Déjà vu.

Yesterday I used "lazy way" to define a WebKit decision. That led to endless discussions, including the WebKit team, the Chrome team, Apple haters, Apple lovers, Google haters, Google lovers. Some people from Apple took it too personal. Are Safari/WebKit teams lazy? +

There are many things we can put into a laziness basket:
－Some bugs take years to be solved
－WebKit status website is not always updated
－There are many things not documented at all anywhere
－Homescreen webapps are evolving slowly and quietly and no one talks about them +

－Safari is well known for NOT documenting things related to iOS and iPadOS. Safari TP and release notes are pretty good but for macOS only. For 10 years in a row, I always found new abilities, problems, even APIs that are not mentioned in any doc. +

My first finding was in iOS 4.2 when I found in a research the Accelerometer API that was documented a few weeks or months after my post and the stable version being launched. Most of you will know all my work on Safari and iOS after that up to last week + http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/safari-ios-accelerometer-websockets-html5

－The Safari and WebKit team is well-known for not answering any questions they don't (or can't) answer, such as the ones on PWAs. You can be in a conversation, but when some keywords appear, the conversation is muted. No more answers. Even not a "I don't know" or "can't say". +

Last week I asked several questions on the DevForums as the WebKit team suggested. I also asked questions on Twitter, some of them regarding WebAuthN were answered. All the questions on Service Workers, WKWebKit and AppStore were ignored. No answer. (question) => undefined +

Of course, they don't need to answer me. Just to anyone. Or document the abilities, and maybe answer questions when docs are not complete or good enough. With the latest version, I was expecting a change based on Twitter interaction, but so far it's still the same. +

Some questions around "are you going to fix this bug" end with "Apple doesn't comment about future plans". And you think, come on! I'm not asking about if the WebView will work on your AR glasses, I need my standard IndexedDB code to work for your users! +

Safari tag: https://developer.apple.com/forums/tags/safari
From 33 questions, only 3 have answers only for some specific topics (extensions).

WebKit tag: https://developer.apple.com/forums/tags/webkit
It has 254 questions. How many answers? 5. Only for one topic: WebView, and not all of the WebView questions. +

I've been approached twice by members of the team to take my usual suggestions on what's missing in docs, deprecations, usual questions for iOS. The last one was a year ago. Nothing, not even a comma, has changed since my last list on shipped features without any doc or info. +

I can continue but the thread is already long enough. Does all of this mean the WebKit and Safari teams are lazy?

Of course not! That's not laziness!

They are doing a pretty good job on some parts they care about, but playing ghosts on other parts. +

After all of these situations, we are talking about conscious decisions, based on resource limitations, the company's policies, or other reasons they don't want to disclose. It's probably not the team's fault, so critics should be taken personally. I criticize the final result. +

I don't buy the Safari is the new IE, or that Google is the good one and Apple the bad one or that sort of childish definitions. The reality is complex and Google has its own similar situations. PWA is love and hate at the same time at Google (not at the sub-world Chrome) +

The Android developer or Play Store websites have no modern mention to Progressive Web Apps, Trusted Web Activities, WebAPK, and related technologies. It's like that doesn't exist. A ghost. The only reference looks like taken from 10 years ago. No link to Chrome Dev info. +

So no, I don't think browser teams are lazy, but they can choose the laziest paths sometimes. They have their reasons that we, as developers, don't like; sometimes there are some apparently valid excuses used to mask the real reasons that we can only imagine. +

It's funny that both Google and Apple are enforcing every once in a while that they love the Web. They need to tell us that. Maybe it's because some of us sometimes think that might not be the case always. +

I've been working for the Web platform for almost 25 years. I've been teaching and consulting for dev teams for 20 years. This is actually not new.

Déjà vu.