Stuck in the dock
I was impressed with how Safari now allows you to add websites to the dock:
It feels great to have websites that act just like other apps. I like that some of the icons in my dock are native, some are web apps, and I mostly don’t notice the difference.
For all intents and purposes, this is a desktop application created without a single line of Swift or Objective-C, or any heavy Electron wrappers.
Oh, and the application can work offline! Service workers, and browser storage are more than stable enough to handle a variety of offline loading patterns. These are truly exciting times to be building for the web!
There was one aspect that I was particularly pleased with. External links:
Links within a Safari-installed web app respect your default browser choice.
Excellent! Except it’s no longer true. At least not in some cases. The behaviour is inconsisent but I’m running the latest version of Safari on the latest version of Sonoma, and now external links in a Safari-installed web app are broken. They just stay in the same application.
I thought maybe it was related to whether the website’s manifest file has the display
value set to “standalone” rather than, say, “minimal ui”. Maybe the “standalone” instruction is being taken literally? But even when I change the value I’m still getting the broken behaviour.
This may sound like a small thing, but it completely changes the feel of using the web app. Instead of feeling like “I’m using an app that just happens to be on the web”, it now feels like “I’m using a web browser but with fewer features.”
I’ve been loving having Mastodon as a standalone app in my dock. It used to be that if I clicked on a link in a Mastodon post, it would open in my browser of choice (Firefox) where I could then bookmark it, or do any other tasks that my browser offers me. Now if I click on a link in Mastodon, I’m stuck in the same “app”. It feels horribly stifling.
I can right-click on a link and get options that still keep me in the same app, like “Open link” or “Open Link in New Window.” To actually open the link in my web browser, I have to select “Copy Link”, then go to my web browser, open a new tab, and paste the link in there.
This is broken. I hope it isn’t intentional. Maybe I’m just at the receiving end of some weird glitch. If this stays this way, I’ll probably just remove the Safari-installed web apps from my dock. They feel pointless if they’re just roach motels.
I’d love to file a bug for this, but this isn’t a Webkit bug, it’s a Safari bug (and the Webkit bug tracker is at pains to point out that Webkit and Safari are not the same thing). But have you ever tried to file a bug with Apple? Good luck!
Anyway, I sincerely hope that this change will be walked back. Otherwise websites in the dock are dead in the water.