[lxgr]

And I could see Safari changing its behavior to only allow HDR for actually playing videos (or even playing videos with actually varying content, if websites start playing clever games with one second loops of still images), or maybe only after confirming an "I am wearing sunglasses right now" prompt.

[zamadatix]

If it were to become a real problem I'd sooner see Apple, of all vendors, leave it as one of the many settings flags in Safari than intentionally avoid or remove support for wide range media in their app.

Related: there is also a CSS property coming which allows sites to control which page content should be clamped to standard range or not. Worst case you can just add an * !important override in your Safari->Preferences->Advanced->Style Sheet if nobody else considers it problematic but you still wanted to clamp things (in Safari, otherwise you can just disable HDR).

[lxgr]

Apple is definitely not afraid to block otherwise widely available features behind flags or extra clicks. For example, Web Push is available on iOS only for "installed PWAs".

[zamadatix]

Specifically media support though, for which Apple has built their entire OS (both macOS and iOS) and app experience around having the best out of the box color experience for designers/aesthetics (e.g. bit depth, wide gamut, true tone type adjustments, hdr all widely adopted early for this reason). This is in contrast to your example of Web Push, which is the antithesis of their goals on how the OS should be used and what for.

The only reason Safari lacks HDR image support on macOS right now is it's their lowest priority platform for the feature. It's coming, it's supported on their other platforms, and it wasn't an unreviewed accident they've been working on it.

[lxgr]

Apple's days of their primary customers being photographers, designers etc. are long past, so I'm not sure I see the distinction between advertisers pushing their content by having it render brighter than #FFFFFF and web push notification spam.

I do believe that Apple generally has plans to implement HDR support in Safari, but I wouldn't be surprised if they immediately walked that back once we see abuse of the technology annoying regular users.

[LoganDark]

> they've been working on it.

Could you provide a link to any recent communication from them about this, or are you just speculating based on that other platforms support it?

[zamadatix]

I don't know about a communication... but I can do one better! You can download the latest Safari Technology Preview on macOS, toggle the "Support HDR Display" feature flag, and see it working (for certain image formats and HDR encodings - it's a flag in preview for a reason). E.g. the images at https://ccameron-chromium.github.io/hdr-jpeg/index.html will be brighter (if your mac has an HDR display attached with HDR enabled) but not the images from this HN post yet.

[LoganDark]

very interesting, thank you!!

[tshaddox]

Why would we expect this to become more of a problem than, say, websites playing audio quietly to encourage you to turn your volume up, than playing extremely loud audio?

[zamadatix]

Websites can't autoplay audio anymore (which is actually really annoying in a few use cases) precisely because of abuse.

I don't think it'll be problematic though because a site can already choose to show you images a lot more bothersome than a bright light (I say this as I type on a 1600 nit HDR monitor) already and that's not a particularly common problem to worry about either. Same for videos, which already HDR support in browsers.

[tshaddox]

> Websites can't autoplay audio anymore (which is actually really annoying in a few use cases) precisely because of abuse.

But this is hardly true. There are some complicated heuristics (like Chrome's "Media Engagement Index") but many websites can and do autoplay video and audio. And browser policies are even more relaxed for playing audio on user events (like clicking).

[zamadatix]

MEI (and the like) is what I'm referring to, though perhaps we look at this from different angles. Sites can still mark audio should autoplay but it's now up to the browser to decide if it actually does it (because shitty sites would abuse that).

[jchw]

It looks like the current Safari developer preview supports it for images, according to the Mozilla bug.