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What PWA Can Do Today

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Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#271

Post by davidy123 »

palata wrote: post #246
davidy123 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 browser…

"IE standards" makes no sense. Yes the big companies dominate web standards, but there are still multiple viable niche browsers that work by conforming to that spec, and an extensive spec validation framework anyone can use (web-platform-tests). It's unreasonable to say someone could come up with an IE compatible browser since there's no promise or reality of a stable design.

But you're just putting yourself out on an increasingly brittle limb to defend native apps, which imo work against user interests.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#272

Post by marvinblum »

palata wrote: post #203
marvinblum wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on Fedora. Of course, there has to be a native UI, but I'm running a two-person company for example. How on earth are we supposed to manage three or more platforms (browser, Android, iOS)? We're not lazy but limited by our mortality. > Because they don't know anything other than webtech and don't want to learn?

> How on earth are we supposed to manage three or more platforms (browser, Android, iOS)? Are you sure you need three or more platforms? In my experience, when I ask small companies what they need, they say "everything". If I listen to them, they even need to run on a Gameboy. Then most startups fail, so apparently the problem was not the number of platforms. It feels like many times, selecting the platforms may be f…

In our case, it's a SaaS (pirsch.io) and browser first. But people and I like having an icon on our phones that we can click to open a dashboard quickly. Of course, this could just be a regular link, but it saves resources because PWAs will cache files (2 MB or something JS bundles for example).

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#273

Post by JimDabell »

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.

You can apply that logic to literally anything Google thinks up. Google writes something in a spec and no matter how stupid, insecure, or privacy violating it is, by this logic Apple is now falling behind and holding the web back because all it would take to make it a standard is for Apple to do what Google wants. Why are you so keen to hand the web platform entirely over to Google?

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#274

Post by JimDabell »

postalrat wrote: post #215
JimDabell wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument would work if it were only Apple rejecting them. Mozilla rejects them on the same grounds.

Mozilla rejects stuff like webusb while apple is blocking add to home screen, push notifications, etc. Stuff that is needed to replace many app store apps. Firefox supports both add to home screen and push notifications.

PWAs already support push notifications and add to home screen on iOS.

Or by “add to home screen”, are you specifically referring to BeforeInstallPromptEvent / prompt()? That isn’t a web standard. It’s something Google alone have implemented, it’s a Chrome-only feature. Firefox hasn’t implemented it either.

> Status of This Document

> This specification was published by the Web Platform Incubator Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track.

https://wicg.github.io/manifest-incubations/

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#275

Post by JimDabell »

dannymoerkerke wrote: post #261
mcculley wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that it works fine for me also on mobile. Somehow they have managed to neuter the desktop experience. A perfect demonstration of PWA today.

Desktop works as well

The website applies -webkit-user-select: none to everything in the feature grid. The website author has intentionally disabled this functionality.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#276

Post by palata »

marvinblum wrote: post #272
palata wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How on earth are we supposed to manage three or more platforms (browser, Android, iOS)? Are you sure you need three or more platforms? In my experience, when I ask small companies what they need, they say "everything". If I listen to them, they even need to run on a Gameboy. Then most startups fail, so apparently the problem was not the number of platforms. It feels like many times, selecting the platforms may be f…

In our case, it's a SaaS (pirsch.io) and browser first. But people and I like having an icon on our phones that we can click to open a dashboard quickly. Of course, this could just be a regular link, but it saves resources because PWAs will cache files (2 MB or something JS bundles for example).

> But people and I like having an icon on our phones that we can click to open a dashboard quickly.

Doesn't make it necessary. Just like analytics, actually: people like to have them, yet most of the time they don't do anything meaningful with them.

(Don't get me wrong: you are perfectly entitled to sell something people like, and people love spending time looking at analytics)

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#277

Post by palata »

davidy123 wrote: post #271
palata wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 browser…

"IE standards" makes no sense. Yes the big companies dominate web standards, but there are still multiple viable niche browsers that work by conforming to that spec, and an extensive spec validation framework anyone can use (web-platform-tests). It's unreasonable to say someone could come up with an IE compatible browser since there's no promise or reality of a stable design. But you're just putting yourself out on a…

> but there are still multiple viable niche browsers that work by conforming to that spec

Again, Chromium-based browsers don't count if their contribution to the codebase is marginal.

Then Google implements stuff that Apple and Mozilla disagree with, and devs still rely on it (e.g. web bluetooth). Not even mentioning that Mozilla is a joke kept alive by Google for antitrust reasons.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#278

Post by davidy123 »

palata wrote: post #277
davidy123 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"IE standards" makes no sense. Yes the big companies dominate web standards, but there are still multiple viable niche browsers that work by conforming to that spec, and an extensive spec validation framework anyone can use (web-platform-tests). It's unreasonable to say someone could come up with an IE compatible browser since there's no promise or reality of a stable design. But you're just putting yourself out on a…

> but there are still multiple viable niche browsers that work by conforming to that spec Again, Chromium-based browsers don't count if their contribution to the codebase is marginal. Then Google implements stuff that Apple and Mozilla disagree with, and devs still rely on it (e.g. web bluetooth). Not even mentioning that Mozilla is a joke kept alive by Google for antitrust reasons.

Firefox is still there. There is more than Chromium based browsers. Safari uses its own engine. Gnome, KDE have their own browsers with their own engines, there are text browsers, experimental browsers, etc. There could be a completely new browser next week that works with 99.9999% of web pages, thanks to web standards.

But even a Chromium based browser setting is better than some random app that could have been a web page.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#279

Post by palata »

davidy123 wrote: post #278
palata wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but there are still multiple viable niche browsers that work by conforming to that spec Again, Chromium-based browsers don't count if their contribution to the codebase is marginal. Then Google implements stuff that Apple and Mozilla disagree with, and devs still rely on it (e.g. web bluetooth). Not even mentioning that Mozilla is a joke kept alive by Google for antitrust reasons.

Firefox is still there. There is more than Chromium based browsers. Safari uses its own engine. Gnome, KDE have their own browsers with their own engines, there are text browsers, experimental browsers, etc. There could be a completely new browser next week that works with 99.9999% of web pages, thanks to web standards. But even a Chromium based browser setting is better than some random app that could have been a we…

> There could be a completely new browser next week that works with 99.9999% of web pages, thanks to web standards.

Don't you think you are slightly underestimating the complexity of a browser that works with 99.9999% of webpages?

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#280

Post by int_19h »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #235
wbharding wrote: post #173

Sure would be nice if Firefox desktop would join the browsers that support PWAs. We build an app that has been PWA-first, but it is unfortunate that this generally requires users to have a Chrome instance running. Would much rather point people to Firefox, and it seems like it would be to their advantage to give apps a reason to recommend FF, if they built a smoother PWA integration than Chrome.

I don't understand the point of PWAs on desktop. I find it much easier to open a website from the addressbar then to open an "app" using spotlight. I always have a browser window open anyway.

Same reason why you might prefer to use an app over a website in general. I use PWAs a lot on Windows, and for me the single biggest benefit is that they don't clutter my browser tabs, but instead show up as separate icons that I can Alt+Tab to, see in taskbar along with their notifications, move and resize the window as I see fit etc. Sure, I could also run them in separate browser windows, but then window management gets much messier.
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