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428 points coronadisaster | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.351s | source
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philistine ◴[] No.23677180[source]
I’ve heard so many people complain on HN about Safari’s lack of support for APIs. Before now, we didn’t have a public justification why Apple refused to implement them. Now we know.

The price of a Safari user in the ad market is going down, and it’s exactly what should be happening. I’m very happy with Apple.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/09/apple-safari-privacy-feature-...

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fastball ◴[] No.23677307[source]
Except "privacy" as a justification is BS.

You can implement these APIs while at the same time requiring explicit permission from the user before a web application can use them. This preserves privacy while also giving users the option to have much more powerful web applications.

Apple doesn't want to implement these APIs because currently if you want access to these things on iOS, you need to go through their walled garden App Store, where they get a big chunk of any revenue you might make on such a service and can nerf competitors and all the other anti-competitive stuff they're doing.

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user5994461 ◴[] No.23677413[source]
I don't want random web sites I open (and their ads) to ask permission to scan bluetooth in my area and use usb devices connected to my computer. A website has no business doing any of that. There is no justification for these API to exist.
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Alex3917 ◴[] No.23677466[source]
> I don't want random web sites I open (and their ads) to ask permission to scan bluetooth in my area and use usb devices connected to my computer.

Why not? It makes complete sense for something like a website that backs up the photos stored on your camera. What's even the counter argument, that if people want to back up their data they should have to pay Apple?

If you've granted a website access to a restricted API, the browser can just paint a flashing red border around the website or whatever, similar to how people configure their terminals when they're SSH'd into prod.

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1. mitchdoogle ◴[] No.23680834[source]
I don't want random sites to ask to use anything on my computer. It's like a popup ad - it's annoying and blocks the site. Sure, there are legitimate use cases, but if it's anything like push notifications it will be heavily abused and far too many sites will ask for permissions.