Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 198 posts

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#171

Post by ptman »

wffurr wrote: post #86
notatoad wrote: post #67

I really wish that firefox and ubuntu would hop on board with this. It seems like they both should be at the forefront of this, but for some reason it's still impossible to make a PWA show up in my app list on ubuntu without installing chrome. Firefox on android does a great job of notifying and offering to install PWAs, but on desktop seems to pretend they don't exist. The bug report for adding any PWA support on de…

Whatever happened to the Mozilla that made FirefoxOS. Just to soon I guess.

FirefoxOS lives on in KaiOS. But that's probably not very open source

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#172

Post by davrous »

tasogare wrote: post #162
querez wrote: post #160

Admittedly it might be my fault for living under a rock, but I don't know what PWA stands for. The fact that the linked article uses the acronym without ever writing out its long form even once rubs me the wrong way. For those like me who are in the dark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_application

It stands for Poor-experience Web Applications. It’s basically website + more JavaScript to get some features somewhat working without network. It’s marketed as the next generation tech for mobile web application but the truth is that without access to the underlying API it’s hard to even get close to native capabilities. And as the web is already super bloated I don’t think it would be a good idea to add more.

I strongly disagree. You have access to a lot of API and even more thanks to project Fugu. We have Web Assembly (WASM), WebGL 2 (soon WebGPU), etc. Check out this article: https://www.davrous.com/2019/10/18/myth-busting-pwas-the-new...

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#174

Post by soraminazuki »

the_gipsy wrote: post #153
spideymans wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn’t agree more. As a developer, PWAs are amazing. Write once, run more or less everywhere. Our enterprise software deployments wouldn’t have been possible if we had to target iOS, Android and Windows specifically. As an end user, I dread the days PWAs ever go mainstream. They’re horribly inefficient from a power and performance point of view, and never have I come across a PWA with a user experience half as go…

> Beyond that, there’s some very serious privacy concerns as well with PWAs, especially with developers abusing APIs for fingerprinting If TikTok was a PWA it couldn't have done a fraction of the tracking it was doing. The irony is that apple is forcing you to use a much more privacy-invasive alternative to PWAs.

> If TikTok was a PWA it couldn't have done a fraction of the tracking it was doing.

This is misleading when the motives of PWA is to make the web browser acquire as much capabilities as a native app. If browsers keep on expanding access to the underlying platform without any regards of the consequences, TikTok would be able to track you more without you ever having to install anything. This would kill the web as we know it because you’ll have to give websites the same trust you give to software when you install them on your computer. We won’t be able to browse the web freely as we do now.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#175

Post by soraminazuki »

nikitaga wrote: post #155
millstone wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is making the right decision here. My iOS device has never once shown me "this website requires Chrome." I get to use the mobile web without needing Google. And Apple is the only reason why. Maybe some day, web apps will become so undeniably awesome that Safari's position is untenable. But the agitation is not coming from iOS users missing out on awesome PWAs. Instead it's web developers, who are just annoyed t…

> respect the conventions of the platform they're building for Do you mean UI conventions, or the "30% revenue cut and a gag order on even mentioning non-appstore signups" convention? Justifying blatant anticompetitive and user-hostile practices by native UI holyness is getting kinda old.

This is a false dichotomy. People can dislike PWAs and be critical of AppStore practices at the same time.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#176

Post by sciprojguy »

millstone wrote: post #140
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent said it's the web developers who argue for PWA, I just stated why they have reasons to do that.

Yeah, agreed. The web is now the most developer-friendly platform by far.

Ha. Using Foundation, Swift and SwiftUI I can write an app that doesn't require a trip to GitHub or Node.js in order to work properly. I can prototype my UI right there in Xcode, and if there's something I need that hasn't made it into SwiftUI yet I can bring in things from UIKit without very much effort. Best of all, I can build for macOS as well as iOS from the same codebase now. It's really hard to get more developer-friendly than that, unless you mean "web-developer-who-doesn't-want-to-learn-iOS-friendly".

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#177

Post by wffurr »

ptman wrote: post #171
wffurr wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever happened to the Mozilla that made FirefoxOS. Just to soon I guess.

FirefoxOS lives on in KaiOS. But that's probably not very open source

I know what happened to FirefoxOS. But the Mozilla that was willing to invest in a web app first mobile OS and all the web capabilities needed to make that great seems to be completely gone.

Now they seem to have given up on the promise of the web as an app delivery platform and have aligned with Apple on a pro-privacy stance that seems based more on posturing than safely providing capabilities.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#178

Post by lolinder »

rubber_duck wrote: post #116
skrowl wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to guess you're on iOS where you don't actually have Firefox (or any other actual browsers besides Safari). Firefox on iOS (like all iOS browsers) is required by App store rules to basically just skin Safari. On Android, Firefox is the MOST usable browser.

Surfing on Firefox Android ATM, and it has the same issues it has on the desktop of sites glitching out - just even harder to work arround on mobile. I'm car shopping and downloading specs from multiple dealers straight out doesn't work - the downloaded PDF won't open, works like a charm in Chrome. Stuff like this is why I suspect most non tech people would revert to Chrome pretty fast.

I've been using Firefox for years and never run into any consistent pattern of things not working, except in cases where applications intentionally do not support Firefox and push me over to Chrome. Those I blame less on Firefox than on companies wanting to eliminate a customer support variable.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#179

Post by lolinder »

k__ wrote: post #69
notatoad wrote: post #67

I really wish that firefox and ubuntu would hop on board with this. It seems like they both should be at the forefront of this, but for some reason it's still impossible to make a PWA show up in my app list on ubuntu without installing chrome. Firefox on android does a great job of notifying and offering to install PWAs, but on desktop seems to pretend they don't exist. The bug report for adding any PWA support on de…

Yes, would be cool. Firefox is currently unusable on mobile :/

For me, uBlock origin is the only thing that makes browsing the web even remotely okay on mobile. Its ability to block large images is a complete game changer for me.

Maybe it's because I've got an "old" phone (4 years ish), but Chrome's insisting that I must download everything a website throws at my made it extremely difficult to use comfortably. As soon as I found out Firefox had extensions on mobile, I switched both my desktop and mobile browsers, and it's been great.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#180

Post by solarkraft »

spideymans wrote: post #126
millstone wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is making the right decision here. My iOS device has never once shown me "this website requires Chrome." I get to use the mobile web without needing Google. And Apple is the only reason why. Maybe some day, web apps will become so undeniably awesome that Safari's position is untenable. But the agitation is not coming from iOS users missing out on awesome PWAs. Instead it's web developers, who are just annoyed t…

I couldn’t agree more. As a developer, PWAs are amazing. Write once, run more or less everywhere. Our enterprise software deployments wouldn’t have been possible if we had to target iOS, Android and Windows specifically. As an end user, I dread the days PWAs ever go mainstream. They’re horribly inefficient from a power and performance point of view, and never have I come across a PWA with a user experience half as go…

> Beyond that, there’s some very serious privacy concerns as well with PWAs, especially with developers abusing APIs for fingerprinting

Do you think native platform APIs are more restrictive?

Post reply on HN