[mostafaberg]

>I don’t know about you, but the idea of having a fully capable web browser in my pocket was a huge part of the appeal.

A: Both iOS and android have fully capable web browsers, I'm not sure what's missing here ?

>I’m talking about stuff that QA should have caught, stuff that if anybody at Apple was actually building ? apps this way would have noticed before they released.

A: They do pass QA, that's why features are removed

>One quick example that bit me was how they broke the ability to link out to an external website from within an app running in “standalone” mode. target=_blank no longer worked.

A: Thank god apple no longer allows that, how do you expect a tiny screen to have popups and switch web browser views when you click links ? this is a very bad UX.

>We were running a chat product at the time, so anytime someone pasted a URL into chat it was essentially a trap.

A: I'm not here to judge your decisions or why you did it that way, but IMHO a chat product doesn't really belong in a "web browser"

>The message from Apple seemed clear: web apps are second-class citizens on iOS

A: Exactly, and it is that way for many good reasons.

I see you've mostly switched to android just so you can continue developing webapps, that's okay for you, but it's not a really good reason at all. Don't be like the people who where bashing apple when it decided to remove support for flash player, because that's one of the reasons the web has become the way it is today, i'm not an apple fanboy, i also did the switch from iOS to Android after around 7 years too.

[danjoc]

>A: Both iOS and android have fully capable web browsers, I'm not sure what's missing here ?

Specifically he mentions his WebRTC video streaming app "just works" on Android Chrome and Firefox.

http://caniuse.com/stream

According to that, it does not work on iOS Safari. Not any version. Ever. Apple only allows Safari on iOS. Therefore, any application that would like to do streaming will have to be native on iOS. Will have to pay Apple a 30% tax. Will have to live with Apple's approval and release schedules.

Apple has allowed Safari to stagnate in significant areas that would permit web apps to compete with native apps. This isn't another iOS vs Android flame war. It's more an indictment of Apple's development priorities on the mobile browser.

[mostafaberg]

I saw that point yeah, sorry i missed mentioning it, but in my opinion, this is not even closely a reason to compare iOS to android, that's basic browser limitation, even though it's pretty recent on android, and your link marks it as "partial support", I wouldn't see it from a developer point of view nor from an end user point of view.

He was even comparing iOS to an old android phone, which definitely didn't support it either way and wouldn't even be updatable to support those new features.. and I wouldn't call a browser that doesn't WebRTC as a less capable one.

[bobbles]

> Apple only allows Safari on iOS

Blatantly false?

https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/chrome-web-browser-by-google...

[thekingshorses]

Not at all.

There is only one rendering engine on iOS. Apple TOS prohibits all other rendering engines. Chrome uses Safari/webkit rendering engine to render the page.

[outside1234]

Chrome is just framing webkit. Its still "safari" under the covers.

[Tloewald]

The general "Safari is the new IE" meme comes down to Apple having different priorities than other browser vendors (notably Google) when adding features. Right now the complaints tend to center on Service Workers and WebGL, but there are quite a few browser technologies in which Safari support lags.

The things Apple priorities -- battery life and security, for instance -- don't mean much to most developers who would prefer to be able to use <insert sparkling new web tech here> without worrying about shims, and so on. Problem is, you can't quote that "there are 1.5 billion Android users out there" with this in mind and keep a straight face. A huge proportion of those users are NOT using a browser this group wants to target.

[ricardobeat]

> Thank god apple no longer allows that, how do you expect a tiny screen to have popups and switch web browser views when you click links ? this is a very bad UX.

I don't think you realize what he's talking about. Any mobile app has the ability to open links either sending them to the default browser or using a webview overlay. How is not being able to open any links at all a better user experience?

[mostafaberg]

1-You're wrong, any app can do that on iOS/Android. who says that you can't open links from an iOS app ?

2-He was specifically talking about webapps in "standalone" mode, he specifically mentioned using `target="_blank"`. that kind of behavior does not belong in mobile environments, actually i personally disallow that on my computer too, but that's personal choice.

[naibafo]

>Both iOS and android have fully capable web browsers, I'm not sure what's missing here ?

I think at that point he was referring to the initial appeal of the iphone, when th efirst one was released. there was no Android and no comparable device existent at the time.

>Thank god apple no longer allows that, how do you expect a tiny screen to have popups and switch web browser views when you click links ? this is a very bad UX.

What kind of phone are you using? most things got screens so big that they don't fit into my pocket anymore.

>I'm not here to judge your decisions or why you did it that way, but IMHO a chat product doesn't really belong in a "web browser"

Rocket.chat does exactly that and it is fantastic. Other webapps as well. The key feature being that you can chat on any browser, and using for example electron (the engine based on chrome, also used by the atom editor) you can easily build apps for every platform. And if you add features, they are added everywhere at the same time without a problem

[mostafaberg]

>I think at that point he was referring to the initial appeal of the iphone, when th efirst one was released. there was no Android and no comparable device existent at the time.

True, but don't forget that the first iPhone was an expensive piece of nothing really, we had no app store nor sdks

>What kind of phone are you using? most things got screens so big that they don't fit into my pocket anymore.

I come from iPhone 3Gs->4->4s->5->6->6s->LG G4, I can say that it's a HUGE screen with bigger resolution than my desktop, but what i meant was the total size of the screen in physical size, i don't want no friggin popups and many windows in a 5" screen

>Rocket.chat does exactly that and it is fantastic. Other webapps as well. The key feature being that you can chat on any browser, and using for example electron (the engine based on chrome, also used by the atom editor) you can easily build apps for every platform. And if you add features, they are added everywhere at the same time without a problem

Ofcourse there are tons of good examples out there, I'm explaining my personal point of view when it comes to web browsers and doing lots of in it that that it was never intended for. I'm fine if you just rename it from web browser to "JS App Container" or whatever, but to me a web browser is just a place to browse pages

[guelo]

> A: I'm not here to judge your decisions or why you did it that way, but IMHO a chat product doesn't really belong in a "web browser"

Slack built a very successful chat app on top of the desktop browser.

[mostafaberg]

Where's your argument ? You can make the worlds best services/apps in the web browser, that doesn't mean it's the de facto.

Also a chat app or any of the other fancy webapps we see here does not fit into the definition of a web browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser

[guelo]

The context of this discussion is wanting to make the mobile browser a suitable platform for development of all apps similar to what has happened in the desktop browser. One of the reasons for this is that the web is one of the few truly open platforms. That it doesn't fit your opinions about what belongs in a web browser is not very interesting, especially since you're not giving any reason why you think some apps should not be in the browser.

[e15ctr0n]

>> I’m talking about stuff that QA should have caught, stuff that if anybody at Apple was actually building ? apps this way would have noticed before they released.

> A: They do pass QA, that's why features are removed

Even if QA catches stuff, it frequently gets ignored by developers and product managers who don't want anything holding up the ship date.

If the software gets frequent updates, this becomes the norm. Bug fixes come in future development cycles, not when they are found.

QA is the least powerful group in any software engineering setup so it's amusing that consumers think of them as God-like powerful creatures who can hold up releases.