Category: Chrome

A Catalina Double Standard

Third-party apps have to be granted explicit permission to display notifications (even if they were already in use on your Mac), but Apple can display a marketing message for their browser when rival Chrome is launched for the first time on Catalina. Cool.

By the way, Firefox is my system default browser. The team has put in a ton of work to make it fast and stable.

playbackIRate

A table comparing the range of playback rates that you can set on HTML video and audio elements using JavaScript. Guess which browser was a real pain to deal with on a recent project?

Supported playbackRate in Browsers
OS Browser Minimum Maximum Source Code Link
macOS v10.14.4 Chrome v74 0.0625 16.0 Chromium source code
macOS v10.14.4 Firefox v66 0.0625 16.0 Firefox source code
macOS v10.14.4 Safari v12.1 0.0625 2.0 I looked, but could not find where it’s defined in the WebKit source code. Maybe it’s in the closed Safari code?

Modern hardware can play video smoothly at even very high rates. I guess Apple doesn’t think there are use cases for playing back video beyond double speed. Furthermore, their own documentation about the ability to specify playbackRate on iOS is inaccurate. As with desktop Safari, you can set it to the same maximum of 2.0, at least as of iOS 12.