I have a hard time reconciling a little caution & reasonableness with a 12 year absence. Calling it "disingenuous haranguing" feels itself disingenuous.
Turns out in this case it wasn’t to prevent abuse, it was balancing their dev resources with a feature which wasn’t being used.[1] The link addresses WebKit, but similar search results turn up in standards groups referencing not just Apple but Microsoft and Google expressing similar objections.
> I have a hard time reconciling a little caution & reasonableness with a 12 year absence. Calling it "disingenuous haranguing" feels itself disingenuous.
I have a hard time reconciling the claim—that a feature implemented in the same year wasn’t for many years after—as a good faith opening of the conversation. People have plenty of reasonable misgivings about WebKit and Safari both in terms of progress and platform privilege. But just sidestepping facts to amplify those misgivings is not reasonable.
I didn’t know the history of this particular API when I saw the comment, but it took ten seconds to realize it had been misrepresented. OP could have taken that ten seconds too. It happens so frequently that there are whole tropes about Safari holding the web back while complaining about things… it’s supported for quite a while.
I’m being sincere when I say, there are plenty of things I wish WebKit/Safari would improve, and the vapid critique brigade that come out whenever this topic comes up are not helping and generally seem to be motivated by other priorities (see above re: platform privilege in this case), not by facts.
I think you're vastly over-ascribing a lot of malice to what has been a pretty harsh & specific tragic trauma that I/some others may not specifically remember, over this.
I missed some basically pointless details? So what? I remember Safari rejecting something that seemed elemental & necessary, & rebuffing essentials. I failed to see a small, short-lived specific, before the inner anti-web Safari beast took back over & re-asserted control. You seem to have vast sympathy for the 10 year absence of this feature, based off of 25 months of availability, before being snuffed out for- literally- the excuse of cheapness. 'We don't want to maintain it.'
> I didn’t know the history of this particular API when I saw the comment,
Bro, I thought it did. But you are agitating for a lot of scorn & anger my way for having missed a detail. It's an interesting footnote. But I fail to see how it impacts the pent-up frustration that's developed over the intervening decade since. What's the relevance here?
I don’t know what trauma you’ve experienced, but if you have and it’s presenting itself in missing browser functionality I hope you’ll take some time off to rest, you surely deserve it and very likely need it. And I apologize for the aggressive way I framed my comment.
SharedWorkers was but one (particularly salty) place crucial to the enterprise where Safari took an anti- stand.
https://webkit.org/blog/8048/what-spectre-and-meltdown-mean-...
My longstanding belief & understanding was that Safari was deliberately crippling cross-tab interactions. This felt like a marked place where Safari had did the right thing, and simply decided what was good for the web was bad for Apple. But I don't know where I'd go to find evidence or citations.
And in Safari 5, June 2010. Many features around workers, shared resources between them, high resolution timers and much more have been introduced… then removed… then reintroduced by all of the major browsers. As with push notifications, I’m glad the WebKit team has been cautious about adding or reintroducing functionality that could be abused.
There are surely pet bugs I wish they’d fix sooner, but they’re hardly the stagnation you portray, especially in the last couple years. There are features devs care about where WK and even Safari have been first to ship.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that iOS shouldn’t prevent other browser engines, albeit cautiously so. But this kind of disingenuous haranguing isn’t helping anyone understand the situation or helping them have a better experience on their own devices.