I don't think many people would consider "Don't use safari" banners a valid option unless the website was somehow really focused on non-apple users or not trying to sell something.
weird, i haven't had that issue! i run a site that's set up¹ to redirect image requests to a WebP version if the Accept header allows it; half our team uses Macs w/ Safari and no one reported any issues with images.
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¹ wordpress + webp-express: https://github.com/rosell-dk/webp-express i guess it's possible they special-case Safari, i'll check later
But whatever the case is, Safari definately does not support webp and special exceptions need to be made to support this edge case.
Nope you are right, when reading the linked issues, safari doesn’t have webp support.
Accept: image/png, image/svg+xml, image/*;q=0, video/*;q=0.8, */*;q=0.5
i also tested it in Firefox, which sends:
Accept: image/webp, */*
honestly, i'm not entirely sure how
image/*;q=0
*/*
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edit: looking at the generated .htaccess, it appears that WebP is served only if Accept contains an explicit `image/webp` (no wildcards), so that explains it.
I count that as a good thing about ios safari.
Roll20 is also such a niche thing already it's not really a fair example. People who want to use roll20 will use another browser because they want to play dnd with their friends. Most stores don't have that social aspect.
It takes someone who really cares about these issues to bother switching back and forth between two different browsers because you want to use a non-Chromium for most things but have to use Chromium for a couple of things. The vast majority would just say "well, whatever" and switch completely.
The dark side to this is that the Chrome team can implement an API as an experiment, then when it's ready, propose it to the standards body and push it through before anybody else can catch up.
I get what you're saying though. Google has the manpower to crank these out at a volume none of its competitors can, but I don't think that's a failure of the standards process.
Chrome's lumbering march to total dominance has been frightening to watch for many years now, and it only seems to be accelerating.
If you have a good idea for a new web standard, you can download the chromium source, add your new standard, build your cool webservice to work with it, and send the chromium OWNERS (many of whom don't work for Google) a PR.
Sure, there will be a bunch of rounds of review and questioning if your feature really is suitable for the whole web, but at the end of the day you'll probably get it in. Then you can add it to Firefox. You could theoretically add it to safari too, but they don't really like taking PR's these days...
Battery status? It could be useful to know if the PC is connected to a power source and the level of the battery, even for a stupid scenario like watching a video, when I'm low on battery I usually reduce the resolution of a YouTube video because reproducing a 4k60p video uses a lot of resources, and drains the battery quickly. It would be useful if the webapp could just do that automatically, maybe on YouTube an option like reduce resolution when low on battery. Or for games, or whatever uses a lot of resources.
Think about it: the only reason because Electron apps exist (and we waste 200Mb of disk for each one of them) is only because browsers don't have APIs to access the filesystem! To me is a waste, the browser should give each application (let's stop calling them sites, they are no longer that) the APIs and permissions to access hardware, just like on mobile devices you have a dialog that says "this app would like to access the internal storage, consent or deny?".
Where is the problem? The user should give the privilege (only one time) and you finally can do basically 99% of work in the browser (and maybe the browser introduces also API to run the application in a window), you no longer need Electron just to do these kind of things, is still more secure than Electron because the code is sandboxed by the browser, and you don't have to worry about packaging your software for different operating systems.
I don't think it's a wrong API, but it certainly is a backward one. I don't want a website to collect low-level information from my computer's ACPI sensors, and then build its own policy on top. (Will I, the user, get any control over that policy? Probably not.) Instead, I want my OS to implement an energy policy (and a control panel for that policy) and then to maybe expose the information about the current energy policy to websites.
E.g., I'd be fine with iOS telling websites that I currently have Low Power mode enabled. If I don't have it enabled, then I don't care if the website thinks 10% is an emergency—I left it disabled for a reason. (And, contrariwise, if I turned on Low Power mode at 100% battery, then I'd like the website to cooperate.)
For a similar idea, I don't want websites to try figuring out that my IP translates to a cellular data connection. But I do want the state of my OS's "Metered Data mode" setting to be passed on to websites, so that they can help me to use less data, when I've decided I want to do so.
That’s the whole point: they look like APIs that might be useful for something but then they invariably become used for fingerprinting or an attack surface and we find out that nobody was actually using it at all, even though we came up with a couple of legitimate-sounding use cases for it.
> the code is sandboxed by the browser
What’s the point of a sandbox if you keep poking holes in it by adding new APIs?
But when was it ever implemented in the wild? This applies to most of these "features". There's a bunch of theoretical use cases, but there's pretty much 0 use for it in reality, and even if there's significant use, it's used more for fingerprinting.
The idea isn't bad, but it should probably be guarded behind some permissions...
This is a great idea! Now I not only have to be careful what drivers I install, I also have to be careful which websites I visit or they'll drive-by brick my development tools. Thanks!
It really should not be easy to update firmware on a device. It should be hard enough that it establishes obvious user intent. And I don't want to use a browser to do this. They're unstable enough without adding in soft real-time requirements. Firefox crashes on me about once per day. Doing it while I'm updating a $3000 JTAG adapter would be an absolute disaster.
The right answer is for Mozilla to implement the API, and leave it disabled by default. Disabled meaning it reports 90% full all the time, or some suitable probability distribution. If a specific API is actually useful for something, then the browser can notice if it being used and pop up its own permissions dialog to enable the API per-site.
Let’s add Javascript to that list too.
Not all sites need it, and given the abuse it’s responsible for, it shouldn’t be permitted unless a user opts in.
And 99.999% of internet users will therefore be trained to blindly click "accept" on any permission popups a website shows them, since outside of HN pretty much everybody loves and appreciates the rich functionality javascript provides.
Or not, when they inevitably discover that leaving it turned off bypasses 90% of newspaper website paywalls whereas turning it on slows their browser down to a crawl and floods their screen with ads.
That single move from Microsoft more or less eliminated the need for any normal application run by any normal user to require admin-rights to function, something which up to that point more or less had been the norm.
Developers fixed their applications to work with a sane privilege level and pretty much everyone was better off.
Let’s do the same with the rampant JS-abuse on the web.
But I don't agree with the overall thesis, that the web fundamentally should not get features like these. Though, obviously, some of these "standards" have been rushed through and poorly executed.
I think for this we can blame Chromium's dominance. As the author said, many of these features were probably motivated by Chrome OS. And the devil's bargain of letting Chromium take such complete control over the web is that Google can strongarm whichever new "standards" they like into the Web.
The standards committee doesn't want WebBatteryStatus? Fine, we'll implement it anyway and now Chrome desktop/mobile, Chromebooks, and Edge will all have it. Sites that want to use it will probably just use it and throw up a "Use Chrome" notification for Firefox and Safari.