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Comment by FoxBJK | Hacker News Reader

Wonder how long it'll take for Blink to overtake WebKit on iOS in terms of usage.

A few weeks, at least. By that point, nearly every user should have gotten a notification that YouTube, GMail or Google Search is 100000% better with Chrome.

On iOS I doubt people use the browser for YouTube, GMail. Those have dedicated apps.

Why do people install those apps? Because the first time they visit that site on a new phone it tells them that everything will be better in the app, without mentioning that this is mostly true only for advertisers.

And essentially every time you click a link in one of those apps.

Ehh...I do think the native app often gives a better experience than mWeb.

Don't get me wrong, a really well-written PWA with fully cached assets is often almost at a native app experience level, but that's not usually the case with most mWeb implementations.

For Gmail, perhaps — I think that’s one of the best cases for push notifications on the web — but YouTube basically comes down to whether you need large offline storage and search is a non-issue.

One thing I noticed about both Google and Facebook’s apps before deleting them was that in addition to using more battery, both were slower in their apps than using the web site. That was surprising but consistent & a large part of why I ditched them.

For me, YouTube comes down to the fact that if I use YouTube through Firefox for Android, and install the "Video Background Play Fix" addon, then I can go for a walk with my phone in my pocket and listen to things through YouTube without having it pause as soon as the screen turns off.

Well, I believe you can do that if you pay for YouTube Extortion Edition or whatever it's called. Which I used to do, until too many ads still came through and I got pissed off.

(Though note: if I got to a YouTube link through anything other than going directly to the site and searching, then it would open in the app. Which would then pause when I turned off the screen. Which was irritating. Fixed by disabling the YouTube app entirely. Life is much better now.)

Ah, that works in mobile Safari without an extension.

Does mobile Safari block ads?

There are content blockers, which are not as comprehensive as Firefox or Chrome extensions but also avoid the performant and privacy concerns common in that space.

> avoid the performance [...] concerns common in that space.

Which performance concerns?

Historically there have been issues with inefficient code on pages with lots of elements or larger data sizes than expected. Since web pages are complex and ads continue to evolve, there’s this constant arms race where people run more code trying to block them and that code takes time and memory to run, and the update cycle means things are pushed out quickly.

A lot of the examples I’ve seen were unexpected situations: e.g. if you look at every <img> with a poorly-tuned regex and someone uses data: URLs, it might be backtracking pathologically on orders of magnitude longer strings. There used to be an issue with each injected CSS file being stored separately - it was fixed years ago but there was a multi-year period where people would complain about Firefox being slow, you’d ask if they had AdBlock Plus installed, and the performance issue cleared up as soon as they disabled it – the problem was an extremely large style sheet multiplied by every open tab and iframe. It was bad enough that they officially called it out on the Mozilla blog:

https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...

The other thing to remember is that a browser developer has to support every user, not just the savvy ones. You might know to stick to certain more-trusted extension but the Safari developer’s threat model has to include someone’s grandfather installing McEaglePatriotGuardElite and blaming Apple when their iPad is slow or that injected code is exploitable. Apple characteristically chose to respond to that by reducing flexibility, which is certainly a valid decision but also one people can reasonably disagree with.

I also use YouTube through a browser. But besides the dark patterns and ads, it's still a worse UX.

So use an Invidious instance. Sure, YouTube blocks the subtitles for some of them, but if you need subtitles, it only takes a couple of minutes to find one of the new subtitles-available instance, and you're good for at least a few months.

That's still a website. I'd much prefer a native app, just without ads and autoplay, etc.

What would an app give you that a website doesn't?

> Don't get me wrong, a really well-written PWA with fully cached assets is often almost at a native app experience level

And what would those be? When this question is asked, people inevitably bring up Twitter as the shining example. And it's just horrendously bad.

I've never seen a good major one TBH. The best PWA I've ever used, however, is this Palm OS emulator:

https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/

I don't have a ROM to import, but it does look quite nice in what's available. Definitely much better than what major companies put out :)

Does Wordle count? It’s simple but it had a ton of users so it might be the most popular.

Wordle is amazing.

Also, very simple ;) I mean, UI-wise and interaction-wise

So you're saying that opening the browser market will improve data collection and reduce the need to install apps, thus strenghtening the web?

Sounds amazing.

I’m saying that it doesn’t do the web a service to break one monopoly while doing nothing about the more successful second monopoly. I want an open App Store but I also want fair competition in the browser market.

but imagine if they didn't need the app

On iOS you can block YouTube ads if you watch through the browser. That alone makes plenty of people not bother with the app.

I don't think it ever would. I think the majority of users would stay with the default browser.

I think that within a more tech-aware demographic, they'll see more people use Chrome.

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