As Apple announced Service Worker support for iOS 11.3 a few months ago, I recently started trying to get a service worker to work on iOS. On Safari it works as expected, after vising the website, it works offline. However, when trying to use the same feature in Chrome, I had intermittent results. Specifically, the service worker would only work every other page refresh, with the original refresh after going offline being one of the ones not working.
I know that Chrome on iOS is built on a version of Safari, therefore I am confused about this behavior.
Is this due to incomplete support from Chrome iOS for Service Workers? Because it is Chrome on iOS, I'm not sure of any easy way to debug it either, so any other tips to help track down the problem would be appreciated. Thank you!
Chrome for iOS do not support service workers currently(as of Apr-2020) and also the "Add to home screen" option is not available, if you are interested in that. Any offline page loading that you are experiencing should be from regular browser cache.
Here is an official documentation from Apple's web-kit page.
Update: A previous version of this post stated the Service Worker API
is available in all applications using WKWebView. At this time it is
only available in Safari, applications that use
SFSafariViewController, and web applications saved to your home
screen.
Notably, Chrome uses WKWebView as its browser engine in iOS, which don't have service worker support yet as per the above statement(which you can find in the link provided above). So the only way you can use Service worker in iOS is to use Safari browser or use one of the above supported web-views inside a native app.
Here is an article on what all PWA features iOS is still missing. Remember, this is a fast growing area. Always check if what is applicable now, especially if the documentation/article is getting older.
Here is an adapter to help debug in Chrome dev tools for pages loaded iOS - webkit/safari. Hope it becomes as easy as Android Chrome debugging one day!
Chrome for iOS is open source (https://blog.chromium.org/2017/01/open-sourcing-chrome-on-ios.html)
We can install the Chrome app with our developer signed certificate on an iOS device, launch the Chrome App, and start testing.
It is technically feasible.
As an update in January 2021: the official documentation from Apple's web-kit page still says the same thing, and I just battled a very difficult to debug issue in Chrome iOS - posting here in case it helps someone.
I had an iFrame containing a cross-origin Angular 10 PWA with Service Worker enabled, and the iFrame content would not show after an initial load - no errors, no server logs, just blank. The only solution that worked was to self-destruct the Service Worker per Angular's docs, and now the iFrame loads fine.
I have a weird situation, I am developing a site I can see all of the images well on my mac as well as an android phone but on my iPhone and my friends mac, and iPad it is not displaying the images when using safari. Is there something I need to add to the files for this to display properly all through out?
Thanks all feedback welcomes
It appears these assets are linked using https but there is not a valid SSL on the site. So on the devices where it works you have either authorized the SSL or bypassed it, but the other devices have not.
If you open up the Developer Tools in Chrome and view the console you can see the assets with issues along with the error message... "Failed to load resource: net::ERR_INSECURE_RESPONSE"
Just in case someone else has the same problem. For me the problem was that a plugin "Ewww image optimizer" converted images to webP, these were then cached and served by cloudflare and wouldn't load in safari
From Apple's guide in Support Universal Links:
When you support universal links, iOS 9 users can tap a link to your website and get seamlessly redirected to your installed app without going through Safari. If your app isn’t installed, tapping a link to your website opens your website in Safari.
But i'm confused that if my app is not installed,and I tap a universal link of my app in another app's UIWebView,will the system launch Safari app to load my website,or still load it in the UIWebView?
I test some app's universal links when the app is not installed,and they never launch Safari to load the next page ,they still load it in the UIWebView.
I want to konw if it's possible to launch Safari,but not stay in UIWebView.Do I need any configuration in apple-app-site-association file?
Actually I want to trace where my app was installed from by using cookie.I can store a cookie in Safari with informations of the download page,and get the cookie with SFSafariViewController when my app is installed and opened,and present different views according to the cookie.
What you are trying to build is called 'deferred deep linking'. This (plus a lot more) is exactly what we provide at Branch.io. If you want to avoid the headache of configuring it all yourself, give this a look. Apps like Pinterest, Airbnb, and Tinder all use us for this reason.
Apple's documentation is referring to the default behavior with the standalone Safari browser. Handling links inside an app with UIWebView supersedes this, and there is no way to automatically bounce out of the origin app into the main Safari app.
The workaround is to store data on your own backend. As you've discovered, relying on a cookie pass-through on the device itself won't work in many cases.
I want to test my website on Safari on my iPad. I only have another PC. Is there a way for me to do remote debugging like ADB (Android Debug Bridge) with mobile Chrome? I searched on StackOverflow, seems there is an Adobe Edge Inspect CC, but I don't know if this is a good choice.
Thanks!
Update October 2019
This solution doesn't work for IOS 12+ (resource 1, resource 2).
Updated and tested on 24/6/2017
Using Chrome on Windows 8 and more recent:
Download and install Node
Download and install ITunes and connect it to your Device. (A pop-up should shows to your iPad to get authorization)
. Be sure to allow web inspector in your iPad
Download and install the remote webkit adapter
Using Powershell (As administrator):
npm install remotedebug-ios-webkit-adapter -g
Execute the adapter:
Using Powershell (as administrator):
remotedebug_ios_webkit_adapter --port=9000
You should get a similar output:
C:\Windows\system32> remotedebug_ios_webkit_adapter --port=9000
remotedebug-ios-webkit-adapter is listening on port 9000
iosAdapter.getTargets
...
Open Chrome and go to the following link:
chrome://inspect/#devices
Click on configure next to "Discover network targets" and add the following:
localhost:9000
Make sure to have the web page you want debug open on safari, you should see it on chrome inspector page under Remote Target
Extra step for iOS 11 Thanks to #skaurus
See monkeythedev's answer for the easiest way to debug on a Windows 8+ machine with iOS 9+. I updated my blog post using information from that answer and other sources and also recorded a screenshare. The method below should still work for iOS 8 and down, if needed.
There is actually a pretty easy way to debug a website in Safari on iOS using Firefox on a Windows machine.
NOTE: Ryan wrote in the comments below that this may only work on iOS 8 and down. I am unable to confirm, but be aware.
I wrote a detailed blog post about this, but here are the highlights:
Install iTunes to get the "Apple Mobile Device Support" and "Apple Application Support" applications that come with it. (uninstall iTunes afterward, if you want)
Connect your iOS device via USB.
Enable web inspector on iOS (available on iOS 6 and later).
Open Safari on your iOS device and browse to a website.
Open Firefox on your Windows machine and press Shift + F8 to open WebIDE, which should include the necessary Valance add-on, if you use Firefox Developer Edition (any version) or Firefox 37 and later (any channel).
For some reason, I couldn't get it to connect to my iOS device until I downloaded the ios-webkit-debug-proxy-win32 program and ran it. It opens a blank Command Prompt, but after I went back to WebIDE after opening it, I disconnected, then reconnected, and I saw debug info for the website I had opened in Safari. You may not need to do this though, as another user just had to add an exception to their firewall then disconnect/reconnect, and it worked.
The debug info available isn't as exhaustive as Chrome Developer Tools (specifically no "Networking" tab), but it was enough for me to be able to view what was going on in the Console.
2018 Update:
Since the original post, the blog post is dead & Telerik App Builder is discontinued and no longer offered. Adding this update to inform readers in case they don't read the user comments that follow this answer post. As for the blog post, for those still interested, here's a web cached copy. Regarding the blog, I think the company that blog's from has since shut down.
When I get a chance, I'll see if I have a copy of the app builder saved so that I can post it online for those still interested in using it, along with another cached copy of the blog post maybe.
Original Answer
You can try option of using Telerik AppBuilder (Windows client) as a replacement on Windows for Safari debugger on Mac when remote debugging. There's a nice blog post about the steps to do it in link below. I'd rather not repost the info as there are also screenshots and it's a lot of text. But essentially, you install app, open it, connect device via USB, then you can find it in the app and open up the developer tools/debugger for it. For non-public websites, you'll have to open up port 80 with some firewall configs documented in the post.
http://blog.falafel.com/Blogs/josh-eastburn/2014/03/04/ios-web-inspector-on-windows-with-telerik-appbuilder
The tool requires a license or you can use the trial, which becomes a basic edition afterwards. I think the basic edition will still allow you to do the debugging. I'm going to try it out myself.
You can also try these iOS apps too, you can find them in the iTunes App store. They give you a built in developer tools feature (right on iOS no remote debug) that mobile Safari doesn't offer.
MIH Tool - basic edition
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mihtool/id584739126?ls=1&mt=8
HTTPWatch Basic
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/httpwatch-basic-http-sniffer/id658886056?mt=8
I gave them a try and they're at least better than the mobile Safari you get on iOS, unless one needs to target full mobile Safari compatibility. I'm guessing the pro/paid editions of those apps give you more/better features.
This question was more than 4 years ago, but I feel like it's worth to mention another option which is platform-independent which seems is not mentioned above:
VConsole
It's a JavaScript that you can inject into your page(s) which will overwrite all native console output and show it as an overlay on top of your page content, in a level of detail that is almost as good as Google Chrome's Developer Tools.
Runs well on iOS Safari, as well as on other mobile browsers - for as long as JavaScript is enabled in the browser.
How to install: https://www.npmjs.com/package/vconsole
You will need NPM tools to install it, but not actually required to use NPM to build your project. You can simply install VConsole somewhere in a separate folder, and just copy-paste vconsole.min.js from it.
Once you inject it into your page, will look like this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="vconsole.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript>let vc = new VConsole(); // this will initialize it.</script>
Visually is very appealing, you will see green button in lower-right corner of your page on your mobile/desktop browser, which will open console overlay.
Very neat!
Of course, it does not provide you with ability to select an element, see calculated css etc., but if you are looking for console output and some network report, this one is really easy to use.
October 2019
AFAIK, For recent IOS versions there is no overall solution for debugging IOS from a PC.
You can however use one of the following solutions:
Display console messages in the browser itself. As described here and in Sinisa's answer.
The "remotedebug-ios-webkit-adapter" doesn't work for debugging IOS 12+. It requires extra steps for IOS 11, and works for IOS 10 and perhaps older versions as well.
I use PrePros for CSS preprocessing and it has a built in server for mobile debugging and web inspector. But this is only good for local sites even still...
In my experience it is often not an issue with mobile Safari only but Safari in general. In these cases it can help to try the normal Safari (for Windows) and see if the bugs appear there. If so, it's much easier to debug something by this way.
2021 update:
The creator of RemoteDebug here. I've built a replacement for RemoteDebug called Inspect, which packages everything together in a pleasant experience and enables easy iOS web debugging from Windows, macOS, and Linux, with a few extra features like screencasting and wifi debugging.
http://inspect.dev
There are a couple of options I've come across for debugging on iOS. They're not full step-through debuggers, but they offer a JS error log, console and some inspection tools:
1. Eruda
By adding the following snippet to the top of your page:
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/eruda"></script>
<script>eruda.init();</script>
You get an interactive set of developer tools similar to those in Chrome and Firefox. Here's a screenshot:
Available at https://github.com/liriliri/eruda
2. MiniConsole
This one I developed myself when I had not discovered another suitable option. It has less features, but it does the main things - capture JS errors, and allow you to run commands to inspect variables and object on your page.
Here's a demo:
It's activated by just placing this script tag on your page:
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/SimonEast/MiniConsoleJS#main/console.js"></script>
Open source, GPL licence. Available at: https://github.com/SimonEast/MiniConsoleJS/
3. vConsole
Another similar option that I've not really tried. Available at https://www.npmjs.com/package/vconsole with a live demo at http://wechatfe.github.io/vconsole/demo.html.
I haven't tried this on a PC, but you should be able to go to http://[DEVICE_IP_ADDRESS]:9999 to debug.
I have a web app that is intended for use as an iOS offline web app. A key feature of the app is that users can download files with extensions like .doc, .ppt, .pdf, etc. To make these available offline, I am making entries for any such files in a cache manifest.
One other caveat: the most user-friendly way I could get these files to open is to jump out of the offline web app and into Safari to actually open the file. This way, I get the "Open in {{Application}}" options that Safari provides. There seems to be some sort of disconnect during this switch from the offline web app to Safari.
Assuming a clean slate:
I've gone and wiped all the data for this site using Settings->Safari->Advanced.
I launch the offline web app while connected to the server (So we're in online mode.)
The application updates the cache successfully.
I close the web app and disconnect from the server.
I relaunch the app and all of the navigation chrome works, so we know the cache is functioning properly.
I click the link to open a file that needs Safari, so iOS switches to Safari and goes to the file's URL.
Safari says "Safari cannot open the page because the server cannot be found."
So, it seems the this application cache is accessible from the offline web app, but not Safari? Can anyone verify this?
And then going forward, if that is in fact the case: any ideas for a better way to do it? Thanks!
iOS Safari work same as Safari does. But I assumed that your iOS Safari doesn't load successfully, you know, the network of iPhone isn't fast as your PC. You must attach handlers to determine when your offline data is loaded successfully.
Check it out: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/appcache/beginner/ and try to use JS to check status of ApplicationCache.