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428 points coronadisaster | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.239s | 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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jodrellblank ◴[] No.23677496[source]
Recently I’ve seen a jump in the number of random sites popping up a “this site wants to access VR hardware” dialogs in FireFox; news articles nothing to do with VR or visualisation. I don’t have any VR devices.

How do you do this bit “requiring explicit permission from the user before a web application can use them” without the fallout of “its just a hundred thousand popups and you’re done!” on every page?

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badwolf ◴[] No.23677892[source]
Just the constant "this website would like to send you push notifications" on every last damn site.
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1. spideymans ◴[] No.23681035[source]
Part of me wishes that browsers dropped support for web push notifications entirely. Or at least bury it in the browser settings somewhere. At best, they provide marginal value to me, and at worse, they're just spammy.

My parents aren't techsavy at all, so when they get those push notification requests, they just hit "accept". They now get dozens of spammy ads sent to them via push notifications (eg, "30% off sale, buy now!")

I've disabled web push notifications entirely, but I still get JavaScript-based prompts asking me for permission to turn on notifications. I already explicitly said no, yet web developers still feel compelled to find workarounds to interrupt my work and ask me for permissions (why?).

I get that in theory, web notifications are supposed to be valuable, but in practice its been nothing more than a constant annoyance for me.