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What PWA Can Do Today

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Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#241

Post by Lornedon »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #178

If this site is supposed to be a good demo of what they’re capable of, it’s failing pretty hard for me. - Takes ages to finish loading - huge number of features/functionality I don’t want a website to have over my phone/desktop - navigation is broken: swiping back causes some double-navigation stutter. - history is broken: attempting to navigate back to HN loads the same page again and again with no content change a…

I understood this as a showcase of the features that PWAs can use, and I think it does a pretty good job at that.

Do I understand your second point correctly? The feature demo is failing at being a feature demo because it demoes some features that you don't like?

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#242

Post by jampekka »

palata wrote: post #234
jampekka wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not. I've coded more for webtech, but have done native for Android (and Linux and Windows. And J2ME and Symbian FFS). Luckily very little iOS and MacOS apart from some reverse engineering. You don't need frameworks or bundlers for simple cases. For many you need just one .html file. For e.g. Android you need quite a bunch of files and directory structures to do even get a Hello world [1]. You need to compile…

In my experience, Android-Studio creates the app for me. There are many files indeed, but that's nicely solved by the IDE. Then Kotlin is great, and I really like Jetpack Compose. You can distribute your APK manually, but if you want it on the Play Store you have to jump through loops indeed. Though I don't think it's worse than running a webserver. > And figure out which API was deprecated yesterday and what's today…

There are plenty of e.g. scaffolding tools to handle the bundlers and deployments etc for web frameworks if you are OK with IDE doing that.

I don't use IDEs or scaffolding tools if I can do without. I use many different languages and platforms, and for that just good old vim and terminal make juggling between them a lot easier.

I do understand that using the tool you know makes things (seem) simple. But it's the same for all tech.

The deprecations were exaggarated (along the tune of your two day). I haven't done Android native in a while, but e.g. the situation with Camera/Camera2/CameraX was quite bad.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#244

Post by benkaiser »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #236
donmcronald wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on Android is worse experience than Chrome too, at least for this app. The app is harder to install (no prompt), the icon looks worse, and the icon has a Firefox badge on it. I wonder if that's down to config for the PWA or a Firefox shortcoming. Anyone know?

> and the icon has a Firefox badge on it This is something enforced by android. If every app was able to pin apps to the homescreen without such a badge, phishing would be too easy ... add something that looks like a bank app to the homescreen, get people to type in their password ... It's not fair, since that's not true for chrome, but there's no obvious solution, other then I guess having some sort of "super trustw…

At least with Nova launcher, you can "edit" a PWA icon once it's on the home screen and un-check the badge to make it look more seamless.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#245

Post by davidy123 »

palata wrote: post #226
davidy123 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debug everywhere or google controlled, those things seem diametrically opposed. Aside from the murky area of cookies, chrome isn't straying much from web standards. There's really not much reason to not use a browser, the compatibility issues are pretty much a thing of the past on any browser, unless you're doing something esoteric. Installing a special app should be unusual.

> Debug everywhere or google controlled, those things seem diametrically opposed. That's what I said. > the compatibility issues are pretty much a thing of the past on any browser Because there is only one meaningful browser left: Chromium. It is not a solution to cross-platform, it is just pushing for a monopoly. Just like a few years ago you could have been advocating for supporting exclusively Internet Explorer: t…

Internet Explorer did not follow web standards, Chrome does, pretty religiously. That's a huge difference. And Safari and Edge are gaining ground, Safari is not based on Chrome anymore and there are a number of open source browsers based on Chrome.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#246

Post by palata »

davidy123 wrote: post #245
palata wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Debug everywhere or google controlled, those things seem diametrically opposed. That's what I said. > the compatibility issues are pretty much a thing of the past on any browser Because there is only one meaningful browser left: Chromium. It is not a solution to cross-platform, it is just pushing for a monopoly. Just like a few years ago you could have been advocating for supporting exclusively Internet Explorer: t…

Internet Explorer did not follow web standards, Chrome does, pretty religiously. That's a huge difference. And Safari and Edge are gaining ground, Safari is not based on Chrome anymore and there are a number of open source browsers based on Chrome.

> Internet Explorer did not follow web standards

Well it was following the "IE standards". The difference is only rhetoric to avoid antitrust. Google dominates the standards. Edge is Chromium, Mozilla is maintained in survival mode by Google.

> Chrome does, pretty religiously

I wouldn't call it "religious" when Chrome follows stuff Google wants and Mozilla/Apple don't want.

> there are a number of open source browsers based on Chrome

Based on Chromium, you mean? That's still dominated by Google.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#247

Post by palata »

jampekka wrote: post #242
palata wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, Android-Studio creates the app for me. There are many files indeed, but that's nicely solved by the IDE. Then Kotlin is great, and I really like Jetpack Compose. You can distribute your APK manually, but if you want it on the Play Store you have to jump through loops indeed. Though I don't think it's worse than running a webserver. > And figure out which API was deprecated yesterday and what's today…

There are plenty of e.g. scaffolding tools to handle the bundlers and deployments etc for web frameworks if you are OK with IDE doing that. I don't use IDEs or scaffolding tools if I can do without. I use many different languages and platforms, and for that just good old vim and terminal make juggling between them a lot easier. I do understand that using the tool you know makes things (seem) simple. But it's the same…

> e.g. the situation with Camera/Camera2/CameraX was quite bad.

Yeah, I think overall it all converged a bit. Well Kotlin and Compose are big changes, but I can't really blame a change like that after more than a decade.

> But it's the same for all tech.

Yeah, I think we mostly agree. My opinion is just that I can switch between many languages and platforms, and native is always better integrated than anything cross-platform. Which makes for better apps and nicer development (I am happier learning Swift than debugging JS on the latest weird iOS-JS-framework with no community to help me).

IMO, if you write a simple app, then everything is simple. If you write a complex app, then native is better. As soon as it gets complex, nobody from the webtech community will know the details of the platform in question (unless they also do native dev on this platform). The native community for a specific platform is always bigger than the web community for it, in my experience.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#248

Post by FridgeSeal »

Lornedon wrote: post #241
FridgeSeal wrote: post #178

If this site is supposed to be a good demo of what they’re capable of, it’s failing pretty hard for me. - Takes ages to finish loading - huge number of features/functionality I don’t want a website to have over my phone/desktop - navigation is broken: swiping back causes some double-navigation stutter. - history is broken: attempting to navigate back to HN loads the same page again and again with no content change a…

I understood this as a showcase of the features that PWAs can use, and I think it does a pretty good job at that. Do I understand your second point correctly? The feature demo is failing at being a feature demo because it demoes some features that you don't like?

If you demoed a car, whose feature set included “often opening the glove box into your shins” and “texting inappropriate things to your ex”, you’d be pretty leery of using it. If random people kept going on about how much they love this car, and the ex-texting features were so good, that they hoped to upgrade them into “actively calling your ex” you’d be a bit leery of what they were talking about.

Every time someone talks about “how great PWA’s are” and how much better they’ll be after just some more features, I just hear “more stuff for advertisers to abuse”, “more things for half-assed devs to drain my battery and network with” and “more ways to have shittier experiences, slower” the less I’m interested in them.

More concretely, it’s a feature demo that doesn’t work (see navigation) for features I consider anti-features.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#249

Post by FridgeSeal »

bbor wrote: post #160
andreyvit wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! And the visuals are horrific too, just look at that tabbar. If anything, it’s a showcase of just how hard it’s gonna be to build a good app this way.

Is there anything about native apps or conventional websites/apps that would improve the visuals?

Native widgets and UI elements, native navigation functionality. Web apps get worse the more they try and pretend to be native apps and implement things like their own scrolling, or their own back/forwards navigation.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#250

Post by FridgeSeal »

bensecure wrote: post #151
JimDabell wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a web standard. Google wrote the specification and only Google have implemented it. It’s an unofficial draft: > Editors: > Matt Giuca (Google Inc.) > Eric Willigers (Google Inc.) > Status of This Document > This specification was published by the Web Incubator Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track — https://w3c.github.io/web-share-target/level-2/ Firefox doesn’t im…

The only relevant browsers on mobile are google's and apple's, and (modern) web standards are created by enough popular browsers implementing them. Literally all it would take for this to be a reliable web standard would be apple choosing to implement it.

Well until that point, and until it’s ratified as one, it’s not a web standard, so you can’t get disappointed that nobody else implements it.
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