Technology @lemmy.world Tony Bark @pawb.social 2mo ago

Firefox Nightly Preps Progressive Web App Support

www.omgubuntu.co.uk Firefox is Finally Adding Support for Web Apps

A few months back Firefox announced it was finally adding support for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) after years of ignoring its own user's requests to do

22 comments

I dont use many PWA's since I had to run them on chromium before. But as a web Dev and even more so as a user, I feel like PWA's are the way to go. They completely avoid all the app stores drama plus the 30% fees. Also the devs get to deploy instant updates without the delay going through the app stores. Just like any other web app. If done right I could see them replacing most native apps. Assuming we can get apple to allow PWAs full CPU usage. Currently they are throttling them from what I understand.

Edit: To clarify I'm speaking about mobile. I've never even tried PWAs on desktop and can't imagine why I would use that over browser+bookmarks.
- But it's easier to block trackers & ads on a PWA, and life made me very cynical about "the industry" 😅
- And FWIW, Firefox already supports them on android; this is about desktop support.
  
  I was going to say, "am I losing my mind?" I've had PWAs on Firefox for years. I've never once cared to use one on the desktop I guess.
  
  Indeed. I'm not sure when they added mobile support back, but it wasn't there when I last looked for it. Guess its time for me to move my PWAs out of brave now. Thanks.
- My only problem with PWAs is that they have arbitrary security requirements. Anything non-localhost needs https. No self-signed cert allowed. Enforcing people to buy a router that supports dyndns for their self hosted apps is odd. I'm wondering who makes these rules.
  
  You can do DDNS for free, using a client app on your server, rather than router.
  
  I use cloudflare-ddns
- PWAs are god awful on IOS.
  
  They are god-awful everywhere. I don’t get why people can be like “yeah I want all of my apps to be janky crap that is usually missing a lot of features you’d get for free using the platform toolkit”. The only exception I’ve seen thus far that was actually good is Figma and god knows how much effort they had to put into that to make it behave even remotely reasonably.
- Didn’t apple disable PWA’s in Europe?
  
  Yes, they did that when the EU made the ruling about allowing other app stores. Apple doesn't like PWAs cause they lose their 30% cut. Hopefully we some ruling or law that they have to treat them equal to native apps.
  
  https://www.techmonitor.ai/digital-economy/big-tech/apple-reverses-decision-to-ban-progressive-web-apps-following-user-backlash it was. But, they bring it back
- I wrote a little background app and extension that opens links from a Chrome PWA in the same named Profile in Firefox for exactly this reason. Probably shoupd have released that...
Ive been using PWAsForFirefox for couple of years now and it's pretty good tho a bit clunky at times as firefox updates tend to break some settings.

And reading through this article seems like I'll be sticking with PWAsForFirefox:

web apps in Firefox will not use a minimal browser frame and will continue to show a main toolbar with address bar, extensions, bookmarks – though the ‘new tab’ button will be replaced with a button to open a normal Firefox window.

Lame.
- I wanted a taskbar button for Navidrome at work. This is so I could quickly find my music in between the several open Firefox windows.
  
  As the IT admin, I could've installed this. But I knew I REALLY shouldn't. It needed administrator rights, and I had no idea how secure it was.
  
  So instead I used Brave for Navidrome PWA. Brave was installed as local user, so it couldn't bring down my entire organization if it got my password.
  
  Now I'll be able to switch back.
Yess finally. Switched off of Chrome after seeing uBlock Origin was going to go away, but I have a lot of PWAs which has been hacky to get working.
What year is it?!
most wanted feature

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