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Apple’s Safari web browser is missing some advanced features compared to Chrome, Firefox and other browsers. Fortunately, a major shortcoming is being fixed: push notifications.
Apple confirmed last year that it was working on standard web push notification support for Safari on all platforms, including Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Before that point, Safari only supported Apple’s proprietary push technology, which few websites supported. The new feature works with standard web push notifications, the same ones sites already use to send alerts via Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge. It’s already made it to macOS Ventura, and now Apple is testing iOS 16.4 beta and iPadOS 16.4 beta, which finally brings the functionality to iPhones and iPads.
Web notifications are useful for web applications, but they are incredibly unpopular everywhere. Mozilla said in 2019 that requests to allow push notifications from sites were rejected more than 97% of the time by Firefox users. That’s probably why Apple is implementing the feature differently than most mobile browsers on Android devices: Sites can’t request to send notifications unless they’re checked on the home screen. Presumably, if you love a site or web app so much that you’d add it to your home screen, chances are you’re open to the idea of getting push notifications.
Apple said in a blog post today: “A web app that has been added to the home screen can request permission to receive push notifications as long as that request is in response to direct user interaction, such as tapping the ‘subscribe’ button. provided. by the web application. iOS or iPadOS will prompt the user to give the web app permission to send notifications. The user can then manage those permissions for the web app in the Notification Settings, just like any other app on iPhone and iPad. Web app notifications work exactly like other app notifications. They show up on the lock screen, in Notification Center, and on a paired Apple Watch.”
However, those are not all the improvements coming to Safari on iPhone and iPad. Web apps on the home screen can now set a badge to the icon, just like native apps, and use more advanced display and video APIs. Finally, if you add a site to the home screen that hasn’t created a special icon, Safari will now generate one from the site’s name and colors instead of using a simple screenshot.
The new features are available in Safari 16.4, which is currently only in the beta versions of iOS 16.4 and iPadOS 16.4, but will soon roll out to everyone.
Source: WebKit Blog
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