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Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

blog.tomayac.com

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Re: Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

#41

Post by brundolf »

Hamuko wrote: post #13
sambeau wrote: post #7

I would love to be able to ship apps in this, with a code bundle, so we don't need to ship a full Electron engine for every app. Even better, I wish someone would standardise it so we could still write one, ship to all platforms.

I imagine most developers will still elect to ship their apps using Electron for the usual Safari issues: Safari is only on macOS, very slow to adapt new web technologies and Safari updates are largely tied to macOS updates.

They recently added a bunch of long-awaited PWA features to mobile safari, and now this. I think Apple's stance is changing

Re: Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

#42

Post by mmaorc »

This is amazing!

I just finished working on a tiny ChatGPT wrapper in Electron just to mimic this feature. I'm very excited to be able to do that easily with GSuite and basically every other website I use daily.

Re: Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

#43

Post by jitl »

koromak wrote: post #36

Any reason you can think of that local storage gets ignored while cookies are maintained?

Cookies have a very small size limit. Other storage like cache, IndexedDB, etc can be 100MB+

Also Safari’s IndexedDB implementation has always been a little shaky I wouldn’t want to deal with it if I was implementing this feature!

Re: Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

#45

Post by pjmlp »

eviks wrote: post #31
pjmlp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect they to do the same I have been doing since 1996 for Web projects, Web standards, and do the needful to make it work across browsers. Alternatively, do what I have been doing since 1990, middleware for business logic with native UI integration. The four preceding years don't count, as I was using only Timex 2068 as my single computer.

The 90-s have very little to show for, especially in the area of Web projects and standards, the testament of the failure of the latter is precisely the required scale of "the needful"

Thankfully many old timers aren't frozen in the 90's, we rather use our experience to write proper Web applications instead of being ChromeOS advocates.

Can't say the same for the Electron generation.

Re: Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

#47

Post by kitsunesoba »

jessmartin wrote: post #34

I am unreasonably excited about Safari PWAs on macOS. This is a very good start. Some of my favorite details from the article: > Different from iOS/iPadOS, credentials in cookies are copied over, so if you were logged in when running in the tab, you're logged in when you launch the app. No other storage means apart from cookies are copied. > Same-origin (or in-scope if a manifest exists) links are handled in-app, cro…

> Web apps run in the context of a separate process called `Web App.app`. Separating Safari and Web App allows both to run independently. You can open a Web app without opening Safari, you can close Safari without all web apps closing.

This is a big thing that's dampened my desktop usage of PWAs with Chrome and other Cloniums - it's highly irritating for Chrome itself to fire up when I launch an installed PWA. Not a problem if Chrome is your main browser I suppose, but that's not an assumption that should be made. Glad Apple took this route on this.

Re: Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

#48

Post by Turing_Machine »

tolmasky wrote: post #38
galleywest200 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having tabs would just make it a browser. Your description leads me to believe you want a browser anyways, not a single app experience whatsoever.

It seems weird to have to point this out, but there are many apps that have tabs that are not web browsers. Any sort of document-based app benefits tremendously from tabs, and thus it would be unfortunate to have to lose that feature when making it a Web App. I for example often need a couple Google Docs open at once. I would very much like to have Google Docs as a separate item in my Dock though. However, I don't wa…

Sure. Even the most basic text editor is a lot nicer if it has tabs, or some tab-equivalent.

Re: Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

#49

Post by jmull »

> Let web apps programmatically trigger the Add to Dock flow, since the Share icon and the File menu install ways are hard to discover.

Please, for the sake of all decency, no! We do NOT need new ways for web sites to badger users.

(Sorry to focus on this one thing. This was a great and informative article, with 99% good ideas. I just had a visceral reaction to the idea of yet more ways for sites to harass me as a user.)

Re: Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta

#50

Post by guessmyname »

jljljl wrote: post #46

Does using Slack as a Safari Web App reduce resource consumption vs the Electron app? This seems like a huge deal if so

> Does using Slack as a Safari Web App reduce resource consumption vs the Electron app?

Yes. Yes it does.

This is why “native” apps that use the operating system’s default WebView for the corresponding platform run seamlessly compared to apps packaged with Electron.

Safari is has much better performance than any other web browser on macOS, and this change will allow users to access those benefits.

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