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Firefox supports PWAs, at least on mobile.
Are they PWAs tho, or just shortcuts?
They open in a window separate from the browser and don't display the browser toolbar, so not just shortcuts.
The main purpose of PWAs is not to remove the browser toolbar but rather cache most of the website to improve speed and reduce data usage if I am not wrong, there are external tools to get rid of the toolbar but Firefox dropped the PWA spec which includes a lot more than just that.
The caching is the result of service workers which Firefox definitely supports.
edit: oh just scrolled down and saw you already commented that later.
Real PWAs, though PWAs aren't that different from shortcuts tbh
As far as I know their main purpose is to cache various parts of the website properly which is a lot more than just a shortcut.
Regular websites can do that too using service workers - Lemmy's webapp uses this to show an error when an instance is unreachable
What we call a PWA is usually just a webpage with a webmanifest, and a service worker script to manage loading those cached resources you mentioned
Seems like you are right, the caching for proper offline usage and use with very limited internet connections is all done trough service workers. Their main job seems to be system integration and while Firefox Android kind of sucks at that too it doesn't seem like they ever cut that down so they just dropped it for desktop users.
On Android at least, Firefox PWA's don't seem to support registering system-level things (like 'Share To' handlers) - you need to use a Chrome PWA for that....
You can use them on Mint through their webapp application.
it does? How
Did my image not load?
Anyway, there's a webapp application that came with Mint and I can use it to setup PWAs through Firefox. I use it for my two router's setup pages.
Here's a link to the git for the that application: https://github.com/linuxmint/webapp-manager
Doesnt seem like it. But thanks
It's not firefox that supports it, it's an app called webapp manager. you can make webapps using any browser you have installed.
You can use it on any distro.
Well, yes. I guess I was saying more that it can be done.
Poor wording on my part.
It's not a problem. I just wanted to clarify that it's distro and browser agnostic.
Oh, my bad. I see you're on world. I don't think the uploaded images in kbin's comments show up on there very well.
Nice, I was trying to figure out how to get that working with Firefox. But, to be fair, it's not Firefox that's supporting PWA, it's the mint webapp-manager which is only included with Mint and requires extra steps to install on other OSes. Not as straight forward as PWA being directly supported by Firefox.
I don't think it was "do not want to support" it was more of a "cannot support".
Only so much developer time to go around, have to pick your battles.
Also, mobile Firefox has supported PWAs for a long time. I wouldn't say PWAs on desktop would be useless, but they make much more sense on mobile than on desktop.
Only use I've found for them on desktop personally is the web interfaces for local hardware. I did use it when I was playing with stable diffusion for a bit but never fine tuned it because stable diffusion kept crashing.
I like them as task bar icons...
Have to use an extension for that.
It's a native feature of Edge, and a buggy version exists in Chrome.
PWAs are useful on desktop if there's web apps you use a lot every day. For example, some people at my Workplace are in Google Docs a lot, so a Google Docs PWA would be useful. Separate taskbar/launcher icon, separate window in Alt-Tab, and at least in Chrome, Google Docs has some basic support working while offline.
Not really, they dropped them wuth the massive layoffs during which they dropped various projects (or more like the entire teams behind them) and increased executive pay... :/
Erm... Writing a manifest is like, an hour of work for a dev? Supporting PWAs is like... years? So um, not really comparable.
For what is worth, the pwaforfirefox project works beautifully, I use it with discord, teams and tidal everyday.
I don't like or use Discord but what's the benefit of using it as a web app vs the downloadable client?
The native client has application level access to the rest of your machine. They use this to run process loggers "for the activity display", or the button that allows you to quickly stream a game if it's running. They could theoretically use this access for keylogging or accessing the mic without explicit user permission. Running the Discord web client keeps the source of collected telemetry within the webbrowser, which doesn't offer keylogging or process logger features, and requires explicit user permission to give websites access to a microphone, camera, or the screen for streaming.
Yes, they do process log on the native client, and from my own GDPR data request it appears they keep this data in detail for a couple of years: https://github.com/snapcrafters/discord/issues/43
- better privacy as no process scanning or direct access to cam/mic
- better performance as discord desktop app for windows still uses 32bit electron, which makes it slower than the web app
- better security as you have an up to date browser engine unlike the desktop app
In Linux the native client is quite bad,especially streaming, as its not hardware accelerated and doesn't stream sound. The browser version doesn't have any of those issues.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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