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Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

My only complaint about Safari is I wish Apple would fully adopt PWA standards on iOS. I believe they don’t want to because it would make the App Store less necessary.

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Apple has systematically ensured PWAs are second-class apps on iOS. They've done just about everything they can to hobble them, including restrictions on memory, storage, notifications, background updates, and which browser can use them (only Safari). It's clear to everyone that this is done to prevent app developers from distributing their software outside the App Store. That's their largest profit centre. Of course they're protecting it.

The irony is that when the iphone was introduced, there was no way to write apps for it and jobs said the way to use third party code was to use a web app and add the link to the home screen (which you can still do, though I doubt many people even know that)

Partly, sure. Don’t think that’s the whole story. I don’t work at Apple or anything so I don’t know what actually goes on in board meetings but I think any tech person would see there are pros and cons to web apps versus native apps.

There’s a funny history where the original iPhone apps could only be web apps as there was no SDK! See history section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_SDK

You can watch Steve jobs rave about the future of PWAs here! https://youtu.be/QvQ9JNm_qWc

Beyond their anti-PWA bullshit, safari is just a worse browser across the board. It's the nre Internet Explorer. Much more on that here

https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/

Do you mind to address some of the points of the article that claims that Chrome is worse?

Well, first nothing that apple says should be taken at face value, especially when it comes to the web.

But if you're not inclined to educated yourself via the tremendous resource I shared, I suppose you could look at

https://wpt.fyi to see how far behind safari lags in supporting features.

There's also the fact that a proof of concept port of Microsoft edge to IOS significantly outperformed safari.

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/06/17/apples-webki...

Chrome is also not the only chromium browser. There's also Vivaldi, brave etc, which make up for some of the ad-related shortcomings of Chrome. I happily use Vivaldi.

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