In Safari on iPad, there is now a default setting called "Prevernt cross-site tracking". Unfortunately, this breaks localStorage for HTML5 games on itch.io because the games are hosted in a frame on a different domain (and this is considered cross-site tracking).
Is this known? Are there any plans to mitigate this? E.g. allow opting into either: a frame running on the same domain, or launch the game in a new tab.
For anyone who's curious, I attempted the following work-around:
#2 works, but, to my surprise, I couldn't find a reliable way to determine if the user is on an iPad. Recent Safari updates make iPads (and iPhones) claim to be desktop Macs, so you have to resort to fragile fingerprinting techniques. (Unsurprisingly, there also is no way to detect if "Prevent Cross-Site Tracking" is enabled.)
If anyone has other ideas, let me know!
I couldn’t find a reliable way to determine if the user is on an iPad
Instead of detecting the device you should do feature detection. In this case you would try to access the localStorage object within a try catch statement. If that fails then you instruct them with alternative solution or a message about how their saves will not persist.
We have to run games in an iframe on a different domain for security reasons:
Unfortunately there are limited things we can do here, other than instructing users to change their browser’s security settings. Having the user visit the domain ahead of time could be valid approach, but I don’t recommend having them visit the game’s page directly. Alternatively you could use some kind of third party API to host save data but then you would have to deal with the privacy implications.
