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.

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.