Apple declined to implement 16 Web APIs in Safari due to privacy concerns

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-...

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.

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?

Easy. You don't have them in popups, you have them in a dropdown that the user selects themselves. Websites then need to learn to fail gracefully if not given certain permissions, otherwise consumers need to stop using those websites.

The solution to privacy concerns is not "nuke functionality", it's "don't let websites abuse functionality for tracking purposes".

Just like how with native apps on iOS, the solution is not "don't let apps ever access GPS data", it's provide a UX that makes it fairly easy to choose and don't provide permissions to apps that don't need them.