Firefox is Finally Adding Support for Web Apps
www.omgubuntu.co.uk
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
  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • butterEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      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.

  • Unmapped@lemmy.mlEnglish
    571·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • Bogasse@lemmy.mlEnglish
      18·
      2 days ago

      But it’s easier to block trackers & ads on a PWA, and life made me very cynical about “the industry” 😅

    • fxdave@lemmy.mlEnglish
      51·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • butterEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        You can do DDNS for free, using a client app on your server, rather than router.

        I use cloudflare-ddns

        • fxdave@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          Oh right. Thanks, indeed. However, for private apps on LAN addresses it’s still a problem.

          • butterEnglish
            2·
            21 hours ago

            Yes it is. PITA to work within your own network.

            I run a DNS server for this purpose.

      • Unmapped@lemmy.mlEnglish
        13·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • Tony Bark@pawb.socialOPEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          Apple doesn’t like PWAs

          Which would probably have Jobs rolling in his grave. He was all for web apps. Hell, their first attempt at widgets on macOS were just web apps. That’s why he was so adamant about getting rid of Flash. He knew the technology was viable.

      • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        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.

        • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          The idea is that Google and Apple on Android and iOS have purposefully gimped PWA functionality in order to maintain the popularity of their app stores. Which I get, because web apps are much more useful and functional on full computers. So it’s not really the fault of the PWAs that PWAs suck. But unfortunately, they do suck.

  • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    201·
    2 days ago

    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.