Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content

The key distinction is the withholding from your competitors part. WinAPI may have a ton of features labelled "pls no use thx" but MS doesn't block you from distributing a program that uses them anyway.

Yeah, this seems reasonable to me. The better thing to get annoyed at Apple for is being slow to implement web standards. I guess you could make the argument that they are choosing to work on stuff like this instead, but I think that’s a weak argument.

Private/secret APIs in DOS/Windows were a prominent part of the US and EU antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft in the 90s/00s.

If you use this CSS liquid glass effect in your app, Apple will reject it from the App Store.

If Apple uses this CSS liquid glass effect in their apps, it'll pass App Store review just fine.

Do you see the issue now?

You can use `-webkit-tap-highlight-color` on your website or PWA and distribute it any way you want. It will just not work in non-webkit browsers like Firefox.

What apple does and what the article talks about: They have a CSS property that ONLY they can use, you can't put that in your PWA, it won't work (no matter the browser).

Bad example since "-webkit-tap-highlight-color" is initially from Apple, not Google

I can install chrome on Windows, Linux and Mac, so I give them a pass. Not to mention that was ancient history.

Google or any open source map product. And actually, if we use the SCOTUS approved DOJ v MSFT consent decree as precedent, any app that can't use this private API component would be an impacted party.

I'm an antitrust nerd - 20+ years since I made my first PACER account as a teenager to get documents from interesting cases..

95% of what people call "anticompetitive" or "monopolistic" has no legal bearing. People don't know the legal definition of those words and bandy them about based on vibes.

This however, is a very very clear case of violations of precedent. If we look at Microsoft's final judgement https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/final-judgment-133 see F(1)(a), H(2)(b), while these stipulations haven't been applied to Apple, if I were in a market dominant position, I'd be super careful about capricious restrictions like the example undocumented API, and behavior that mimics patterns of activity that were seen as actionably sanctionable to similar market dominant forces

> With whom is Apple competing on their own web pages and apps?

With every other app using a web view.

> without referring to monopolies

Of course it’s about monopolies. Safari is still “privileged” to be forced default browser. Making an alternative, Apple ensured to be very hard and expensive. So gating any kind of first party feature is a big no.

It’s a way they can make their webview-based apps look “native” more easily than a third party can. If you try out a third-party app and it looks less well integrated visually than a similar first-party app, then the latter has a competitive advantage because of that.

I don't think it's an improvement, but having a GUI that matches user expectations is undeniably a business advantage.

I'm generally opposed to that as well. Agreeing with Muromec's reply, I don't think it is necessarily anticompetitive in the case where the console vendor doesn't favor its first party games, but of course all three do that in practice. The situation is somewhat mitigated by the existence of a flourishing open market alternative (PC games).

More broadly, and not based on antitrust grounds but on property rights grounds, I am opposed to every kind of DRM. First, it should be legal to circumvent any and all DRM/anti-copying measures. Second, it should be illegal to deprive the next owner of their property rights so that you can exert ownership control over a product past its sale.

If I buy a computer, do nothing but install a keylogging rootkit on it, and sell it on to someone else, I would rightly risk jail time. "The malware is part of the product" is not a valid excuse. DRM is also malware. It should be prosecuted as such, and if existing legislation is found wanting, more specific laws need to be written.

I'm assuming they don't like that either.

Apple does plenty of bad things, and many are worse than this, but it doesn't mean it's not fair to point out this one is bad, too.

It all comes down to "the vendor can do things with your computer you can't do yourself" in the end.

No, it says it is restricted. You need to set a private attribute on the webview to enable it. And if you interact with private APIs your app will be rejected in review.

Electron doesn't use WebKit, so definitely not. Not sure about Tauri desktop, but how would you use it for Tauri mobile and React Native?

"The Toupée Theory of In-App Webviews" is perfect. I might change it in the post.

> Apple used to be about insane polish.

I think that's mostly a brand narrative/myth. MacOS has always had warts at any given time.

Yes, those parts of the Settings app are built with web views that embed React Web:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30648424

When you tap some of the menu items in the “Saved to iCloud” section, they don’t have the normal grey item highlight that happens with the rest of the settings app.

according to the post, it doesn't exist on Safari

Actually it does not. It used to, but then was rewritten. The Accessibility Inspector app can be used to see what's the class of the UI elements, if you want to check.

True, but Apple did this to themselves. Their flat UI also drew a lot of ire for this initially, especially from accessibility concerned circles.

I don't buy it.

First, AR is currently aspirational at best. After decades of failures.

Second, overlaying translucid UI over content makes separation of UI from content worse, not better.

Windows Aero tried that 2 decades ago and, while it looked cool, they reverted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

> seems like the future

Please, please cite sources for this. Without context you are really just drawing conjecture here.

Apple certainly seems invested in the idea of an AR future. But users do not - ARkit integrations are few-and-far between, Pokemon Go is a dead fad and Vision Pro failed harder than almost any other contemporary Apple product. It seems less like Apple is skating to the puck, and more like they're begging someone to pass to them. But the rest of the industry seems content ignoring the AR industry to invest away from Apple into stocks like Nvidia. Simultaneously, Apple threw away their stake in consortiums like Khronos, signalling a lack of desire to engage in new software standards.

With how many roadblocks Apple is facing here, I have no idea how you'd conclude that forcing AR on their users is a preferred paradigm.

As a fan of aero, I hope Google copies the Apple theme with their own aero theme.

There are some places where I hope Apple improves things like legibility and contrast, but I'll take anything over the bland, flat designs of the Window 8 era.

Wow, I didn't stop to think how Windows Vista is actually quite close to 20 years old now. It and Windows 7 still feel "modern" in my mind.

Windows 7's had more character.

Windows 7 built a design language around it, transparency was never the main attraction.

Which is smart. Contrast is king, especially on consumer hardware where grandma might not see too well in her late age. It wasn't the glass effects of Vista or Yosemite that appealed to people, it was the high-contrast UI elements and skeuomorphic design elements (neither of which are present in liquid glass).

Chromatic aberration ain’t blur