[HN Gopher] Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025
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       Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025
        
       Author : dhruv3006
       Score  : 45 points
       Date   : 2025-12-18 04:55 UTC (5 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (zerotrickpony.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (zerotrickpony.com)
        
       | Terretta wrote:
       | The full screen thing -- have you tried saving the SPA to the
       | home screen?
       | 
       | Together with some meta tags, that launches full screen and stays
       | full screen, like an app.
       | 
       | The bashing on apple for this "to sell more apps" is nonsense,
       | Apple originally designed and intended for HTML5 apps to beat
       | Flash.
       | 
       | One of the earliest games for iPhone was PacMac, it was a SPA web
       | app saved to home screen, it worked great.*
       | 
       | OTOH, in 30 years of web dev, I never got pages about raccoons to
       | work either.
       | 
       | * _Haven 't checked this lately to see if they deprecated this._
        
         | brailsafe wrote:
         | > The bashing on apple for this "to sell more apps" is
         | nonsense, Apple originally designed and intended for HTML5 apps
         | to beat Flash.
         | 
         | Whatever their apparent intention might have been ~15 years
         | ago, it would be hard to argue that Apple puts a lot of
         | resources into trying to protect its fiefdom. I don't think it
         | would be all that different to suggest they (Apple) wouldn't
         | try to control how people pay for apps by preventing app
         | developers to offer a web-based payment option, on the basis of
         | their past relationship with HTML5. A huge component in their
         | success with iPhones has been control over the entire supply
         | chain.
         | 
         | That said, it is a somewhat conspiratorial take that is
         | probably better explained by laziness, bad choices, and control
         | over proprietary UX patterns (that suck), than generalized
         | competition, but it's not much of a reach. They also compute
         | localStorage limits differently and have always diverged for
         | stupid reasons
        
           | llmslave2 wrote:
           | Interestingly enough Apple has put a ton of effort into
           | Safari recently and have shot up to the top of the interop
           | leaderboards.
           | 
           | https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable
           | 
           | I don't really buy the conspiratorial takes either. I think
           | they just had different priorities for their browser.
        
       | NooneAtAll3 wrote:
       | this felt not as a "50 problems in web api" list, but more like
       | "50 reasons to stop caring about iOS and just leave it rotting"
        
       | qingcharles wrote:
       | I feel like there are a lot of iOS/iPadOS 17 and below devices
       | holding things back right now. Desktop browsers are in a really
       | good standards space now with their constant and frequent nagging
       | for users to update.
        
       | AshleysBrain wrote:
       | It sounds like they were testing with iOS 12? In practice that
       | has fallen out of use and doesn't need to be supported any more.
       | Yes, a bunch of problems are to do with Safari specifically, but
       | if you target relatively modern versions only (iOS 16+ is pretty
       | reasonable IMO) it'll save a lot of pain.
        
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       (page generated 2025-12-23 23:00 UTC)