Firefox Nightly Preps Progressive Web App Support (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
from tonytins@pawb.social to technology@lemmy.world on 17 Mar 2025 19:42
https://pawb.social/post/21537529

#technology

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Unmapped@lemmy.ml on 17 Mar 2025 20:54 next collapse

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.ml on 17 Mar 2025 21:14 next collapse

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

Peer@discuss.tchncs.de on 17 Mar 2025 23:23 next collapse

Didn’t apple disable PWA’s in Europe?

Unmapped@lemmy.ml on 17 Mar 2025 23:53 next collapse

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.

tonytins@pawb.social on 18 Mar 2025 04:36 collapse

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.

moe90@feddit.nl on 18 Mar 2025 04:35 collapse
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world on 18 Mar 2025 01:07 next collapse

PWAs are god awful on IOS.

2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de on 18 Mar 2025 15:52 collapse

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.

EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world on 18 Mar 2025 17:30 collapse

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.

fxdave@lemmy.ml on 18 Mar 2025 01:26 next collapse

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.

butter@midwest.social on 18 Mar 2025 12:12 collapse

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

I use cloudflare-ddns

fxdave@lemmy.ml on 18 Mar 2025 13:46 collapse

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

butter@midwest.social on 18 Mar 2025 21:07 collapse

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

I run a DNS server for this purpose.

Vincent@feddit.nl on 18 Mar 2025 07:26 next collapse

And FWIW, Firefox already supports them on android; this is about desktop support.

roofuskit@lemmy.world on 18 Mar 2025 11:31 next collapse

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.

Unmapped@lemmy.ml on 18 Mar 2025 17:46 collapse

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.

fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com on 24 Mar 2025 11:27 collapse

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…

bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 17 Mar 2025 21:37 next collapse

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.

moe90@feddit.nl on 18 Mar 2025 04:28 next collapse

most wanted feature

drmoose@lemmy.world on 18 Mar 2025 07:55 next collapse

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.

Kusimulkku@lemm.ee on 18 Mar 2025 09:06 next collapse

What’s even the point if they do that, might as well just use bookmarks

drmoose@lemmy.world on 18 Mar 2025 09:33 collapse

Yeah what a wasted opportunity which is very typical for Firefox

butter@midwest.social on 18 Mar 2025 12:17 collapse

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.

twice_hatch@midwest.social on 18 Mar 2025 13:57 collapse

What year is it?!