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by EGreg 3301 days ago
Does this mean Apple may actually implement Service Workers and Web Push in the next Safari?? :)
5 comments

I hope not as Service Workers is an awful technology.

It is completely hostile to users. If I close a web page I expect everything related to that web page to stop. Immediately. I don't expect there to be lingering background threads consuming battery life, network data and disk storage. And in Chrome you can only discover service workers by enabling a Debug mode and memorising a specific URL. Exactly how does a non-developer figure out what is going on ?

If Apple had any sense they would ban service workers and instead propose use case specific, tightly focused and managed APIs that focus on security and battery life first.

Also just a hint at a future where Botnets are running in your browser:

https://sakurity.com/blog/2016/12/10/serviceworker_botnet.ht...

Service workers were designed to only work during events which you opted into. Either because you loaded the site which is now making requests, or because you OPTED IN to receive notifications.

Think about it this way... why do you have to download an entire app just to use a site? Don't like the notifications? Turn the off.

Yes because ordinary users never, ever opt in to things they shouldn't. And because of that one opt-in mistake suddenly they have invisible service workers mining Bitcoins which they could never learn about since the discovery mechanism for service workers is currently non-existent.

Again, the concept of background tasks isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it needs to be locked down to specific use cases not a free for all allowing arbitrary JS to be executed.

So limit the amount of CPU/bw/etc. they can use, just like mobile platforms do for background apps?
Installing an app is a higher bar than tapping the "get out of my way" button on a modal dialog that some website just shoved in your face.
Oh good. It can only burn 10% of my battery and bandwidth to make someone else rich. That's fair.
Service Workers are "under consideration" (https://webkit.org/status/#specification-service-workers), but there's no mention of Web Push. We can only hope.
Would assume no since they have APNS built into Safari/macOS [1] with a registration workflow that is nowhere close to the one that the Push API spec uses. I think Apple would keep it that way since they are sensitive about notifications not being used to spam/advertise.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi...

I wish Web Push would go away. The last thing I/most people/my inlaws who can't use a computer need is more notifications
By Web Push you mean http2.0's push feature? If so then yes (http://caniuse.com/#search=http%2F2).

AFAIK Service workers are still under consideration, and nothing was announced.

By Web Push EGreg probably means https://www.w3.org/TR/push-api/ which requires Service Workers as a dependency.