Journal tags: standalone

Apple announced some stuff about artificial insemination at their WorldWide Developer Conference, none of which interests me one whit. But we did get a twitch of the webkit curtains to let us know what’s coming in Safari. That does interest me.

I’m really pleased to see that on desktop, websites that have been added to the dock will be able to intercept links for that domain:

Now, when a user clicks a link, if it matches the scope of a web app that the user has added to their Dock, that link will open in the web app instead of their default web browser.

Excellent! This means that if I click on a link to thesession.org from, say, my Mastodon site-in-the-dock, it will open in The Session site-in-the-dock. Make sure you’ve got the scope property set in your web app manifest.

I have a few different sites added to my dock: The Session, Mastodon, Google Calendar. Sure beats the bloat of Electron apps.

I have encountered a small bug. I’ll describe it here because I have no idea where to file it.

It’s to do with Spaces, Apple’s desktop management thingy. Maybe they don’t call it Spaces anymore. Maybe it’s called Mission Control now. Or Stage Manager. I can’t keep track.

Anyway, here are the steps to reproduce:

1. In Safari on Mac, go to a website like adactio.com
2. From either the File menu or the share icon, select Add to dock.
3. Click on the website’s icon in the dock to open it.
4. Using Apple’s desktop management (Spaces?) available through the F3 key, drag that window to a desktop other than desktop 1.
5. Right click on the site’s icon in the dock and select Options, then Assign To, then This Desktop.
6. Quit the app/website.
7. Return to desktop 1.

Expected behaviour: when I click on the icon in the dock to open the site, it will open in the desktop that it has been assigned to.

Observed behaviour: focus moves to the desktop that the site has been assigned to, but it actually opens in desktop 1.

If someone from Apple is reading, I hope that’s useful.

On the one hand, I hope this isn’t one of those bugs that only I’m experiencing because then I’ll feel foolish. On the other hand, I hope this is one of those bugs that only I’m experiencing because then others don’t have to put up with the buggy behaviour.

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.

Trys liked it too:

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.

I updated my Mac to the newest operating system, Sonoma. I did this to try out the new “add to Dock” feature in Safari. It’s like the “add to Homescreen” action on iOS.

Before I get into what’s good, I have to start by ranting about a big problem on both desktop and mobile: discovery.

First of all, you have to know that a square with an arrow sticking out of it means “share”.

Okay, I can buy it. It’s no better or worse than the three horizontal lines of a hamburger icon, or the three horizontal dots of a kebab icon. And whereas the hamburger and kebab icons are used as a catch-all cupboard to sweep all your rubbish into, at least this icon has a specific meaning. It means share, right?

Well, it used to. But now it’s also home to “add to Homescreen” and “add to Dock”. Neither of those actions are sharing.

Stretching semantics, I suppose you could say you’re sharing something with yourself.

Anyway, this is the biggest issue with progressive web apps on both iOS and Mac. Regardless of how well they work, there’s not much point if most people don’t know the option exists.

(Update: Jen rightly points out that you can also get to “add to Dock” from the file menu. Doh! How did I miss that‽)

Discovery aside, I was interested to see how Safari handles web apps on desktop compared to how Chrome does it.

I’ve had one or two web apps in my dock for a while, installed through Chrome. Google Meet is one of them. I use it quite a bit, and honestly it feels no different to using a native desktop app.

One annoyance is that the Chrome browser also automatically launches whenever I launch the Google Meet icon in my dock. This wouldn’t matter if Chrome were my default browser, but I use Firefox. So whenever I’m using the Google Meet web app, there’s a Google Chrome icon hanging around in my dock, saying “gizza job, I can do that.”

I opened Google Meet in Safari and then selected “add to Dock” from the square with an arrow sticking out of it. Then I quit Safari. I was delighted to see that when I launched the Google Meet web app from the dock, it didn’t automatically launch Safari! Excellent!

Even better, links within a Safari-installed web app respect your default browser choice. What I mean is, previously when I had Google Meet installed via Chrome, if I clicked an external link in Google Meet it opened in Chrome. But now with the Google Meet installed via Safari, external links open in Firefox, my browser of choice. Very good!

But the Safari-installed version of Google Meet is, alas, over-zealous with permissions. I have to grant access to my microphone and camera every single time I launch it. Previously—with the version installed via Chrome—it remembered my choice.

Now I don’t know if the behaviour in the Safari-installed version is a deliberate choice made for security reasons, or if it’s a bug. I suspect it’s a bug. After all, on iOS you get access to more permissions if a site is added to the homescreen—it’s the only way to ask for permissions for notifications, for example.

I added a few more sites to my dock: mastodon.social and thesession.org. They both work really well as standalone apps.

Interestingly, if I click a link to thesession.org from within the mastodon.social standalone web app (or the other way around), the link opens in my default browser. So the web apps don’t “own” the domains. That’s fine, although I wonder if it violates the principle of least surprise—perhaps the expectation is that the installed web app is the preffered owner of that link.

I also tried adding Google Calendar to my dock. Ironically, I can only do this with Safari. For some reason, Google have chosen not to make their calendar a progressive web app …which means there’s no option to install it from Google Chrome.

They’re missing a trick there. It’s the perfect candidate for being a standalone app.

Actually, I take that back. Gmail is the perfect candidate for being a standalone app …and yet it’s not a progressive web app. Very odd!

With Safari, you can add any website to the dock. It doesn’t need to be a progressive web app. But the installation experience works best if there’s a manifest file pointing to some nice icons.

As it turned out, Google Calendar runs like an absolute dog in Safari (and therefore as a Safari-installed web app). Before you cry conspiracy, note that it runs absolutely fine in Firefox. I know because I use it in Firefox every day. But I can’t add it to my dock from Firefox because Mozilla turned their back on progressive web apps a while back. A bad decision.

Google Calendar isn’t the only thing that runs slowly in Safari’s engine. This page on The Session has a very large DOM and a badly-coded in-page search (I know, I know, I need to improve it). It works fine in other browsers but Safari struggles mightily.

(Update: I tried using Google Calendar from Safari again and it seems to be running just fine now. Maybe I caught it on a bad day? In any case, I’ve added it to the dock now and it’s feeling good as a standalone app.)

Still, aside from a few annoying little things around permissions and performance—and the situation with discovery—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.

I wonder if there’s much point using wrappers like Electron any more? I feel like they were mostly aiming to get that parity with native apps in having a standalone application launched from the dock.

Now all you need is a website.

It’s said that the best way to learn about something is to teach it. I certainly found that to be true when I was writing the web.dev course on responsive design.

I felt fairly confident about some of the topics, but I felt somewhat out of my depth when it came to some of the newer modern additions to browsers. The last few modules in particular were unexplored areas for me, with topics like screen configurations and media features. I learned a lot about those topics by writing about them.

Best of all, I got to put my new-found knowledge to use! Here’s how…

The Session is a progressive web app. If you add it to the home screen of your mobile device, then when you launch the site by tapping on its icon, it behaves just like a native app.

In the web app manifest file for The Session, the display-mode property is set to “standalone.” That means it will launch without any browser chrome: no address bar and no back button. It’s up to me to provide the functionality that the browser usually takes care of.

So I added a back button in the navigation interface. It only appears on small screens.

Do you see the assumption I made?

I figured that the back button was most necessary in the situation where the site had been added to the home screen. That only happens on mobile devices, right?

Nope. If you’re using Chrome or Edge on a desktop device, you will be actively encourged to “install” The Session. If you do that, then just as on mobile, the site will behave like a standalone native app and launch without any browser chrome.

So desktop users who install the progressive web app don’t get any back button (because in my CSS I declare that the back button in the interface should only appear on small screens).

I was alerted to this issue on The Session:

It downloaded for me but there’s a bug, Jeremy - there doesn’t seem to be a way to go back.

Luckily, this happened as I was writing the module on media features. I knew exactly how to solve this problem because now I knew about the existence of the display-mode media feature. It allows you to write media queries that match the possible values of display-mode in a web app manifest:

.goback {
  display: none;
}
@media (display-mode: standalone) {
  .goback {
    display: inline;
  }
}

Now the back button shows up if you “install” The Session, regardless of whether that’s on mobile or desktop.

Previously I made the mistake of inferring whether or not to show the back button based on screen size. But the display-mode media feature allowed me to test the actual condition I cared about: is this user navigating in standalone mode?

If I hadn’t been writing about media features, I don’t think I would’ve been able to solve the problem. It’s a really good feeling when you’ve just learned something new, and then you immediately find exactly the right use case for it!

If you download Safari Technology Preview you can test drive features that are on their way in Safari 15. One of those features, announced at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, is coloured browser chrome via support for the meta value of “theme-color.” Chrome on Android has supported this for a while but I believe Safari is the first desktop browser to add support. They’ve also added support for the media attribute on that meta element to handle “prefers-color-scheme.”

This is all very welcome, although it does remind me a bit of when Internet Explorer came out with the ability to make coloured scrollbars. I mean, they’re nice features’n’all, but maybe not the most pressing? Safari is still refusing to acknowledge progressive web apps.

That’s not quite true. In her WWDC video Jen demonstrates how you can add a progressive web app like Resilient Web Design to your home screen. I’m chuffed that my little web book made an appearance, but when you see how you add a site to your home screen in iOS, it’s somewhat depressing.

The steps to add a website to your home screen are:

1. Tap the “share” icon. It’s not labelled “share.” It’s a square with an arrow coming out of the top of it.
2. A drawer pops up. The option to “add to home screen” is nowhere to be seen. You have to pull the drawer up further to see the hidden options.
3. Now you must find “add to home screen” in the list

• Copy
• Add to Reading List
• Add Bookmark
• Add to Favourites
• Find on Page
• Add to Home Screen
• Markup
• Print

It reminds of this exchange in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy:

“You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.”

“But the plans were on display…”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a torch.”

“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look you found the notice didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of The Leopard.’”

Safari’s current “support” for adding progressive web apps to the home screen feels like the minimum possible …just enough to use it as a legal argument if you happen to be litigated against for having a monopoly on app distribution. “Hey, you can always make a web app!” It’s true in theory. In practice it’s …suboptimal, to put it mildly.

Still, those coloured tab bars are very nice.

It’s a little bit weird that this stylistic information is handled by HTML rather than CSS. It’s similar to the meta viewport value in that sense. I always that the plan was to migrate that to CSS at some point, but here we are a decade later and it’s still very much part of our boilerplate markup.

Some people have remarked that the coloured browser chrome can make the URL bar look like part of the site so people might expect it to operate like a site-specific search.

I also wonder if it might blur “the line of death”; that point in the UI where the browser chrome ends and the website begins. Does the unified colour make it easier to spoof browser UI?

Probably not. You can already kind of spoof browser UI by using the right shade of grey. Although the removal any kind of actual line in Safari does give me pause for thought.

I tend not to think of security implications like this by default. My first thought tends to be more about how I can use the feature. It’s only after a while that I think about how bad actors might abuse the same feature. I should probably try to narrow the gap between those thoughts.