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Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

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Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#61

Post by bob1029 »

I am very excited about the idea of both of these monsters actually getting behind PWA. One can only wonder about their motivations (i.e. anti-trust heating up), but I will take whatever I can get at this point.

To me, full support for PWA across all vendors' app stores would represent a revolution in the ability for hobbyists and small development shops to publish incredible applications.

Has HN not been published as a PWA to the various app stores yet? This seems like an obvious use case and could serve as a great example for other applications.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#62

Post by tapoxi »

alwillis wrote: post #59
osrec wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Apple is stifling innovation by not supporting certain APIs. They need to stop doing this, or they will hurt themselves in the long run. As it is, most people use Safari on iOS because they are forced to - all other browsers on iOS are forced to use WKWebView, which basically means they are wrappers around Safari's view. To this day, I can't understand why their users stand for this. In this regard, Apple re…

In this regard, Apple reminds me of a cult leader brainwashing their followers into believing the cult's way is the best way. Makes me a little sick actually. Are you sure you aren’t the one being brainwashed? Why should anyone trust Google, since they make virtually all of their revenue from ad tech, which means tracking users across the web, even when they don't want to be. Advertisers are Google's customers, not t…

> If we are to believe Apple cares about its users, then it makes perfect sense why they don't allow slower, less power efficient, less secure and less private web engines available on iOS.

Caring would mean giving people a choice. The real reason is they're pivoting into services and other forms of recurring revenue. They don't want people building platform-independent apps that don't need Apple approval and can bill outside of their 30% cut.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#63

Post by vially »

alwillis wrote: post #59
osrec wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Apple is stifling innovation by not supporting certain APIs. They need to stop doing this, or they will hurt themselves in the long run. As it is, most people use Safari on iOS because they are forced to - all other browsers on iOS are forced to use WKWebView, which basically means they are wrappers around Safari's view. To this day, I can't understand why their users stand for this. In this regard, Apple re…

In this regard, Apple reminds me of a cult leader brainwashing their followers into believing the cult's way is the best way. Makes me a little sick actually. Are you sure you aren’t the one being brainwashed? Why should anyone trust Google, since they make virtually all of their revenue from ad tech, which means tracking users across the web, even when they don't want to be. Advertisers are Google's customers, not t…

> [...] why they don't allow slower, less power efficient, less secure and less private web engines available on iOS

Do you have a source that shows how chromium/edge/firefox/etc are inferior to safari in this regard?

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#65

Post by ptx »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #55
osrec wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Apple is stifling innovation by not supporting certain APIs. They need to stop doing this, or they will hurt themselves in the long run. As it is, most people use Safari on iOS because they are forced to - all other browsers on iOS are forced to use WKWebView, which basically means they are wrappers around Safari's view. To this day, I can't understand why their users stand for this. In this regard, Apple re…

99.9% of users don’t even know what a browser engine is. Why would they care that they’re using WebKit instead of gecko or chromium? What they want is their bookmarks and such to sync between browsers across devices, and Apple lets that work just fine. As an iPhone user I actually like that all phones use the same engine. It prevents the “this website is better viewed in ” pop up from affecting mobile users (and in p…

If the last period of monoculture (the IE one) had persisted, most sites wouldn't have worked for any iOS users. iOS might not been feasible at all.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#66

Post by osrec »

alwillis wrote: post #59
osrec wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Apple is stifling innovation by not supporting certain APIs. They need to stop doing this, or they will hurt themselves in the long run. As it is, most people use Safari on iOS because they are forced to - all other browsers on iOS are forced to use WKWebView, which basically means they are wrappers around Safari's view. To this day, I can't understand why their users stand for this. In this regard, Apple re…

In this regard, Apple reminds me of a cult leader brainwashing their followers into believing the cult's way is the best way. Makes me a little sick actually. Are you sure you aren’t the one being brainwashed? Why should anyone trust Google, since they make virtually all of their revenue from ad tech, which means tracking users across the web, even when they don't want to be. Advertisers are Google's customers, not t…

Oh man, not sure where to begin with responding to this.

I'm not saying Google is incredible (my opinion is quite the contrary actually). However, I am saying Apple is holding the web back, in a fairly annoying way, for developers.

The fact that they are a rich corporate does not mean they always will be, or that they're conducting their business in the best way possible. There are plenty of examples of rich tech businesses that lost their market share very quickly. We don't even need to look that far into the past for an example: BlackBerry sticks out in my mind. I believe their stubbornness and resistance to change caused their downfall. I feel it may be a similar fate for Apple, and for similar reasons, unless they change their attitude towards the web.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#67

Post by notatoad »

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 desktop has been languishing for years. And as far as i can tell, the ubuntu software center team doesn't believe that PWAs exist at all.

it seems crazy to me that there's no functionality built into ubuntu that allows me to add youtube to the app list.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#68

Post by notatoad »

judah wrote: post #10
no_gravity wrote: post #8

The main problem I see in PWAs these days is that they cannot permanently store data on the device. As soon as the user deletes their "browser data", all the data of the PWAs on the device is lost too. If PWAs would get their own permanent storage like other apps, it would be a huge step forward.

Certainly it's true PWAs are subject to the user's desires about browser data. I think that's a good thing for users. PWAs usually store client-side data as a kind of cache: cookies, local storage, service worker cache. Caches are not meant to be permanent. There may be room for improvement here, however. One might imagine that clearing browser data shouldn't clear data for installed PWAs. That's an argument worth fu…

>Certainly it's true PWAs are subject to the user's desires about browser data. I think that's a good thing for users.

i mostly agree, but the user experience isn't there yet. browsers make it easy to delete all data, but don't have any workflows that encourage deleting the data from only a single app. at this point, it seems less about empowering users to have control over their own data and more like browsers just don't care about PWA data.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#69

Post by k__ »

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 :/

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#70

Post by notatoad »

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 :/

I find Firefox Preview (with ublock origin enabled) to be the most usable of all the mobile browsers i've tried.

Chrome has a few nice things going for it, but i'd rather have ublock.

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