[HN Gopher] FirefoxPWA: Progressive Web Apps for Firefox
___________________________________________________________________
FirefoxPWA: Progressive Web Apps for Firefox
Author : 1_player
Score : 201 points
Date : 2021-12-04 11:32 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| Firefox, thanks to "Firefox Lockwise" and other Mozilla products,
| is now a brand name, not just a browser name. The product title
| sounds like it came from Mozilla, which is probably not ok.
| WallyFunk wrote:
| How is a PWA different from adding a site to your homescreen?
| tommek4077 wrote:
| It is a glorified bookmark. But the JavaScript kids like how
| some of there scripts still run offline. As long as you don't
| use their website in any normal way, like clicking anywhere.
| blowski wrote:
| There's the rather big deal that it also allows me to access
| APIs that I can't access from a normal website - like
| vibrate, notifications, storage, authentication, bluetooth,
| orientation, network info, motion, speech recognition, NFC,
| contacts.
| thepra wrote:
| Adding as a bookmark doesn't get rid of the search bar and
| doesn't fill the top notification bar with the same colour as
| the app sets in the <head>.
|
| And there isn't a real flow that does explicitly say "Install"
| which is crucial for the final user to understand.
|
| And overall after PWA installation the screen is filled with
| app alone in a clear and native looking way.
| newacc9 wrote:
| Last I checked geolocation was still busted on FF Android when
| you actually "install" it and launch from the install-icon. Put
| in a bug report like 2 years ago. PWAs are ok for little internal
| widgets, but I couldn't recommend them for user facing stuff. For
| the uninformed, the principle reason to avoid PWAs is you need
| more granular control over the hardware than is available through
| a webAPI also indexeddb data will get deleted by Apple after a
| week for your privacy.
| neilsimp1 wrote:
| I've been doing this manually for a while by creating a FF
| profile for an app, adding some userChrome.css to hide some of
| the chrome at the top, and creating my own .desktop files to open
| FF in the new profile.
|
| It's a bit tedious but it works.
|
| I'd love to try this if I didn't have to use a FF extension to do
| it. It looks like it does it better than I have been doing it.
|
| Also the name should be changed.
| butz wrote:
| How hard would it be to work together with Mozilla to ship this
| functionality in Firefox officially? Their excuses not to work on
| SSB (that's what they called installing web apps to desktop)
| were: 1. "no perceived user benefit" and 2. "feature is costing
| us time in terms of bug triage". Evidently, some users and
| developers find mentioned feature useful, because many projects
| like FirefoxPWA exists. Get other projects that are trying to
| achieve the same goal on board (Web App Manager from Linux Mint
| comes to mind) and everybody wins. As an added bonus, Firefox
| might even increase their user base a little.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Sometimes it is hard not to think that this is part of the deal
| with Google:
|
| Mozilla gets $500m - in theory for having Google as the default
| search engine - I reality to just to not challenge Chrome.
|
| Anyone have a good explanation for why this isn't true?
| thepra wrote:
| I've been using this extension for a while, not bad so far but
| the big plus for me is the possibility to "install" any website
| as a PWA, making the website containerised and not messing with
| the normal browser (like Google cross logins)
|
| I've also dedicated a user guide to install FirefoxPWA for my own
| PWA but generic and easy enough for the average user I think, at:
|
| https://collanon.com/en/installation#firefox-desktop
| erickj wrote:
| I've been running firefox like this manually for years. My
| method for this is basically just create a profile for any
| service I want to run standalone. Works great
|
| 1. Create a profile for the app you want to run...e.g. Spotify.
| Set the home bag
|
| 2. Create a startup file for your Firefox/Profile combo, e.g.
|
| $ cat .local/share/applications/Music.desktop
|
| [Desktop Entry]
|
| Categories=Music;X-AudioPlayer;AudioVideo;Spotify
|
| Exec=/usr/bin/firefox --class=musicplayer -P music
|
| Icon=Music-icon
|
| StartupWMClass=musicplayer
|
| StartupNotify=false
|
| Terminal=false
|
| Type=Application
|
| Name=Music
|
| Comment=Firefox music container
| chrismorgan wrote:
| ICE is a good way of doing basically this, including creating
| the profile and giving it a "hide everything" userChrome.css,
| when you use Firefox: https://github.com/peppermintos/ice
| thepra wrote:
| Luckily this add-on makes this possibility effortless
| indymike wrote:
| This tool is named deceptively. It makes it sound like Firefox
| has broken or missing support for PWAs. Firefox has great support
| for pwas. My team shipped our app as a pwa in May and it was easy
| to do and works 100% in both chrome and Firefox.
|
| It appears this is more of a packager that tries to turn a
| website into a pwa and makes it install more like a native app. I
| may try it out, but the name is horrible and damaging to Firefox
| so I'll probably not ship until that name is changed.
| butz wrote:
| More precise terminology should be "Install to desktop" (or
| homescreen on mobile). Years ago there was a tool (or
| extension) called Prism, that did exactly the same thing.
| pndy wrote:
| If anything, Mozilla was pioneering around idea of such easy
| accessible web applications with Prism project up until it was
| abandoned [1].
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Prism
| alex_smart wrote:
| >Firefox has great support for pwas
|
| It doesn't and the relevant bug is marked as WONTFIX.
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407202
| [deleted]
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Isn't being installable as an app kind of the most baseline
| feature of PWAs? To my knowledge desktop Firefox doesn't let
| you do that without an addon like this.
| manjana wrote:
| IIRC Firefox did use to support installing of PWAs until
| about a year ago. It still boggles my mind why they dropped
| it.
| zamalek wrote:
| Bizarre decisions about features is run of the mill these
| days for Mozilla. I had to use FF a few days ago (WebKit
| derivatives can't load massive GitHub pull requests) and I
| truly missed the browser. But I use PWAs, so I have to use
| Chrome.
| kibwen wrote:
| I'm not sure why you find Chrome necessary for PWAs, I
| use Discord, Spotify, Zoom, etc. all exclusively from
| within Firefox.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| > As of 2021, PWA features are supported to varying degrees by
| Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Firefox for Android, and Microsoft
| Edge[2][3] but not by Firefox for desktop.[4]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_application
| rectang wrote:
| > _This tool is named deceptively._
|
| It's a trademark violation, in that "FirefoxPWA" improperly
| implies that that Firefox is the brand behind the product. This
| isn't likely to go all the way to a court of law, but if it did
| it would be an open and shut case. The author should do the
| polite thing and rename their product.
|
| Legally proper alternatives would be "PWAs for Firefox" or more
| clearly, "PWA Installer for Firefox" as suggested elsethread.
| Those aren't necessarily great product names, but they
| illustrate a point: the inversion makes it clear that this is a
| third party offering, rather than something coming from
| Firefox.
|
| For what it's worth I don't think the author intended to create
| marketplace confusion, because the full product _description_
| "Progressive Web Apps for Firefox" makes it clear it's a third-
| party offering. It should be possible to resolve this amicably.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| How do I install a PWA on Firefox? Wanted to do that just
| yesterday to get offline Excalibur, but could not find a
| button.
|
| (Desktop, Fedora - in case that makes a difference)
| sabellito wrote:
| I thought this install feature was for phones only, but a
| comment further down posted an addon link:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29440657
| nhumrich wrote:
| And the add on mentioned, is this project
| [deleted]
| KoftaBob wrote:
| > Firefox has great support for pwas
|
| It doesn't support "installing" PWAs like native apps, and
| that's a core feature of PWAs, so no it does not have great
| support for PWAs
|
| > the name is horrible and damaging to Firefox so I'll probably
| not ship until that name is changed.
|
| I think you're being a bit harsh here. Sure, a more accurate
| name would be "PWA Installer for Firefox", but to say it's
| deceptively named is pretty hyperbolic.
| ydlr wrote:
| What does it mean to install a webapp?
|
| Is it different than Firefox's "Add to Home" button?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Actually, on mobile it is. Which infuriates me more than it
| should.
|
| There are two ways to link to an application in Firefox:
| one just creates a shortcut ("Add to home") which opens the
| browser. The other opens a full screen application, like
| PWAs are designed to do.
|
| When I hit the install button, what I really want is the
| latter but occasionally PWA detection seems to fail and
| installs a shortcut instead.
|
| In desktop Firefox, Mozilla has decided to can this idea
| and not implement it. There was a bug open for this in
| bugzilla, but that was closed as WONTFIX.
| Daedren wrote:
| That's what it is. But only Firefox Mobile supports it,
| this extension is about the desktop version.
| yawaramin wrote:
| When I see a name start with 'Firefox' I really do expect it
| to be _from_ the team Firefox at Mozilla, and was genuinely
| expecting the link to have either the mozilla.org,
| firefox.com, or github.com /mozilla URLs. IMHO it's important
| to preserve the name recognition of the only open source
| browser that can compete with Chrome.
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| Not anymore is it hyperbolic. Not when you have product names
| like "Firefox Lockwise" and so forth. Firefox is now a brand
| name and also a browser name (horrible, horrible move by
| Mozilla, IMHO). So, FirefoxPWA is probably in some kind of IP
| violation.
| IceDane wrote:
| What exactly is the motivation for this project? I read the
| readme but I'm still at a loss.
|
| If my company chose to build PWAs, I would choose to use a
| browser that supports it in the way that is required. It would be
| totally bonkers to choose something like this just so that I can
| run them on firefox. Especially considering that this quite
| literally doesn't support half the feature set that might make
| PWAs desirable over a native app(like access to a lot of native
| APIs).
|
| Even if we wanted to build PWAs, and then for some weird reason
| needed to use firefox, then the lack of support for them in
| firefox would be more likely to lead to not building PWAs instead
| of trying to wrangle firefox into something it doesn't really
| support.
|
| What am I missing here?
| pgcj_poster wrote:
| In addition to developers, many web applications have users. If
| a website is available as a PWA, some Firefox users might want
| to install it.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| If you open Spotify in Chrome (or any Chromium browser), you'll
| get a little popup, like this: https://i.imgur.com/vw5diI2.png
|
| If you click "Install", you'll get an app-like Spotify icon,
| it'll show up in applications, you can Cmd+Tab/ Alt+Tab to it
| with its icon, so on. It's basically an app - but it's running
| in a separate Chrome window and managed by the browser.
| Electron but you don't have to install a copy of Chrome every
| time, basically. (Also, if you're like me and use Brave, this
| is better in every way.)
| indymike wrote:
| > What am I missing here?
|
| Firefox does support PWA. This is a browser extension for
| packaging and installing like a native app. Pwa is a web spec
| and it is very nice.
| 1_player wrote:
| Mainly the goal is to create standalone Firefox apps, as a
| lightweight replacement to Electron apps, with their own
| permissions and desktop notifications.
|
| Chromium/Edge make this super easy, and I use it to create
| standalone versions of Youtube Music, Fastmail, YNAB, WhatsApp
| so that they share the same Firefox process, instead of having
| four separate Electron apps written by third-parties that are
| just a fancy way of wrapping a website in their own window
|
| And for some reason, Mozilla isn't interested of having this
| feature in their own browser.
| blowski wrote:
| We need to protest against how Apple cripples PWAs on iPhones.
| Sure some apps might be more efficient as native apps, but let me
| choose.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That is what keeps the Web of fully turning into ChromeOS for
| all practical matters.
| criddell wrote:
| I support Apple because I think they are sticking up for their
| users. If they had great support for PWAs a lot of companies
| and developers would go that route and there would be no native
| app option.
|
| You have a choice. If you want to run PWAs, get an Android
| phone.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| I am an Apple user and they're not sticking up for me.
| They're sticking me.
|
| > If they had great support for PWAs a lot of companies and
| developers would go that route and there would be no native
| app option.
|
| No. Apple doesn't want to let go of the app store model and
| the money it gives em. Every other problem one could conceive
| of is solvable.
| criddell wrote:
| > Every other problem one could conceive of is solvable.
|
| I think the biggest problem with PWAs is the resource
| usage. A well written PWA will use a lot more battery,
| network, CPU, and memory than a well written native app.
| That's not solvable.
|
| PWAs are a lowest common denominator solution. They are
| good for developers but bad for users.
| blowski wrote:
| > A well written PWA will use a lot more battery,
| network, CPU, and memory than a well written native app.
| That's not solvable.
|
| What complete nonsense. It's hardly baked into the rules
| of the universe. Of course Apple could figure this out at
| a technical level, it just doesn't work for their profit
| margins. Besides, it should be my choice and not Apple's
| whether I want to install an app that uses more CPU.
|
| > They are good for developers but bad for users.
|
| There are entirely valid use cases where the expense and
| hassle of making native apps prevents any app existing at
| all. Small businesses building apps for their staff,
| individuals building apps for themselves or families,
| small groups of friends.
| criddell wrote:
| > Apple could figure this out at a technical level
|
| Probably not. Running an app in the browser is
| essentially running on a virtual machine. That's not
| going to be as efficient as a native app.
| blowski wrote:
| It depends on what the app is doing. If it's something I
| load once a day to read HTML content that's already been
| downloaded, how's that going to be less efficient?
| gherkinnn wrote:
| True. Battery use for long-running web apps on phones is
| hard to solve. I have yet to gain experience in this.
| marcodiego wrote:
| That's interesting. AFAIK, Steve Jobs didn't want installable
| app on the iphone. The phone should come with a few features
| and everything external should come from the web. He changed
| his mind after android included installable apps.
| criddell wrote:
| Steve Jobs thought any feature that Apple products didn't
| have was stupid and then once they added that feature, it was
| the best thing ever and their version was the best version of
| that feature.
| lelandfe wrote:
| One fun example is Steve hating music subscription
| services:
|
| > You pay to download 500 songs and one day you stop paying
| your subscription fee and your entire music library goes
| away.
| jamil7 wrote:
| I mean he wasn't wrong just out of touch.
| gigglesupstairs wrote:
| And may be because Cydia happened?
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| We also need to protest against the ongoing effort to misuse
| the web for fscking web apps nobody wants, to the detriment of
| the original purpose of the web as a hypertext delivery
| mechanism.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Web apps don't hurt pure hypertext delivery, in fact
| everything is very much backwards compatible.
| remus wrote:
| > ...ongoing effort to misuse the web for fscking web apps
| nobody wants...
|
| You mean things like google maps, gmail and vimeo? They seem
| pretty popular to me, and significantly improved by the fact
| that almost anyone with a web browser can access them.
| moonchrome wrote:
| >fscking web apps nobody wants
|
| I want webapps. I don't want to install everything and the
| browser sandbox is tightest available. Taking my apps
| everywhere without having to install them is really nice.
| agust wrote:
| You must be living in a parallel universe. On desktop pretty
| much the entire app industry as shifted to the web, including
| recently the very well-known and used software that are
| Office 365 and Photoshop. Most people are perfectly happy
| with web apps. Easily reachable and discoverable through web
| browsers, not using space in disk, performing quite well for
| most of them. They are great for companies too, reducing
| dramatically development and maintenance cost, with only one
| codebase for all devices instead of one per platform,
| allowing to develop apps that would have never existed
| otherwise.
|
| Actually nobody cares about "the original purpose of the
| web". The web has included technologies to build apps very
| early by the way, back in the 90s.
| ohCh6zos wrote:
| Almost everything around PWA's is an anti-feature that makes
| the browser more opaque.
| afavour wrote:
| "nobody wants"
|
| Yeah, you're right. No one ever wanted to use Hotmail on the
| web back in the 90s. No one wants to use Google Maps now.
| Please, _please god_ let me have to download a native app
| from an App Store in order to access my online banking! It's
| what the masses demand!
| rndgermandude wrote:
| Nobody wants?
|
| I want some of them, if they make sense. I will give you that
| a lot of things just don't really make sense as a webapp, but
| a lot of other things do.
|
| There is a lot of "small" things I'd rather run in the
| confines of a sandboxed webapp than run as a "native" app.
| Things I use once in every blue moon, where I do not want to
| download a binary or worse track down a bunch of dependencies
| and compile myself. Opening a website in <10seconds is just
| faster than that, and hassle-free, and doesn't mean I have to
| maintain the stuff (either by keeping it up to date, or
| remembering to get rid of the thing after use). Even worse
| are the webapps pretending to be "native apps". Please stop
| packaging your "webapp" only as an electron app if you only
| ever use normal web browser features.
|
| My problem with the state of things is just that every other
| "small" webapp tries to compel me into making an account for
| absolutely no reason first, or sell me "premium" features, or
| is plastered full of ads (which is less of a problem with the
| adblocker I use). Worse, if they do not really let me export
| my data. But all this also applies to native apps these days.
| blowski wrote:
| By that logic, the internet was originally invented to help
| the military communicate, and thus most of us shouldn't use
| it at all.
| tyingq wrote:
| Probably hard to unring that bell. It even seems like many
| "native apps" are now mostly just webviews with a very small
| amount of native orchestration, etc.
| woutr_be wrote:
| I don't really follow the world of PWAs, what is Apple doing to
| cripple them on iOS?
| alfonsodev wrote:
| this is 2020[1] state but you can make an idea, the most
| important one in my opinion is the friction that exists to
| add the app to the app list of your phone, you can't do it
| programatically is the user who has to go through the menus
| of iOS, it makes imposible to have a nice Web App Store and
| that's the biggest barrier for mass adoption in my opinion.
|
| - [1] https://simplabs.com/blog/2020/06/10/the-state-of-pwa-
| suppor...
| The_rationalist wrote:
| The thing is, Ionic has none of those issues
| dbetteridge wrote:
| Can only use Apples JS engine on iOS and they limit things
| like push notifications and background workers.
|
| Makes it difficult to get the full 'App' experience people
| expect
| fakename11 wrote:
| OP probably wants site to be to send notifications even
| though Firefox's research on the topic has shown that they
| are 99+ percent spam. I find it very annoying when I visit a
| site and there's an annoying pop-up asking for notifications
| (even though chrome and firefox block most automatically).
| The Mozilla study showed that sites already try and show 100s
| of billion notifications to users a year "Notification
| prompts are very unpopular. On Release, about 99% of
| notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively
| denied by the user." https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/
| 2019/11/04/restricti... I also would bet that most acceptance
| clicks by users were accidental.
| runarberg wrote:
| You can say the same thing about email, but yet there are
| plenty of legitimate use cases. Cases include chat apps
| like slack, you might want to see when someone has messaged
| you even though you might not have the slack tab open. Are
| you attending a music festival and have the schedule open
| for an artist you want to see, well the concerts have been
| delayed 20 min, would be handy to get a push notification
| telling you that.
| k__ wrote:
| Nobody cares about notifications.
|
| It's all about the shitty browser storage on iOS.
| realusername wrote:
| Yeah if Safari wouldn't break localStorage or indexDB
| every other version, that would work better already and a
| nice start.
| mavhc wrote:
| Pretty sure I want to know when I have a new message
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| yes. go and check a regular friends' chrome browser.
| notifications left and right, constant irritant of
| "breaking news" and "check this out" from essentially spam
| sites. i am grateful of preventing notifications by default
| notatoad wrote:
| that sounds right, i block about 99% of notifications on my
| phone, regardless of wehther they're from webapps or native
| apps. but the 1% i don't block are _incredibly useful and
| the main reason i have a phone in the first place_
|
| i hope nobody is deciding that no apps should ever be
| allowed to send notifications, just because most
| notifications get blocked. it's still an incredibly useful
| feature even if most apps use it poorly.
| tehbeard wrote:
| There is nothing stopping Firefox from saying x,y and z
| APIs are considered dangerous and web app only, and gating
| them behind the PWA install prompt.
|
| I want Apple to do this as well to put pressure on google
| to fix their shit with letting these run rampant on the
| web.
| pygy_ wrote:
| Notifications from Web sites are spam.
|
| Web apps that can be made resident on your phone home
| screen are another story, where notifications may be
| legitimate (e.g. chat apps).
| blowski wrote:
| Notifications from websites _that I don 't want to
| receive_ are spam. Perhaps it's a webapp where I
| communicate with friends, and want to be notified.
| GranPC wrote:
| I tried using the web notification API for a project
| recently - a project which is putting users' needs and
| wants above anything else. Our users wanted to receive push
| notifications whenever we go live, so the initial prototype
| used SMS notifications since that's what we were already
| using.
|
| Over time, the cost of these (completely optional and opt-
| IN) notifications grew enough that I figured it was time to
| seek an alternative. I fully implemented WebPush
| notifications and evaluated them with my users. I found
| that most Android devices wouldn't vibrate nor make a sound
| when a notification is received, and iOS straight up
| doesn't support these APIs. With these findings, I scrapped
| the entire implementation. It was useless to our users and
| only led to more confusion.
|
| If I had to guess, I would say that is the exact reason 99%
| of WebPush usage is spammy. Spammers don't really care
| about quality of service, they just want to cast a wide
| net. I'm willing to bet the API would see a massive uptick
| in legitimate adoption if it wasn't so utterly useless in
| the real world.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Apple deliberately cripples like, like notifications and
| workers - so that you have to wrap your PWA in an "app" for
| those features and distribute it on the App Store - with all
| the "fun" stuff that comes along with that.
| agust wrote:
| Their Safari browser, running on WebKit, is full of bugs and
| lagging behind in features such as Push Notifications,
| Install prompts for Web Apps, and many many others. It makes
| it impossible to have quality Web Apps running through
| Safari.
|
| This wouldn't be a problem if users could use other browsers
| that are not that buggy and have the features needed to build
| native-like app experience. But Apple is banning any other
| browser from using their own engine, they are all forced to
| use the buggy and lagging behind WebKit. Firefox, Edge,
| Chrome, etc on iOS are just skins around WebKit.
|
| So there is basically no browser competition on iOS, and this
| is how Apple prevent web apps from competing with native
| apps.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Things I don't want on the web:
|
| - Websites asking me for permission to send me
| notifications
|
| - Websites asking me to install an app to use them
|
| What other features are you decreeing essential? I admit
| curiosity if my distaste is in perfect opposition.
| infamia wrote:
| Other people want different features than you. Consider
| businesses who want to distribute PWAs to their employees
| instead of going through the laborious and time-consuming
| process of waiting for Apple reviews, resubmitting if you
| get a "Monday morning cranky reviewer", etc. For these
| folks, the app review process is primarily just wasted
| time and effort.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| In good software, disabling those prompts would be a
| single setting. I'm sure Apple can find a way to make it
| work, they've got plenty of reserves in the bank. In
| Firefox on Android, it's in Settings > Permissions, with
| the defaults to "Ask to allow" and the only alternative
| being "Blocked".
|
| I personally want notifications from the sites I use and
| I want to know if I can install websites so that they
| work offline. It takes the guesswork out of "will I be
| able to use this when I'm out and about" which is
| essential for the concept to work. Besides that, I just
| want to use my RSS reader without browser chrome.
|
| There are tons of shitty blogs and crapsites that ask for
| all kinds of stuff like permissions, persistent file
| storage and GPU access, that I agree with. Excessive use
| of these prompts should be a reason to drop that website,
| though, not to remove the feature.
|
| By the same logic, all notifications should be banned
| from mobile phones, because there's tons of them that
| push ads and other unwanted crap (including big names
| like Netflix). Which is something you can probably do, if
| you really want to, by just disabling notifications for
| every app you install.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Your logic is not aligned with my own. I visit a thousand
| websites a month and never return to most of them that
| month, if ever. I use the same fifty apps each month.
|
| One thousand notification prompts, one for each site I
| visit, is unacceptable.
|
| Fifty notification prompts, one for each time I open an
| app for the first time on my phone, is acceptable.
|
| You've only addressed the single-site case, not the at-
| scale reality that we users face when browsing HN or
| Google News or any other content aggregator that links
| out to a near-infinite array of sites.
|
| My browser is for the open web. My phone is for native
| apps. I'm aware this is upsetting to proponents of PWAs,
| but it's not because of technological limitations that I
| feel this way. It's because websites target the lowest
| common denominator, and I don't have time for that on
| mobile.
|
| I can barely stand to use HN on mobile, it's so awful, it
| doesn't honor my OS-wide text settings, it has a
| horrendous text area, it ignores system color palettes,
| it doesn't support OS dark mode hints. HN consciously
| chooses to target browsers only and does not wish to
| target being an app, and so I have modified my browser to
| adapt the website to be tolerable to me. But HN does not
| deserve to exist on my phone as-is outside of my browser.
|
| Very few websites put in the level of effort to deserve
| to be called an "app", and my views reflect their
| disregard for per-platform integration. (Similarly, I
| loathe apps that are just a website in a shim, and I
| tolerate them as minimally as necessary for banking and
| medical purposes, and tolerate none in my everyday use.)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Interesting. You and I visit very different websites if
| you get that many permission prompts. The worst offenders
| in my experience are low-effort tech blogs I encounter
| when Googling an error message.
|
| According to my Firefox settings, I've given notification
| access to about 50% of the websites that requested it. I
| certainly visit a lot of different sites, usually linked
| from aggregators and social media such as HN, Reddit and
| Twitter.
|
| We can both have our ways. Allow for an easy way to
| disable the prompts permanently, perhaps even in a popup
| after installation, and we can all go our merry way.
|
| My enjoyment of PWAs basically comes down to the fact
| that the browser acts as an extra sandbox that I control.
| I can install addons that change bad behaviours and block
| tracking resources and I can safely run and update them
| without risking exposing too much information. I mainly
| use them for things I run myself (Home Assistant is a big
| one there), weather apps (Buienalarm) and forums where I
| want a notification if someone replies to my messages
| directly. They're the applications that are just
| interactive enough that a static website wouldn't
| suffice, but not interactive enough that I want to
| download an application for them.
|
| One example is Youtube: if Google put in some effort, the
| entire app would only serve as a downloading and caching
| platform. Browsers are good at playing video. They're
| good at simple like/dislike interactions, and they're
| good at making comments. Yet for some obscure reason, the
| website is janky and difficult to use, forcing people to
| use their apps with all of its native code and
| unnecessary bells and whistles. There shouldn't be a need
| for the browser to do any serious Javascript work unless
| you watch 3D/360deg video, and even that is uncommon
| enough that running the code in JS would be good enough.
| There are rich web video platforms out there with the
| same basic feature set; many of them in the adult
| entertainment industry, because of Apple's and Google's
| unwillingness to platform them, but also outside of it on
| platforms like Floatplane and its competitors.
|
| Youtube should be a PWA or maybe even a website, not a
| full-blown app. Sadly, the web version of Youtube is
| neither of those things.
|
| The lack of these features make Safari, and in some cases
| even Firefox, simply insufficient for my use cases. I
| hate Chrome but I started to use these features when
| Chrome and Edge (pre-Edgium) made their way to implement
| PWAs and Firefox went the same direction; I expected FF
| to just take their time, not reject the concept all
| together.
|
| I actually like HN's clarity and simplicity and it's lack
| of the barely function rich text editor JS mess. Perhaps
| dark mode CSS would be a nice feature, but it's not that
| important to me. I despise blog platforms such as medium
| that pretend to be apps when they're really just shitty
| websites.
|
| Our preferences seem to be the exact opposite of each
| other's, and that's fine. I do't want to impose my
| preferred way of working on you by forcing things like
| notifications and other permission prompts onto you,
| which is why I'm a fierce proponent of easy and clear
| methods to disable any potentially unwanted
| functionality.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Opt-out rather than opt-in is a philosophical issue at
| the core of many concerns. I simply don't think the open
| web deserves opt-out access to my notifications. Websites
| need to step it up and become apps if they want me to
| risk my time on their notifications, and if they choose
| not to, so be it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Some websites won't or can't become apps because of app
| store rules, especially on iOS. That's why the web is
| seen by many as a way out, and why iOS web developers in
| particular seem to be such aggressive proponents of
| adding more PWA features.
|
| Even an app following all standards can get refused by
| Apple's app review and there's no recourse other than to
| retry and hope this time the reviewer does their job
| right. Code using several open source licenses can't be
| uploaded to the Apple App store for legal reasons and
| there's no way around that either.
|
| I think the web does deserve opt-in methods to access to
| many features, and I'd even like some features (like
| WebGL or WebGPU) to be behind additional permissions.
| Same with <canvas> features, most websites don't need
| that and it's mostly used for stalking me.
|
| In a perfect world, Google would be able to put a real
| version of Chrome onto iOS and Mozilla would be able to
| do the same for Firefox, that way everyone could get what
| they wanted. The PWA enthusiasts could get a PWA-capable
| browser, the rest could stick to Safari with all of its
| quirks. That's not going to happen any time soon, though.
| [deleted]
| dmitriid wrote:
| > In good software, disabling those prompts would be a
| single setting.
|
| There are now several _dozen_ APIs that require prompts
| to work. And Chrome is busy ramming through several dozen
| more.
|
| It's not "a single setting to disable these prompts".
| tjohns wrote:
| Off the top of my head: The web app working while
| offline, local storage, and background sync.
|
| The idea is to be able to build web apps that have
| feature parity with native apps. (Especially on mobile,
| where apps are expected to integrate with the system and
| data connectivity is intermittent.)
|
| If you don't want that, that's fine. But native apps are
| popular for a reason, and those features are a big part
| of that reason.
| freediver wrote:
| > Off the top of my head: The web app working while
| offline, local storage, and background sync.
|
| Do you really mean the web? Or a small subset of the web
| (that then probably already has a native iOS app)? For
| example how would Google search work while offline?
|
| Even making something as "simple" as HN (only compared to
| Google search) work while offline would be a considerable
| technical challenge and a large investment for HN, for a
| use case that is almost non-existent.
|
| Would really appreciate your perspective.
| tjohns wrote:
| I mean web apps, but not the broader web. Things that
| would have an analog as native mobile or desktop apps.
| This doesn't really apply to content sites.
|
| Not everything makes sense offline. If you need to
| perform real-time lookups, or if the backing database is
| too large, or the data is rapidly changing, or the user
| just infrequently visits the site - those are all good
| reasons to require connectivity.
|
| But if the data is small enough, can be cached, and can
| be sent asynchronously, and is something the user is
| using consistently it's a good candidate. Apps that work
| well would be things like email, productivity apps (word
| processing/spreadsheets/photo editing), and maybe small
| data feeds like weather and news headlines. Even chat is
| fine, since connectivity gaps are often only a couple
| minutes long.
|
| My litmus test is "is this something somebody would
| expect to work while they're on a train as part of their
| daily commute."
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Long-term static content like documentation. Apps that
| can operate on local data like various text editing,
| notes, primitive video and audio work, etc.
|
| And the ability to continue using portions the app if you
| briefly loose connection. That can be quite powerful in
| some instances.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| I just tested the only website I have in "Add to Home
| Screen" PWA mode on iOS, and it caches all of itself
| perfectly fine offline, but since the site is coded
| badly, it doesn't recognize that it's in offline mode and
| crashes instead of being a useful app.
|
| It serves the crash page locally, from cache. But it's
| clear that they could have invested in this and chose not
| to. That's not the OS's fault, any more than it is when
| an native app decides not to implement offline support.
|
| But. Native apps are _required_ to ship basic offline
| mode support, so that when launched while offline, they
| show _something_ to the user. The open web has no such
| requirement, and tends prefers the laziest approach
| without regard for users. Restrictive demands upon apps
| is what makes me prefer them; I respect others prefer the
| freedom not to bother with offline or accessibility or
| whatever.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The only way I could ever support these features being
| added to Safari on iOS is if:
|
| - Safari reports to pages that permission is given,
| regardless of actual permission state
|
| - Developers have no way to trigger a system prompt
| dialog for either, instead requiring a user action
| initiated from browser chrome
|
| This is so websites can't even implement their own
| prompts to sidestep restriction to user actions within
| the page, or even have the state on which to judge if a
| prompt should be shown. Bottom line, those features are
| fine so long as they bring zero additional
| dickbars/dialogs/etc.
| ivarv wrote:
| I totally agree with your second point, but your first
| won't work. If a PWA has been downloaded it can report
| back its status - any PWA developer would rely on their
| own status tracking implementation, not some unreliable
| flag provided by Safari.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Yeah I see no issue for "installed" PWAs having access to
| real status, I just don't want to see any hint of a
| prompt while I'm in my browser. The web's lack of
| intention-gating makes it too ripe for abuse, but once a
| PWA is installed the user has expressed interest and a
| higher level of consent.
| phaer wrote:
| Isn't that case somehow similar to how Microsoft used to
| bundle IE with Windows? iOS isn't a monopoly such as
| Windows was, but you _could_ use another browser engine on
| Windows and you can 't on iOS. Shouldn't that at least
| worry antitrust legislators in the EU and/or the US?
| agust wrote:
| Definitely. The situation on iOS is much worse than it
| ever was on Windows. Apple is banning all competition in
| the browser space on more than 1 billion devices
| worldwide.
|
| Antitrust legislators would surely be very interested in
| this if they were aware of the issue, but most of them
| probably aren't yet. Some people have been talking to
| regulators, like Stuart Langridge and Bruce Lawson to the
| UK regulator, the CMA.
|
| Stuart Langridge presentation to the CMA:
| https://kryogenix.org/code/cma-apple/
| rectang wrote:
| I have mixed feelings about this. Without Safari being
| required on iOS, Chrome's market share would be
| overwhelming and then we'd be in a situation back more
| like the bad old days of IE, where a single browser
| dominated not just on one OS but across the entire
| ecosystem.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| And undoubtedly, if Blink-Chrome were present on iOS you
| can bet that many web devs would target that exclusively,
| requiring you to trade away battery life and privacy to
| use the entire web.
|
| The web should be to the greatest extent possible browser
| agnostic.
| julianlam wrote:
| No, not at all.
|
| In Windows you can install any other browser you want
| (even if it ships with IE default).
|
| On iOS, ALL browsers are forced to used Safari's
| rendering engine. It would be like installing Firefox and
| it uses Trident in the background.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| The poster you are responding to is saying the same
| thing, but also referencing the huge judgement that
| Microsoft faced for pre-installing Internet Explorer /
| making it the default browser.
|
| They're saying that while the situation isn't completely
| analogous, that what Apple is doing is far more egregious
| than what Microsoft already faced massive judgement for
| doing.
| adam12 wrote:
| One thing that really bothers me is that there is no install
| prompt for a PWA on iOS. Users have to be told to find the
| install button which is buried in a menu.
| donmcronald wrote:
| I would also like to have it, but I can see how it could
| become a spam issue. Every garbage site on the planet would
| start pushing PWAs to get on a users home screen. It would
| be the same thing if notifications were reserved for PWA
| installs only and not in the browser.
|
| That's one area where the app stores are pretty good. If
| you open the app store, you _want_ to install apps. The
| same can 't be said for a website.
|
| I think the only way it would work really well is if the
| add to home screen / install button was prominent in the
| browser chrome and sites could trigger some effect if they
| can be installed as a PWA. For example, change from an
| inactive button to an active button.
| adam12 wrote:
| I'm not sure how it could be abused. The api doesn't
| allow the developer initiate the install prompt.
| [deleted]
| kgwxd wrote:
| OT but, is anyone else having issues with Gmail and YouTube in FF
| after left open for, sometimes, just a few minutes? Lately for
| me, they stop refreshing properly and things like changing email
| folders or loading more comments as I scroll on YT just don't
| work and I have to refresh the page to fix it.
| Narishma wrote:
| Yes, I have this problem with Youtube in Firefox as well (on
| Linux if it makes a difference).
|
| I don't know about Gmail as I use the HTML view, which is much
| faster in general and only updates when you tell it to.
| thepra wrote:
| I'm with you, I always leave YouTube open in Firefox for
| listening music and I have your same issues
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| No problems and I do what you say all the time. I often leave
| youtube playing music in the background and it will play for
| days if I let it. Almost every problem I ever had in firefox I
| chased down to an errant plugin so turn off all your plugins
| (or start in safe mode) and go from there.
| sp332 wrote:
| I've had this problem with Voice pretty consistently, but gmail
| just slows down sometimes.
| skinkestek wrote:
| This is a brilliant start. Maybe rename it to avoid annoying
| Mozilla unnecessary.
|
| I'm one of those who want a softfork(?) of Firefox: a set of
| patches on top of official Firefox that keeps getting expanded
| until it eclipses the official Firefox.
|
| I already tried to donate but failed.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| The problem with soft forks is that virtually no one wants to
| maintain HTML rendering or implement CSS color for fun, and
| eventually when the underlying engines change, the soft forks
| have to keep up, leading to the same sort of complaints that we
| see about macOS requiring significant annual reworks.
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