I use PWAs extensively and Firefox decided they won't bother to implement them, so that's going to be a no from me.
Rather than wanting the web platform to be first class, they really want it to languish as a second-class citizen. Really sad, seeing as they also fired devs, and invested in "AI" instead.
They just seem like another way to attempt to shift users from the 'proper web' into a place where blocking ads is more difficult.
Personally, I wish we could purge the vast majority of 'apps' from the world, they shouldn't be apps in the first place, most have no need to run native code, they should be links to websites, sites that can work on more-or-less any device in any browser.
I used to be the maintainer for Nativefier (which made web apps into native apps via Electron). It was very popular because many people don’t want certain sites to be one of X tabs in one app, especially when those sites act like they’re own apps. So we gave users the ability to treat these web “apps” like any other apps.
We actually shut down the project because a good PWA implementation does this better than we ever could. PWAs can have extensions like ad blockers (very difficult to impossible in Electron). PWAs get automatic browser updates (very difficult with Electron).
PWAs are great, and FF’s implementation of them is not.
> They just seem like another way to attempt to shift users from the 'proper web' into a place where blocking ads is more difficult.
Extensions still run in PWAs on Chromium-based browsers, so I'm not sure that's the intent behind implementing them.
> Personally, I wish we could purge the vast majority of 'apps' from the world
Out of curiosity, where do you draw the distinction between an app and a website? PWAs are largely just websites with an OS shortcut, and in some cases more integration via platform APIs. I'm sure you're familiar with the term "web app", which perfectly highlights how muddied the line is with modern tooling.
I use Elk Mastodon client - being able to install it as a PWA is great - I get a nice icon on my mobile screen same as any other app, and it runs full screen without an address bar. I can switch between it and other apps, I don't see the downside really
On Windows the Twitter, Instagram, TikTok apps are PWAs. I like to use them because I can pin them to the start menu, have them start on a separate window by default and remember the window position.
Having apps that works as well as native ones, while using the same codebase and open technologies, and that is naturally as decentralized, safe and accessible as the web.
Also not needing to be politically correct, approved by Google and Apple or share large percent of revenue and marketing data with them.
It could be happening if Firefox took it more seriously and Apple didn't prevent it from happening.
Getting a full screen view without having to go through the insane hassle of Ionic and the Play store every time you make a one line change? Really useful for various offline control web apps, though I admit it's a rounding error use case that most browsers are more hostile to every year with arbitrary restrictions around HTTP connections (did you know Safari's ATS policy now blocks fetch over unsecure connections, lmao). Web games come to mind as well I guess?
I'm still baffled that mobile browsers don't have the desktop equivalent of F11. Or a console for that matter, the ADB is good and all but it's not always an option.
> Firefox and Safari do not support installing PWAs on any desktop operating systems... Chrome and Edge support installing PWAs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks. [1]
Any idea what Mozilla's motivation is here? (Apple's at least is easy to understand, even if you disagree.)
> Firefox and Safari do not support installing PWAs on any desktop operating systems... Chrome and Edge support installing PWAs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks.
Curious, can you give some examples of PWAs you use, and why? I've rarely seen any benefit of actually installing a PWA vs just bookmarking the site.
On mobile, I could see privacy reasons for wanting to use a PWA vs a native app, but every time I've seen a site that supports a PWA, they also support a native app and the PWA is usually a sad substitute in comparison.
Photopea, it's a web based photo editor that is really really great. If you install it as a PWA, it works offline. Similarly, excalidraw, monkeytype, google calendar all work offline if you install it as a PWA.
Apart from that, I have youtube music, slack, discord, whatsapp web just for convenience of having it in alt+tab rather than cycle through a thousand tabs (admittedly, this usecase is nullified by tab search)
Any online IDE is a much nicer experience as an installed PWA compared to as a browser tab. VS code server for instance, since you don't get a the address bar at top like https://code.visualstudio.com/assets/docs/remote/vscode-serv... (without having to go Full screen on browser), and you get a standalone icon in task bar, and standalone window so you can Alt-Tab between it and other apps like web browser of choice quickly.
I use PWAs for YouTube Music, Slack, and Readwise Reader.
Sometimes there is a standalone app available, like with Slack, but often the PWA has the same features and doesn't duplicate the entire Web Platform stack (Electron), which saves some battery.
Along those lines, does macOS 14's Safari's support for "Add to Dock" count as installing a PWA? I have a couple frequently used websites in my dock, acting more or less like regular Mac apps (or at least like Electron apps). What would a "proper" PWA add to that?
(Not a leading question. I'm genuinely asking people who like and use PWAs: is there something cool I'm missing out on?)
You're correct. I'm actually not sure what installing a PWA does that visiting the website in your browser doesn't, but it's essentially opening the website in a headless browser. So very much like electron except instead of having to bundle the browser in the executable it uses your machine's browser.
I personally hate PWAs even the ones I use on mobile (with firefox). Not being able to open a link in a second tab for example. I much rather just open the web app in a normal browser. PWAs just seem to reduce functionality over a normal web page.
I like to see Firefox the browser as something that will have a life independent of Mozilla the (crappily managed) corporation. When they finally go down in flames, the open source community will continue to work on it in some fashion. It started as a skunkworks project, and I expect it will continue to have a life after Mozilla.
That, or something else will fill the void (maybe something built off Servo, I dunno), but that seems less likely.
I have tried to switch out of curiosity, but the lack of PWA support in addition to missing features like WebUSB really limits how useful the browser is to me.
we really need a wealthy tech founder type (especially one who made their millions or billions on the web) to start a new foundation that will actually care about Firefox rather than see it as a liability. Mozilla has completely lost my trust and support
I didn't follow this PWA stuff very closely, but from what I understand, Mozilla didn't want to implement the PWA protocol proposed by Google because it contained things that weren't compatible with the open web view focused on the benefit of the users which Firefox has. I'm happy there is a browser that takes this stance.
Foam is to VSCode, what Org (and Org-Roam) are to Emacs.
As a former org-roam user, I ended up preferring it because my end goal was to convert my notes to HTML and blog posts, and org is poor at that as HTML is not valid org code whereas it is in Markdown. There's just a whole host of markdown-it plugins [1] out there to add footnotes and all sorts of things to Markdown, and Foam also understands Jekyll frontmatter YAML, which is perfect for blog post tags/categories.
This gives it similar power and flexibility to Org-Roam, as you can extend the model to improve the editing experience.
So why don't I use Obsidian, Logseq, and others? Because they're dedicated apps, and now I have to bring various half-baked plugins into them to give me the power my editor already affords me. With notes, half your time is spent editing, so why wouldn't you want your editing to be as close as possible?
Secondarily, nothing stops me from using everything altogether, since it's all Markdown, I can load up my note repo in Obsidian or Logseq and others, and continue editing in VSCode and Emacs!
They're in a GitHub repo, so I just use that since GH renders Markdown.
I could probably use Obsidian/Logseq mobile if I wanted to. (Again, because it's Markdown... which is about universal now.)
And like, it's Markdown. It's meant to be readable as-is, so I can probably figure out any alternative method. I'd obviously miss out on tag searching and graphing, but I don't have heavy mobile use right now.
Edit: Yeah, the GitHub mobile app ain't the worst. I can probably find a way to get local git on my phone, and then just use Obsidian Mobile if I want to get fancy.
Under Eric Schmidt they were engineer-driven, during the golden era of the 2000s. Nowadays they're MBA driven, which is why they had 4 different messaging apps from different product managers.
Lack of top-down direction is what allowed that situation. Microsoft is MBA-driven and usually has a coherent product lineup, including messaging.
Also, "had." Google cleaned things up. They still sometimes do stuff just cause, but it's a lot less now. I still feel like Meet using laggy VP9 (vs H.264 like everyone else) is entirely due to engineer stubbornness.
I would say that Microsoft's craziness around buying Kin and Nokia, and Windows 8, RT edition, etc etc, was far more fundamental product misdirection than anything Google has ever done.
Microsoft failed to enter the mobile space, yeah. Google fumbled with the Nexus stuff, even though they succeeded with the Android software. But bigger picture, Microsoft was still able to diversify their revenue sources a lot while Google failed to do so.
That's true, although Pixel seems good as a successor, but the big thing Microsoft did was use what they had to get into new markets.
Procuring Azure is a good option for lots of companies because most companies' IT staff know AD and Microsoft in general, and Microsoft's cloud offers them a way to use the same (well, not the same, but it's too late by then) tools to manage their company IT.
I'm not disagreeing with its success, but I do think they had a much simpler journey, as to my understanding a lot of it involved cloudifying their locked-in enterprise customers, rather than diversifying into new markets.
What frustrates me about Google is they fumbled in a lot of markets that aren't far from their established ones. Zoom ate their lunch with video chat, and now MS Teams seems to be beating GSuite. Maybe YouTube -> social networking would've been doable, but they botched it with G+. The old Google was only good at facing new technical challenges, not making products. Now that's changing, and I think at least they can make Google Cloud work.
I also don't see anything big Google has leveraged Android for, besides Pixel, which is actually more to cement Android cause they know they don't have enough control with software alone. At least I have decent amount of faith in them pulling that off.
20 versions of .net is wonderful. Changing the names of features over and over again is great too. I am also pleased that windows ten is the last version of windows.
The same Microsoft that recently brought us "New Teams" and "New Outlook" and gave us a reskinned version of the same programs but now we have it installed twice?
Those are two messaging apps regular people can actually name, unlike all of Google's messaging apps. MSN Messenger survived 13 years supposedly. Skype was also a big thing for several years MS owned it.
And I hate Teams personally, but lots of teams use it.
That distinction doesn't matter to Microsoft. Also it's funny how Google chat products once again go unmentioned... Their alternative is Chat (or idk, chat.google.com), and it's possibly even worse than Teams.
I think Google chat(s)'s issue may be lack of features and marketing, Microsoft Teams is drowning with bugs, performance issues, poor UI/UX design, etc.
I haven't used Teams enough to say, but Chat suffers from the latter things. UI keeps randomly changing in big ways, threading is confusing, there's serious lag just switching chats, takes forever to load, feature set is only on par with Slack circa 2015.
You can say a lot about Doctorow but his writing usually gets republished in a lot of places. Last I checked, he has his Twitter feed, a Mastodon, hosts his stuff on Pluralistic and that last one is just a blog so he has an RSS feed too.
Granted this talk is not something he hosted, but generally speaking, Doctorow is the last one to make that argument with.
The guy is very good at outreach; the sad reality is that most people are on big walled garden platforms, so that's where you need to go to reach out. Him republishing his stuff to as many places as possible seems like the best of both worlds in that regard.
Ivory tower mentality is what gets us the FSF, and they have been awful at general outreach.
Thanks, and I agree! I was there for the talk and Julia was absolutely electric. When Alex Miller introduced her, he said he wanted someone who makes him happy when they're on stage, and he was right to have chosen Julia!
>In January 2023, Raytheon denied media reports that security clearance background checks for jobs at the defense contractor investigate whether applicants play War Thunder.
> I have to question any article that claims task manager items are "randomly moving around."
"Randomly" is colloquially used to mean "chaotically" in a lot of contexts, and the chaotic they mean is "unpredictable enough as to seem or feel random".
Rather than wanting the web platform to be first class, they really want it to languish as a second-class citizen. Really sad, seeing as they also fired devs, and invested in "AI" instead.