Bryan Irace writes about web views in iOS and offers a great idea for the future: a Safari view controller.

But in-app browsers have some pretty massive downsides as well. They can’t access cookies stored by other in-app browsers, nor Safari, requiring the user to repeatedly log in to websites that they should already be authenticated with. iCloud Keychain is great for syncing credentials across devices, but while Safari has access to its data, in-app browsers don’t. This isn’t merely Apple being punitive – it’d be horribly negligent to give third-party applications access to this kind of information.

Essentially, developers would be able to implement a web view based on Safari that offers Safari features to other apps while also isolating code from third-party access. This would be good for security, for example, but also for consistency with extensions and iCloud features.

As I noted earlier this week, implementations of web views can be massively different from app to app. A native Safari view could offer more options than standard web views and secure user data from third-party apps (case in point). It could also provide a solution to this:

It’d be awesome if Apple decided to make iCloud Tabs accessible to other apps with an API in iOS 8.

— Federico Viticci (@viticci) March 7, 2014

You can find Bryan’s suggestion on OpenRadar.