SFUniversalLink
As promised, API for macOS browsers to adopt universal links!
Please review the header for details on how to adopt—ADC hasn’t got them yet. 🤐
Universal Links let certain HTTP links (e.g. Dropbox and Twitter, or hypothetically Zoom) open directly in an app instead of in the browser, potentially bypassing a confirmation alert that a custom URL scheme would have caused. This API lets third-party browsers provide an experience that matches Safari.
However, sometimes the user doesn’t want the link to open in the app, and so Safari in Catalina lets you Control-click to choose the browser instead. (On iOS you can long-press.) The isEnabled property lets you see how the user last opened a link for that app, so that you can respect the preference. And it’s shared across the OS, so you can change it in a third-party browser and affect Safari’s behavior.
See also: What’s New in Universal Links.
Previously:
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
One of the things that seems fundamentally limiting is how the website provider — rather than you, the user — controls which app that is.
Consider twitter.com, where a more open implementation could let you open a tweet in any app that supports it, such as Tweetbot or Twitterrific, but due to the design, it can only be Twitter's own app.
And (I could be wrong?) even if they wanted to, they couldn't let you choose between multiple or choose based on what you have installed (e.g., Twitter's own Tweetdeck).
@Sören My understanding is that Twitter could (but doesn’t) provide a ranked list that includes third-party clients, and so if you only had one installed you would get the one you want. I agree that it would be nice for the user to be able to choose, even among apps that the site hasn’t listed.
[…] URLs that hit them get passed to the native app. iOS has “universal links” which are coming to the web apparently. (Atishay Jain has an excellent write-up on them.) But links like that don’t leave […]
[…] URLs that hit them get passed to the native app. iOS has “universal links” which are coming to the web apparently. (Atishay Jain has an excellent write-up on them.) But links like that don’t leave […]
