A couple of things. First, I agree on the idea Safari for years ignores bugs and move on.

Then, I think you need to add here the full story, not just the one that supports your point. If not, the whole message is too soft

  • PWAs run on iOS; that’s the whole idea of the P. I understand the basic problem of course, but we should stop being hypocrites here. Do we want a Progressive Enhancement based solution or not?
  • AppCache is not deprecated on Apple. I’m not saying it’s the same as SW; I’m not saying it’s not buggy and that is perfect. But it’s there anyway. You can do some things still today for offline app shell caching. I don’t like how it works today, but not mentioning it at all doesn’t help.
  • Do you know the whole PWA thing was promoted by Steve Jobs first? And basically the Web community didn’t take it and then Apple didn’t evolved it? The whole SW+WAM thing is basically inspired by Apple solution (much better! but inspired)
  • The whole mobile web as we know it today was presented for the first time by Steve Jobs 10 years ago. Don’t give the right credit here is also bad for the message. It feels fanatic.
  • Apple did a signal about PWAs lately. I’m not saying it’s enough, but there is a signal. iOS 11 will replace after years the engine behind Web.app, so the problem of the tap-delay won’t be there in a few months, and API compatibility and performance will be better (check Safari 11 release notes)
  • Microsoft said 13 months before that PWAs will be supported on Edge. Cool! But 13 months later and 2 versions of Edge after the announcement and we still don’t have it. I’m not saying it won’t but at this rhythm it might even be in Safari before Edge :P There is a little of marketing there, so you are complaining about Safari but not Edge. You can say: “SW are in beta” there, well… they were for 2 versions (Edge 14 and Edge 15). But Web App Manifest is not there and last time I checked there is no signs of it yet. BTW… same on Firefox. Look at this: http://caniuse.com/#search=web%20app%20manifest

I’m not here to defend Safari, I’m here to say that the whole story is usually better than just the one you prefer ;) I really thing that for Apple moving into Service Workers and Web Push is a must at this point. I’m also disappointed there is no news on iOS 11 about it. And also think the reason why Apple is not there has to do probably on how these things came into the market. Some tweet fights a couple of months (years?) ago demonstrated that some political errors might happened to not having consensus on how to replace AppCache and “home screen meta tags”

    Maximiliano Firtman

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    mobile+web developer, author, trainer, speaker | firt.mobi