection API a security risk for example? Having it implemented would be amazing for web apps. Also there's features like deep linking into PWAs that ought to be pretty basic PWA functionality that's not on this list that even Safari on Mac OSX has but Safari on iOS doesn't. Even the add to home screen menu option is deliberately made hard to find. Apple doing this for the benefit of the user is one of the less likely hypotheses.

pjmlp

The advocates of ChromeOS Platform keep pushing their agenda. Chrome APIs and Electron crap, and then everyone complains about Microsoft.

ocdtrekkie

I very much appreciate the secure baseline Safari settles on. The entire ecosystem is protected by Safari being slow and reasonable. My only peeve is that Apple resets the feature flags with every update. So the one experimental feature I use I have to reenable each and every time I get a phone update.

agust

Worth noting that Apple doesn't just cripple iOS Safari, it cripples all iOS browsers because it also forces them to use WebKit, the crippled browser engine underneath Safari. It would be fine if they just made Safari bad, that's their choice. But they don't stop there: they make the entire web bad on iOS purposely to promote the native apps they can tax.

nazgu1

Also WebUSB, WebMIDI. Not to mention that you can’t develop an app for you (and your family and friends) without have developer subscription :(

hk1337

How many of these features that chrome offers have been fully flushed out and in a true working stable state? Google Chrome has a habit of pushing features out before they're really ready and Safari is usually on par with Firefox for features from what I have seen.

matthewfcarlson

Like most people (at least on this thread). I’m okay with the vast majority of these things not supported in mobile safari. But man, Bluetooth would be nice. I often provision esp32 devices for various things and either I need an app or a laptop when my phone is perfectly capable.

samlinnfer

To be honest, I'm really surprised they let PWAs have notifications. That's literally the only use case we have on that entire page and it actually works.

easeout

Gotta meet your audience where they are. As a Mobile Safari user, the foremost way I feel my use of the web is crippled is that pages assume a bigger screen or are just poorly arranged. This of all web pages ought to be easy to read on an iPhone screen, but the way it's constructed prevents it. You can't zoom the whole page out to see the entire table width because the table is in a scrolling frame and wider than its box. You can only scroll the nested frame sideways to see how row labels relate to iPhone cells. If you give up and use landscape, it still scrolls vertically in its frame. You have to aim for the margin or else you'll scroll just an inch and be halted because you caught the table. Because it's critical that the web be as free as it is: • It's natural that some pages turn out like this • So it's natural the web is a little bit shitty all over • So it's natural the demand for richer web features is low

daft_pink

To be fair, some of these features are security issues some users don’t want to have in their browser.

MantisShrimp90

I recently posted about how I refuse to buy apple products because of stuff like this. The lock in has made iPhone users dependent on a app ecosystem when we could have had most of our functionality through the open web. People saying they don't want these features are missing the point. Its about control and if developers have the option to make something as a website that actually works that gives them less incentive to make an app that apple can take 30% of your profit from while you are forced to write in their proprietary language for the stuff that only works on their devices. So much engineering duplication of effort and waste just to satisfy a bottom line.