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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Developers should develop for the web, not one particular browser. There are desktop and native mobile applications that manage to work across multiple operating systems and cpu architectures, and you’re telling me web developers can’t test their shit on a handful of browsers and configurations?

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You're correct but it's not always this simple. Apple drags their feet with the implementation of some standards and sometimes there is nothing to fall back on. Many of those standards are just bringing functionality available in native apps to the web so we can only speculate that they do it to keep apps on the App Store. One good example is push notifications: they took a long time to support it, and the "Add to Home Screen" requirement makes it almost worthless.

That’s not a good example, that’s literally the worst example you could have possibly chosen. Push notifications are an anti-feature. It is a disgusting embarrassment that they were ever considered part of the web platform, and I admire Apple for rightfully resisting it.

Safari is a better browser because it doesn’t support them.

I see that reaction a lot but it doesn't make sense to me. Yes, there are apps that abuse them, but that is why it requires your permission. Exactly like how native apps require your permission to send you push notifications. So why are push notifications only acceptable in native apps?

> Safari is a better browser because it doesn’t support them.

It has supported them since iOS 16.4. The issue is they made enabling them so high friction for users that you're better off publishing a WebView wrapper to the App Store instead. More work for app devs, worse experience for users, but great for Apple because it's still on the App Store.

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