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
Less time and money spent on useless features like progressive web apps means more time can be spent on useful features like data harvesting, AI bullshit, and Facebook-approved advertising.
PWAs are not a useless feature. It’s an incredibly useful and powerful set of web standards that allows sites to provide excellent user experiences more akin to what apps could provide, without users needing to go and download an app—which a lot of users, especially more privacy and security focused users—hate being asked to do.
Thank you. I work on (as in develop) PWAs on a daily basis, so none of this is new to me. I think my sarcasm just didn’t quite hit the mark. I appreciate you standing up for PWAs. 💖
Honestly I just love the idea of PWAs so much, but I’ve so rarely seen anything that truly seems to take advantage of what they can offer, so I’m just a little sensitive to dismissal of them.
I definitely get it. I remember reading Mozilla’s blasé attitude towards them years ago, with them justifying not supporting PWAs because no one uses them, and thinking that obviously no one will use them if you don’t make Firefox a good alternative for using them!
The customer my company works towards have chosen to move a lot of their operations to PWAs because they’re so versatile and can be easily integrated to all the systems they need to run them on. We target phones, tablets, heavy machinery, and desktops.
Originally when the iPhone launched the entire idea was to not have apps, but use PWAs. That was maybe a bit early since PWAs weren’t that mature yet, but with modern web platform technologies you can do a lot with PWAs, so I think if that sort of concept was launched today it’d do better.
That was maybe a bit early since PWAs weren’t that mature yet
Not only were they not mature yet, they didn’t exist. Web apps as a concept did…sorta, barely, but the ServiceWorker API that defines true PWAs wasn’t introduced to Chrome until 2015—and Safari (on both Mac and iOS) didn’t get it until 2018, over a decade after the original iPhone launched.
Because it’s low effort.
Less time and money spent on useless features like progressive web apps means more time can be spent on useful features like data harvesting, AI bullshit, and Facebook-approved advertising.
PWAs are not a useless feature. It’s an incredibly useful and powerful set of web standards that allows sites to provide excellent user experiences more akin to what apps could provide, without users needing to go and download an app—which a lot of users, especially more privacy and security focused users—hate being asked to do.
That was clearly a comment that should have ended with /s
Yeah, I thought that calling Facebook approved advertising “useful” would make it obvious.
Thank you. I work on (as in develop) PWAs on a daily basis, so none of this is new to me. I think my sarcasm just didn’t quite hit the mark. I appreciate you standing up for PWAs. 💖
Honestly I just love the idea of PWAs so much, but I’ve so rarely seen anything that truly seems to take advantage of what they can offer, so I’m just a little sensitive to dismissal of them.
I definitely get it. I remember reading Mozilla’s blasé attitude towards them years ago, with them justifying not supporting PWAs because no one uses them, and thinking that obviously no one will use them if you don’t make Firefox a good alternative for using them!
The customer my company works towards have chosen to move a lot of their operations to PWAs because they’re so versatile and can be easily integrated to all the systems they need to run them on. We target phones, tablets, heavy machinery, and desktops.
Originally when the iPhone launched the entire idea was to not have apps, but use PWAs. That was maybe a bit early since PWAs weren’t that mature yet, but with modern web platform technologies you can do a lot with PWAs, so I think if that sort of concept was launched today it’d do better.
Not only were they not mature yet, they didn’t exist. Web apps as a concept did…sorta, barely, but the ServiceWorker API that defines true PWAs wasn’t introduced to Chrome until 2015—and Safari (on both Mac and iOS) didn’t get it until 2018, over a decade after the original iPhone launched.