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This tool is named deceptively. It makes it sound like Firefox has broken or missing support for PWAs. Firefox has great support for pwas. My team shipped our app as a pwa in May and it was easy to do and works 100% in both chrome and Firefox.
It appears this is more of a packager that tries to turn a website into a pwa and makes it install more like a native app. I may try it out, but the name is horrible and damaging to Firefox so I'll probably not ship until that name is changed.
> _This tool is named deceptively._
It's a trademark violation, in that "FirefoxPWA" improperly implies that that Firefox is the brand behind the product. This isn't likely to go all the way to a court of law, but if it did it would be an open and shut case. The author should do the polite thing and rename their product.
Legally proper alternatives would be "PWAs for Firefox" or more clearly, "PWA Installer for Firefox" as suggested elsethread. Those aren't necessarily great product names, but they illustrate a point: the inversion makes it clear that this is a third party offering, rather than something coming from Firefox.
For what it's worth I don't think the author intended to create marketplace confusion, because the full product _description_ "Progressive Web Apps for Firefox" makes it clear it's a third-party offering. It should be possible to resolve this amicably.
>Firefox has great support for pwas
It doesn't and the relevant bug is marked as WONTFIX.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407202
Isn't being installable as an app kind of the most baseline feature of PWAs? To my knowledge desktop Firefox doesn't let you do that without an addon like this.
IIRC Firefox did use to support installing of PWAs until about a year ago. It still boggles my mind why they dropped it.
Bizarre decisions about features is run of the mill these days for Mozilla. I had to use FF a few days ago (WebKit derivatives can't load massive GitHub pull requests) and I truly missed the browser. But I use PWAs, so I have to use Chrome.
I'm not sure why you find Chrome necessary for PWAs, I use Discord, Spotify, Zoom, etc. all exclusively from within Firefox.
That's not what a PWA is, a PWA is installable, and Firefox doesn't have that.
> As of 2021, PWA features are supported to varying degrees by Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Firefox for Android, and Microsoft Edge[2][3] but not by Firefox for desktop.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_application
If anything, Mozilla was pioneering around idea of such easy accessible web applications with Prism project up until it was abandoned [1].
[1] -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Prism
How do I install a PWA on Firefox? Wanted to do that just yesterday to get offline Excalibur, but could not find a button.
(Desktop, Fedora - in case that makes a difference)
I thought this install feature was for phones only, but a comment further down posted an addon link:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29440657
And the add on mentioned, is this project
> Firefox has great support for pwas
It doesn't support "installing" PWAs like native apps, and that's a core feature of PWAs, so no it does not have great support for PWAs
> the name is horrible and damaging to Firefox so I'll probably not ship until that name is changed.
I think you're being a bit harsh here. Sure, a more accurate name would be "PWA Installer for Firefox", but to say it's deceptively named is pretty hyperbolic.
When I see a name start with 'Firefox' I really do expect it to be _from_ the team Firefox at Mozilla, and was genuinely expecting the link to have either the mozilla.org, firefox.com, or github.com/mozilla URLs. IMHO it's important to preserve the name recognition of the only open source browser that can compete with Chrome.
If you were not aware of Mozilla dropping support for PWAs, it could potentially sound that way. But to me it was pretty clear that it's a third-party thing, because why the hell would Mozilla create a separate project to do this after they dropped support?
Not anymore is it hyperbolic. Not when you have product names like "Firefox Lockwise" and so forth. Firefox is now a brand name and also a browser name (horrible, horrible move by Mozilla, IMHO). So, FirefoxPWA is probably in some kind of IP violation.
What does it mean to install a webapp?
Is it different than Firefox's "Add to Home" button?
That's what it is. But only Firefox Mobile supports it, this extension is about the desktop version.
"Add to home screen" is the option you'll get if the web app doesn't have PWA support.
If PWA is supported firefox mobile will show an "Install" option instead. This works more like a native app. When launched there will be no URL bar and the status bar will take the main colour of the PWA.
Actually, on mobile it is. Which infuriates me more than it should.
There are two ways to link to an application in Firefox: one just creates a shortcut ("Add to home") which opens the browser. The other opens a full screen application, like PWAs are designed to do.
When I hit the install button, what I really want is the latter but occasionally PWA detection seems to fail and installs a shortcut instead.
In desktop Firefox, Mozilla has decided to can this idea and not implement it. There was a bug open for this in bugzilla, but that was closed as WONTFIX.
More precise terminology should be "Install to desktop" (or homescreen on mobile). Years ago there was a tool (or extension) called Prism, that did exactly the same thing.
We need to protest against how Apple cripples PWAs on iPhones. Sure some apps might be more efficient as native apps, but let me choose.
That's interesting. AFAIK, Steve Jobs didn't want installable app on the iphone. The phone should come with a few features and everything external should come from the web. He changed his mind after android included installable apps.
Steve Jobs thought any feature that Apple products didnât have was stupid and then once they added that feature, it was the best thing ever and their version was the best version of that feature.
One fun example is Steve hating music subscription services:
> You pay to download 500 songs and one day you stop paying your subscription fee and your entire music library goes away.
I mean he wasnât wrong just out of touch.
And may be because Cydia happened?
I don't really follow the world of PWAs, what is Apple doing to cripple them on iOS?
Their Safari browser, running on WebKit, is full of bugs and lagging behind in features such as Push Notifications, Install prompts for Web Apps, and many many others. It makes it impossible to have quality Web Apps running through Safari.
This wouldn't be a problem if users could use other browsers that are not that buggy and have the features needed to build native-like app experience. But Apple is banning any other browser from using their own engine, they are all forced to use the buggy and lagging behind WebKit. Firefox, Edge, Chrome, etc on iOS are just skins around WebKit.
So there is basically no browser competition on iOS, and this is how Apple prevent web apps from competing with native apps.
Things I donât want on the web:
- Websites asking me for permission to send me notifications
- Websites asking me to install an app to use them
What other features are you decreeing essential? I admit curiosity if my distaste is in perfect opposition.
In good software, disabling those prompts would be a single setting. I'm sure Apple can find a way to make it work, they've got plenty of reserves in the bank. In Firefox on Android, it's in Settings > Permissions, with the defaults to "Ask to allow" and the only alternative being "Blocked".
I personally want notifications from the sites I use and I want to know if I can install websites so that they work offline. It takes the guesswork out of "will I be able to use this when I'm out and about" which is essential for the concept to work. Besides that, I just want to use my RSS reader without browser chrome.
There are tons of shitty blogs and crapsites that ask for all kinds of stuff like permissions, persistent file storage and GPU access, that I agree with. Excessive use of these prompts should be a reason to drop that website, though, not to remove the feature.
By the same logic, all notifications should be banned from mobile phones, because there's tons of them that push ads and other unwanted crap (including big names like Netflix). Which is something you can probably do, if you really want to, by just disabling notifications for every app you install.
Your logic is not aligned with my own. I visit a thousand websites a month and never return to most of them that month, if ever. I use the same fifty apps each month.
One thousand notification prompts, one for each site I visit, is unacceptable.
Fifty notification prompts, one for each time I open an app for the first time on my phone, is acceptable.
Youâve only addressed the single-site case, not the at-scale reality that we users face when browsing HN or Google News or any other content aggregator that links out to a near-infinite array of sites.
My browser is for the open web. My phone is for native apps. Iâm aware this is upsetting to proponents of PWAs, but itâs not because of technological limitations that I feel this way. Itâs because websites target the lowest common denominator, and I donât have time for that on mobile.
I can barely stand to use HN on mobile, itâs so awful, it doesnât honor my OS-wide text settings, it has a horrendous text area, it ignores system color palettes, it doesnât support OS dark mode hints. HN consciously chooses to target browsers only and does not wish to target being an app, and so I have modified my browser to adapt the website to be tolerable to me. But HN does not deserve to exist on my phone as-is outside of my browser.
Very few websites put in the level of effort to deserve to be called an âappâ, and my views reflect their disregard for per-platform integration. (Similarly, I loathe apps that are just a website in a shim, and I tolerate them as minimally as necessary for banking and medical purposes, and tolerate none in my everyday use.)
> One thousand notification prompts, one for each site I visit, is unacceptable.
That's a slippery slope argument. Apple could very well require the PWA to be installed first before allowing it to send notifications, and make the install button non-intrusive.
Interesting. You and I visit very different websites if you get that many permission prompts. The worst offenders in my experience are low-effort tech blogs I encounter when Googling an error message.
According to my Firefox settings, I've given notification access to about 50% of the websites that requested it. I certainly visit a lot of different sites, usually linked from aggregators and social media such as HN, Reddit and Twitter.
We can both have our ways. Allow for an easy way to disable the prompts permanently, perhaps even in a popup after installation, and we can all go our merry way.
My enjoyment of PWAs basically comes down to the fact that the browser acts as an extra sandbox that I control. I can install addons that change bad behaviours and block tracking resources and I can safely run and update them without risking exposing too much information. I mainly use them for things I run myself (Home Assistant is a big one there), weather apps (Buienalarm) and forums where I want a notification if someone replies to my messages directly. They're the applications that are just interactive enough that a static website wouldn't suffice, but not interactive enough that I want to download an application for them.
One example is Youtube: if Google put in some effort, the entire app would only serve as a downloading and caching platform. Browsers are good at playing video. They're good at simple like/dislike interactions, and they're good at making comments. Yet for some obscure reason, the website is janky and difficult to use, forcing people to use their apps with all of its native code and unnecessary bells and whistles. There shouldn't be a need for the browser to do any serious Javascript work unless you watch 3D/360° video, and even that is uncommon enough that running the code in JS would be good enough. There are rich web video platforms out there with the same basic feature set; many of them in the adult entertainment industry, because of Apple's and Google's unwillingness to platform them, but also outside of it on platforms like Floatplane and its competitors.
Youtube should be a PWA or maybe even a website, not a full-blown app. Sadly, the web version of Youtube is neither of those things.
The lack of these features make Safari, and in some cases even Firefox, simply insufficient for my use cases. I hate Chrome but I started to use these features when Chrome and Edge (pre-Edgium) made their way to implement PWAs and Firefox went the same direction; I expected FF to just take their time, not reject the concept all together.
I actually like HN's clarity and simplicity and it's lack of the barely function rich text editor JS mess. Perhaps dark mode CSS would be a nice feature, but it's not that important to me. I despise blog platforms such as medium that pretend to be apps when they're really just shitty websites.
Our preferences seem to be the exact opposite of each other's, and that's fine. I do't want to impose my preferred way of working on you by forcing things like notifications and other permission prompts onto you, which is why I'm a fierce proponent of easy and clear methods to disable any potentially unwanted functionality.
Opt-out rather than opt-in is a philosophical issue at the core of many concerns. I simply donât think the open web deserves opt-out access to my notifications. Websites need to step it up and become apps if they want me to risk my time on their notifications, and if they choose not to, so be it.
Some websites won't or can't become apps because of app store rules, especially on iOS. That's why the web is seen by many as a way out, and why iOS web developers in particular seem to be such aggressive proponents of adding more PWA features.
Even an app following all standards can get refused by Apple's app review and there's no recourse other than to retry and hope this time the reviewer does their job right. Code using several open source licenses can't be uploaded to the Apple App store for legal reasons and there's no way around that either.
I think the web does deserve opt-in methods to access to many features, and I'd even like some features (like WebGL or WebGPU) to be behind additional permissions. Same with <canvas> features, most websites don't need that and it's mostly used for stalking me.
In a perfect world, Google would be able to put a real version of Chrome onto iOS and Mozilla would be able to do the same for Firefox, that way everyone could get what they wanted. The PWA enthusiasts could get a PWA-capable browser, the rest could stick to Safari with all of its quirks. That's not going to happen any time soon, though.
> In good software, disabling those prompts would be a single setting.
There are now several _dozen_ APIs that require prompts to work. And Chrome is busy ramming through several dozen more.
It's not "a single setting to disable these prompts".
The only way I could ever support these features being added to Safari on iOS is if:
- Safari reports to pages that permission is given, regardless of actual permission state
- Developers have no way to trigger a system prompt dialog for either, instead requiring a user action initiated from browser chrome
This is so websites canât even implement their own prompts to sidestep restriction to user actions within the page, or even have the state on which to judge if a prompt should be shown. Bottom line, those features are fine so long as they bring zero additional dickbars/dialogs/etc.
I totally agree with your second point, but your first won't work. If a PWA has been downloaded it can report back its status - any PWA developer would rely on their own status tracking implementation, not some unreliable flag provided by Safari.
Yeah I see no issue for âinstalledâ PWAs having access to real status, I just donât want to see any hint of a prompt while Iâm in my browser. The webâs lack of intention-gating makes it too ripe for abuse, but once a PWA is installed the user has expressed interest and a higher level of consent.
Other people want different features than you. Consider businesses who want to distribute PWAs to their employees instead of going through the laborious and time-consuming process of waiting for Apple reviews, resubmitting if you get a "Monday morning cranky reviewer", etc. For these folks, the app review process is primarily just wasted time and effort.
Apple has an enterprise distribution system for exactly that use case, instant distribution with no review required. So thatâs not a valid example.
Off the top of my head: The web app working while offline, local storage, and background sync.
The idea is to be able to build web apps that have feature parity with native apps. (Especially on mobile, where apps are expected to integrate with the system and data connectivity is intermittent.)
If you donât want that, thatâs fine. But native apps are popular for a reason, and those features are a big part of that reason.
I just tested the only website I have in âAdd to Home Screenâ PWA mode on iOS, and it caches all of itself perfectly fine offline, but since the site is coded badly, it doesnât recognize that itâs in offline mode and crashes instead of being a useful app.
It serves the crash page locally, from cache. But itâs clear that they could have invested in this and chose not to. Thatâs not the OSâs fault, any more than it is when an native app decides not to implement offline support.
But. Native apps are _required_ to ship basic offline mode support, so that when launched while offline, they show _something_ to the user. The open web has no such requirement, and tends prefers the laziest approach without regard for users. Restrictive demands upon apps is what makes me prefer them; I respect others prefer the freedom not to bother with offline or accessibility or whatever.
> Off the top of my head: The web app working while offline, local storage, and background sync.
Do you really mean the web? Or a small subset of the web (that then probably already has a native iOS app)? For example how would Google search work while offline?
Even making something as "simple" as HN (only compared to Google search) work while offline would be a considerable technical challenge and a large investment for HN, for a use case that is almost non-existent.
Would really appreciate your perspective.
I mean web apps, but not the broader web. Things that would have an analog as native mobile or desktop apps. This doesnât really apply to content sites.
Not everything makes sense offline. If you need to perform real-time lookups, or if the backing database is too large, or the data is rapidly changing, or the user just infrequently visits the site - those are all good reasons to require connectivity.
But if the data is small enough, can be cached, and can be sent asynchronously, and is something the user is using consistently itâs a good candidate. Apps that work well would be things like email, productivity apps (word processing/spreadsheets/photo editing), and maybe small data feeds like weather and news headlines. Even chat is fine, since connectivity gaps are often only a couple minutes long.
My litmus test is âis this something somebody would expect to work while theyâre on a train as part of their daily commute.â
OK so Gmail is a perfect example then. Let's imagine a scenario where PWAs were fully possible on iOS and the user has a choice of a native iOS Gmail app or a PWA webview app. Do you not think that a native app would offer a better user experience and that 9/10 of users would prefer it?
Yes, personally speaking, Iâd prefer the native app given the choice. :)
Iâm not personally arguing for PWAs over native apps!
That said, I also know there are some apps that will never be developed as native apps (due to cost issues), and in those cases it would be nice to give web developers the tools to at least make the experience more pleasant and native-feeling.
Fair enough. Can you give a few examples of real world sites that would benefit from this (that already do not have a native app)?
Long-term static content like documentation. Apps that can operate on local data like various text editing, notes, primitive video and audio work, etc.
And the ability to continue using portions the app if you briefly loose connection. That can be quite powerful in some instances.
Isn't that case somehow similar to how Microsoft used to bundle IE with Windows? iOS isn't a monopoly such as Windows was, but you _could_ use another browser engine on Windows and you can't on iOS.
Shouldn't that at least worry antitrust legislators in the EU and/or the US?
Definitely. The situation on iOS is much worse than it ever was on Windows. Apple is banning all competition in the browser space on more than 1 billion devices worldwide.
Antitrust legislators would surely be very interested in this if they were aware of the issue, but most of them probably aren't yet. Some people have been talking to regulators, like Stuart Langridge and Bruce Lawson to the UK regulator, the CMA.
Stuart Langridge presentation to the CMA:
https://kryogenix.org/code/cma-apple/
I have mixed feelings about this. Without Safari being required on iOS, Chrome's market share would be overwhelming and then we'd be in a situation back more like the bad old days of IE, where a single browser dominated not just on one OS but across the entire ecosystem.
And undoubtedly, if Blink-Chrome were present on iOS you can bet that many web devs would target that exclusively, requiring you to trade away battery life and privacy to use the entire web.
The web should be to the greatest extent possible browser agnostic.
No, not at all.
In Windows you can install any other browser you want (even if it ships with IE default).
On iOS, ALL browsers are forced to used Safari's rendering engine. It would be like installing Firefox and it uses Trident in the background.
The poster you are responding to is saying the same thing, but also referencing the huge judgement that Microsoft faced for pre-installing Internet Explorer / making it the default browser.
Theyâre saying that while the situation isnât completely analogous, that what Apple is doing is far more egregious than what Microsoft already faced massive judgement for doing.
Exactly, thanks for clarifying - I've been afk :)
OP probably wants site to be to send notifications even though Firefoxâs research on the topic has shown that they are 99+ percent spam. I find it very annoying when I visit a site and there's an annoying pop-up asking for notifications (even though chrome and firefox block most automatically). The Mozilla study showed that sites already try and show 100s of billion notifications to users a year
"Notification prompts are very unpopular. On Release, about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user."
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/11/04/restricti...
I also would bet that most acceptance clicks by users were accidental.
Notifications from Web sites are spam.
Web apps that can be made resident on your phone home screen are another story, where notifications may be legitimate (e.g. chat apps).
Notifications from websites _that I don't want to receive_ are spam. Perhaps it's a webapp where I communicate with friends, and want to be notified.
I tried using the web notification API for a project recently - a project which is putting users' needs and wants above anything else. Our users wanted to receive push notifications whenever we go live, so the initial prototype used SMS notifications since that's what we were already using.
Over time, the cost of these (completely optional and opt-IN) notifications grew enough that I figured it was time to seek an alternative. I fully implemented WebPush notifications and evaluated them with my users. I found that most Android devices wouldn't vibrate nor make a sound when a notification is received, and iOS straight up doesn't support these APIs. With these findings, I scrapped the entire implementation. It was useless to our users and only led to more confusion.
If I had to guess, I would say that is the exact reason 99% of WebPush usage is spammy. Spammers don't really care about quality of service, they just want to cast a wide net. I'm willing to bet the API would see a massive uptick in legitimate adoption if it wasn't so utterly useless in the real world.
There is nothing stopping Firefox from saying x,y and z APIs are considered dangerous and web app only, and gating them behind the PWA install prompt.
I want Apple to do this as well to put pressure on google to fix their shit with letting these run rampant on the web.
that sounds right, i block about 99% of notifications on my phone, regardless of wehther they're from webapps or native apps. but the 1% i don't block are _incredibly useful and the main reason i have a phone in the first place_
i hope nobody is deciding that no apps should ever be allowed to send notifications, just because most notifications get blocked. it's still an incredibly useful feature even if most apps use it poorly.
Nobody cares about notifications.
It's all about the shitty browser storage on iOS.
Pretty sure I want to know when I have a new message
Yeah if Safari wouldn't break localStorage or indexDB every other version, that would work better already and a nice start.
You can say the same thing about email, but yet there are plenty of legitimate use cases. Cases include chat apps like slack, you might want to see when someone has messaged you even though you might not have the slack tab open. Are you attending a music festival and have the schedule open for an artist you want to see, well the concerts have been delayed 20 min, would be handy to get a push notification telling you that.
I find it hard to believe that I would get notified for anything useful but I am absolutely certain I will be notified incessantly for things that donât matter. In fact the later spoils it for the former because the later train people to ignore notifications.
For instance any shop I create an account with (Best Buy, Ulta Beauty, âŠ) thinks I want to hear from them once a day or more often. If they tried to keep it relevant it would be one thing but it is really a conversation where one side talks talks and talks and the other isnât listening. Right now on Arstechniaâs Dealmaster they are talking like it is news that Amazon Fire tablets on sale but they ought to just send me a notice when Fire tablets arenât on sale.
We're talking about PWAs the user chooses to install. Of course they want to get notified. In my case I want to run Fastmail and WhatsApp. What use are they to me if they don't notify me when I get a message.
People in this thread keep confusing notification request from random websites with notification requests from web apps you WANT to get notified from. It's a thing. And all browser offer a per-site preference. Having PWA support doesn't mean being spammed by every site you visit.
It seems like this framework is addressing that but so far a PWA is a disorganized patchwork of features that might seem to fit together if you squint. For instance the user has no control over how much IndexedDB storage is used if any, and that the only thing you do have consent for is notificationsâŠ. Which normally is a request to spam, maybe 10% of the time it is a ârealâ PWA but I am sure the majority of those are spam too.
People who use the web are used to being spammed at every turn so naturally they are going to expect any feature usually used for spam to be used for spamming. It doesnât help that PWA hasnât had clear branding that ordinary people would understand.
yes. go and check a regular friends' chrome browser. notifications left and right, constant irritant of "breaking news" and "check this out" from essentially spam sites. i am grateful of preventing notifications by default
this is 2020[1] state but you can make an idea, the most important one in my opinion is the friction that exists to add the app to the app list of your phone, you can't do it programatically is the user who has to go through the menus of iOS, it makes imposible to have a nice Web App Store and that's the biggest barrier for mass adoption in my opinion.
- [1]
https://simplabs.com/blog/2020/06/10/the-state-of-pwa-suppor...
The thing is, Ionic has none of those issues
Can only use Apples JS engine on iOS and they limit things like push notifications and background workers.
Makes it difficult to get the full 'App' experience people expect
One thing that really bothers me is that there is no install prompt for a PWA on iOS. Users have to be told to find the install button which is buried in a menu.
I would also like to have it, but I can see how it could become a spam issue. Every garbage site on the planet would start pushing PWAs to get on a users home screen. It would be the same thing if notifications were reserved for PWA installs only and not in the browser.
That's one area where the app stores are pretty good. If you open the app store, you _want_ to install apps. The same can't be said for a website.
I think the only way it would work really well is if the add to home screen / install button was prominent in the browser chrome and sites could trigger some effect if they can be installed as a PWA. For example, change from an inactive button to an active button.
I'm not sure how it could be abused. The api doesn't allow the developer initiate the install prompt.
They can just trigger the prompt when you scroll the website or something, that counts as a user gesture.
Apple deliberately cripples like, like notifications and workers - so that you have to wrap your PWA in an "app" for those features and distribute it on the App Store - with all the "fun" stuff that comes along with that.
That is what keeps the Web of fully turning into ChromeOS for all practical matters.
We also need to protest against the ongoing effort to misuse the web for fscking web apps nobody wants, to the detriment of the original purpose of the web as a hypertext delivery mechanism.
You must be living in a parallel universe. On desktop pretty much the entire app industry as shifted to the web, including recently the very well-known and used software that are Office 365 and Photoshop. Most people are perfectly happy with web apps. Easily reachable and discoverable through web browsers, not using space in disk, performing quite well for most of them. They are great for companies too, reducing dramatically development and maintenance cost, with only one codebase for all devices instead of one per platform, allowing to develop apps that would have never existed otherwise.
Actually nobody cares about "the original purpose of the web". The web has included technologies to build apps very early by the way, back in the 90s.
Nobody wants?
I want some of them, if they make sense. I will give you that a lot of things just don't really make sense as a webapp, but a lot of other things do.
There is a lot of "small" things I'd rather run in the confines of a sandboxed webapp than run as a "native" app. Things I use once in every blue moon, where I do not want to download a binary or worse track down a bunch of dependencies and compile myself. Opening a website in <10seconds is just faster than that, and hassle-free, and doesn't mean I have to maintain the stuff (either by keeping it up to date, or remembering to get rid of the thing after use). Even worse are the webapps pretending to be "native apps". Please stop packaging your "webapp" only as an electron app if you only ever use normal web browser features.
My problem with the state of things is just that every other "small" webapp tries to compel me into making an account for absolutely no reason first, or sell me "premium" features, or is plastered full of ads (which is less of a problem with the adblocker I use). Worse, if they do not really let me export my data. But all this also applies to native apps these days.
> ...ongoing effort to misuse the web for fscking web apps nobody wants...
You mean things like google maps, gmail and vimeo? They seem pretty popular to me, and significantly improved by the fact that almost anyone with a web browser can access them.
ânobody wantsâ
Yeah, youâre right. No one ever wanted to use Hotmail on the web back in the 90s. No one wants to use Google Maps now. Please, _please god_ let me have to download a native app from an App Store in order to access my online banking! Itâs what the masses demand!
>fscking web apps nobody wants
I want webapps. I don't want to install everything and the browser sandbox is tightest available. Taking my apps everywhere without having to install them is really nice.
Probably hard to unring that bell. It even seems like many "native apps" are now mostly just webviews with a very small amount of native orchestration, etc.
By that logic, the internet was originally invented to help the military communicate, and thus most of us shouldn't use it at all.
Web apps don't hurt pure hypertext delivery, in fact everything is very much backwards compatible.
Almost everything around PWA's is an anti-feature that makes the browser more opaque.
I support Apple because I think they are sticking up for their users. If they had great support for PWAs a lot of companies and developers would go that route and there would be no native app option.
You have a choice. If you want to run PWAs, get an Android phone.
If they supported PWAs, 90% of apps wouldnât need a native option. Most apps are text, images, maybe some kind of media if weâre getting crazy, and buttons.
Mobile web apps suck because mobile browsers make them suck.
Thereâs no reason I can edit complex spreadsheets in Google Sheets in my desktop web browser, but every time I go to Reddit or Quora on my mobile browser, they claim that their native apps are required to truly display text and images correctly.
There's fanboyism and there's "you are wrong for wanting something Apple didn't care to implement, they know better than you". Your argument doesn't any sense, it's just partisanship and appeal to authority.
You can't explain that PWAs have no place in iOS using the excuse that Apple is doing it for our sake. Sorry, that's just dumb.
In another comment I explain that a well written PWA will use more battery, CPU, memory, and network bandwidth than a well written native app.
Web apps are lowest common denominator solutions and thatâs not where Apple wants to be. They know their users are better off with native apps. If you disagree, then stick with Android which has pretty good support.
I am an Apple user and they're not sticking up for me. They're sticking me.
> If they had great support for PWAs a lot of companies and developers would go that route and there would be no native app option.
No. Apple doesn't want to let go of the app store model and the money it gives em. Every other problem one could conceive of is solvable.
> Every other problem one could conceive of is solvable.
I think the biggest problem with PWAs is the resource usage. A well written PWA will use a lot more battery, network, CPU, and memory than a well written native app. That's not solvable.
PWAs are a lowest common denominator solution. They are good for developers but bad for users.
> A well written PWA will use a lot more battery, network, CPU, and memory than a well written native app. That's not solvable.
What complete nonsense. It's hardly baked into the rules of the universe. Of course Apple could figure this out at a technical level, it just doesn't work for their profit margins. Besides, it should be my choice and not Apple's whether I want to install an app that uses more CPU.
> They are good for developers but bad for users.
There are entirely valid use cases where the expense and hassle of making native apps prevents any app existing at all. Small businesses building apps for their staff, individuals building apps for themselves or families, small groups of friends.
> Apple could figure this out at a technical level
Probably not. Running an app in the browser is essentially running on a virtual machine. That's not going to be as efficient as a native app.
It depends on what the app is doing. If it's something I load once a day to read HTML content that's already been downloaded, how's that going to be less efficient?
True. Battery use for long-running web apps on phones is hard to solve. I have yet to gain experience in this.
I've been using this extension for a while, not bad so far but the big plus for me is the possibility to "install" any website as a PWA, making the website containerised and not messing with the normal browser (like Google cross logins)
I've also dedicated a user guide to install FirefoxPWA for my own PWA but generic and easy enough for the average user I think, at:
https://collanon.com/en/installation#firefox-desktop
I've been running firefox like this manually for years. My method for this is basically just create a profile for any service I want to run standalone. Works great
1. Create a profile for the app you want to run...e.g. Spotify. Set the home bag
2. Create a startup file for your Firefox/Profile combo, e.g.
$ cat .local/share/applications/Music.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Music;X-AudioPlayer;AudioVideo;Spotify
Exec=/usr/bin/firefox --class=musicplayer -P music
Icon=Music-icon
StartupWMClass=musicplayer
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Name=Music
Comment=Firefox music container
ICE is a good way of doing basically this, including creating the profile and giving it a âhide everythingâ userChrome.css, when you use Firefox:
https://github.com/peppermintos/ice
Luckily this add-on makes this possibility effortless
How hard would it be to work together with Mozilla to ship this functionality in Firefox officially? Their excuses not to work on SSB (that's what they called installing web apps to desktop) were: 1. "no perceived user benefit" and 2. "feature is costing us time in terms of bug triage". Evidently, some users and developers find mentioned feature useful, because many projects like FirefoxPWA exists. Get other projects that are trying to achieve the same goal on board (Web App Manager from Linux Mint comes to mind) and everybody wins. As an added bonus, Firefox might even increase their user base a little.
Sometimes it is hard not to think that this is part of the deal with Google:
Mozilla gets $500m - in theory for having Google as the default search engine - I reality to just to not challenge Chrome.
Anyone have a good explanation for why this isn't true?
> Anyone have a good explanation for why this isn't true?
The burden of proof is on the person making the assertion. Newton didn't say, 'F=ma - Anyone have a good explanation for why this isn't true?'
Otherwise, all we'll do here is disprove conspiracy theories and propaganda.
Hanlon's razor. It ain't malice, just plain incompetence.
This is a brilliant start. Maybe rename it to avoid annoying Mozilla unnecessary.
I'm one of those who want a softfork(?) of Firefox: a set of patches on top of official Firefox that keeps getting expanded until it eclipses the official Firefox.
I already tried to donate but failed.
The problem with soft forks is that virtually no one wants to maintain HTML rendering or implement CSS color for fun, and eventually when the underlying engines change, the soft forks have to keep up, leading to the same sort of complaints that we see about macOS requiring significant annual reworks.
There's serious need to augment Firefox, it has been years and they still haven't figured out how to let users ergonomically select a new tab page.
Bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409675
&
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460412
I've been doing this manually for a while by creating a FF profile for an app, adding some userChrome.css to hide some of the chrome at the top, and creating my own .desktop files to open FF in the new profile.
It's a bit tedious but it works.
I'd love to try this if I didn't have to use a FF extension to do it. It looks like it does it better than I have been doing it.
Also the name should be changed.
Firefox, thanks to "Firefox Lockwise" and other Mozilla products, is now a brand name, not just a browser name. The product title sounds like it came from Mozilla, which is probably not ok.
Last I checked geolocation was still busted on FF Android when you actually "install" it and launch from the install-icon. Put in a bug report like 2 years ago. PWAs are ok for little internal widgets, but I couldn't recommend them for user facing stuff. For the uninformed, the principle reason to avoid PWAs is you need more granular control over the hardware than is available through a webAPI also indexeddb data will get deleted by Apple after a week for your privacy.
How is a PWA different from adding a site to your homescreen?
Adding as a bookmark doesn't get rid of the search bar and doesn't fill the top notification bar with the same colour as the app sets in the <head>.
And there isn't a real flow that does explicitly say "Install" which is crucial for the final user to understand.
And overall after PWA installation the screen is filled with app alone in a clear and native looking way.
It is a glorified bookmark. But the JavaScript kids like how some of there scripts still run offline. As long as you don't use their website in any normal way, like clicking anywhere.
There's the rather big deal that it also allows me to access APIs that I can't access from a normal website - like vibrate, notifications, storage, authentication, bluetooth, orientation, network info, motion, speech recognition, NFC, contacts.
OT but, is anyone else having issues with Gmail and YouTube in FF after left open for, sometimes, just a few minutes? Lately for me, they stop refreshing properly and things like changing email folders or loading more comments as I scroll on YT just don't work and I have to refresh the page to fix it.
No problems and I do what you say all the time. I often leave youtube playing music in the background and it will play for days if I let it. Almost every problem I ever had in firefox I chased down to an errant plugin so turn off all your plugins (or start in safe mode) and go from there.
Yes, I have this problem with Youtube in Firefox as well (on Linux if it makes a difference).
I don't know about Gmail as I use the HTML view, which is much faster in general and only updates when you tell it to.
I'm with you, I always leave YouTube open in Firefox for listening music and I have your same issues
I've had this problem with Voice pretty consistently, but gmail just slows down sometimes.
What exactly is the motivation for this project? I read the readme but I'm still at a loss.
If my company chose to build PWAs, I would choose to use a browser that supports it in the way that is required. It would be totally bonkers to choose something like this just so that I can run them on firefox. Especially considering that this quite literally doesn't support half the feature set that might make PWAs desirable over a native app(like access to a lot of native APIs).
Even if we wanted to build PWAs, and then for some weird reason needed to use firefox, then the lack of support for them in firefox would be more likely to lead to not building PWAs instead of trying to wrangle firefox into something it doesn't really support.
What am I missing here?
Mainly the goal is to create standalone Firefox apps, as a lightweight replacement to Electron apps, with their own permissions and desktop notifications.
Chromium/Edge make this super easy, and I use it to create standalone versions of Youtube Music, Fastmail, YNAB, WhatsApp so that they share the same Firefox process, instead of having four separate Electron apps written by third-parties that are just a fancy way of wrapping a website in their own window
And for some reason, Mozilla isn't interested of having this feature in their own browser.
If you open Spotify in Chrome (or any Chromium browser), you'll get a little popup, like this:
https://i.imgur.com/vw5diI2.png
If you click "Install", you'll get an app-like Spotify icon, it'll show up in applications, you can Cmd+Tab/ Alt+Tab to it with its icon, so on. It's basically an app - but it's running in a separate Chrome window and managed by the browser. Electron but you don't have to install a copy of Chrome every time, basically. (Also, if you're like me and use Brave, this is better in every way.)
In addition to developers, many web applications have users. If a website is available as a PWA, some Firefox users might want to install it.
> What am I missing here?
Firefox does support PWA. This is a browser extension for packaging and installing like a native app. Pwa is a web spec and it is very nice.
