undefined | Better HN

story

0 pointsalwillis7y ago0 comments

Then of course there's the lack of support for WebRTC and virtually no support for PWAs.

From Webkit.org, June 7, 2017 [1]:

>Today we are thrilled to announce WebKit support for WebRTC, available on Safari on macOS High Sierra, iOS 11, and Safari Technology Preview 32. In this post, we will go through an overview of our implementation. We will have future posts that cover more best practices for developers.

[1] https://webkit.org/blog/7726/announcing-webrtc-and-media-cap...

For PWAs, you need Service Workers and some accompanying APIs and Safari seems to have those as well: https://webkit.org/blog/8090/workers-at-your-service/

0 comments

ravenstine7y ago

Thanks for pointing that out. Still, Safari is super late to the game with WebRTC.

Safari supports service workers but without support for the Web App Manifest, hence no "Add to Homescreen", PWAs are basically crippled on iOS.

https://webkit.org/status/#specification-web-app-manifest https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Manifest

Android Browser, Chrome, and Firefox all support this feature at this point but not Safari or anything that uses WebKit. So while service workers are supported on iOS Safari, PWAs are relegated to being mere cached webpages. The manifest is probably more important than service workers because without it all you have is a webpage that is treated no differently from other web pages. A progressive web app is supposed to share characteristics with normal apps by definition and be recognized as such by the browser, which is still not the case in Safari.

So yes, there is still virtually no support for PWAs. There would be partial support if some manifest features were implemented, but currently it's not supported at all.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse