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Open Letter to Tim Cook: Sabotaging Web Apps Is Indefensible
(letter.open-web-advocacy.org)
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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Firefox doesn't even support pwa, this is a weird community to post this
Firefox for Android supports PWAs, only Desktop Firefox dropped the support
And there is FirefoxPWA, an extension to add pretty solid PWA support on desktop.
Which honestly makes sense, what’s the point of PWA on desktop?
Web apps are awesome on desktop especially when common clients like Skype and Slack are absolute fucking shit with zero dev time spent on them because Electron is a lazy alternative despite being shit software that needs to fucking die.
Thankfully --no-remote parameter still sort of works to make Firefox semi usable as a web app.
This needs to be said more often
I love how somehow electron is the lazy way while web apps isn’t, even though electron is just an executable with chromium bundled
And made significantly worse by a) locking you into using a restricted version of the browser made by a shitty company. b) laging noticeably behind that browser in development c) using custom apis for performing tasks already available in any browser like interacting with microphone, camera etc d) breaking perfectly working components that rely on OS apis in regular browsers like screen sharing, video acceleration, etc e) some of the above is partially responsible for Electron being totally broken on certain combinations of OS/WM/hardware where regular browsers work prefectly fine
I can keep going, but my point is all these pointless sacrifices are supposedly there to save dev team a bit of time instead of designing a properly working website and just using a web app or allocating some time to build a functional native app.
Fuck Google and fuck electron. It's just a pathetic attempt to mine more data from people using pseudo app.
I agree that ElectronJS is shit but the idea behind isn't bad. See tauri, it achieved the same thing but better
Source: I'm a developer forced to also work with electron
How is a web app any better than an electron app? Electron is just a wrapper for a web app.
Didn't slack just revamp their entire UI? And also what's functionally wrong with it? I haven't had any issues with slack
After years of using it, there was only once a brief release in which screen sharing actually worked. The only way I can share screen at the moment is by launching slack in any of chrome based browsers. None of the apps work. Not the native one, not the flatpak, not the snap.
Yeah but it’s as buggy as hell
Installing web apps that should really be their own apps and not confined to a tab in your browser. Especially on Linux for things like Notion that you'll need often and accessible from the dash or task bar.
I actually would love to have it since I'm on Linux. My options are sometimes nothing, 3rd party packaged version, broken or slow startup time. (Most of the time it's just fine though)
Having everything as cached Web pages with notifications, working camera, mic and screen sharing is very good.
What’s the difference to open it in your own browser then?
It doesn't create a new entry in the taskbar with a separate icon and I can't target it as easily for "Open on this virtual desktop" settings. Links don't open in another tab of the window you use only for an application. Shortcuts usually function better also.
Those are just some things of the top of my head
Mmh I see! I used a tool to convert the website to an electron package (for Linux), but the experience was just the same as using the browser so I just went with that tbf
I've used some of those also. I've had mixed experiences with them since some applications always open stuff in a tab which you can only get to and close with shortcuts and the favicon not being used by default on Wayland. I mean those are very minor though hahaha.
Mostly the same as on phones.
Basically the same point as Electron/Tauri, make a web app feel like a native app by getting rid of the typical browser UI to focus on the content. I'm pretty sure they usually integrate with OS features, like launchers, so you don't need to bookmark it in your browser, you just open like any other app.
Developers can focus on PWA for phones and desktop.
What’s the point of it on phones?
Single app for all platforms, without the baggage and issues of the cross-native solutions.
They're actually secure too. It's always interesting to me how iphone owners are so concerned about security and privacy, right up until Apple tells them not to.
I've had an Apple user on here try to tell me that PWAs would open new security issues if they could be installed by any browser. They didn't want to accept that a PWA would need both a browser exploit and an iOS exploit to have the same malicious potential as an iOS app has with just an iOS exploit. But they didn't care that literally any website has the same potential for exploitation as PWAs do.
I genuinely don't understand how you can get to this understanding without willfully ignoring how these things work.
Right...
Moving the app outside the confinement of official distribution channel/getting rid of 20/30% of store tax?
Isn’t that what’s happening in the EU?
You don’t have to rely on stupid “app” stores