[Discussion] Progressive Web Apps - what's your opinion?

Sup.

First of all, let’s build context:

Google is seeming to be pushing the PWA thing ahead, and if you know about Oracle vs Google you probably know why.

Apparently google is trying to ditch java completely, already chose Kotlin to be its’ native language, then launched flutter, and now this. They’re probably building their way to launch Fuchsia based on Go, Flutter and PWAs probably [this is just an opinion and speculation].

I wanna know what you guys think about this, are PWAs the future?

And mostly, how ok are you with that?

I don’t really like webapps in general.

The good thing about PWAs is that they’re vendor neutral, which is a plus compared to something like Chrome Apps (remember those?). Any browser can support PWAs, and Firefox has support for then on Android and partial support on desktop. PWAs will (probably) go a long way in making things like the Librem 5 and Pinephone more usable, which is definitely a plus.

I also hope this encourages people to stop using Electron on desktop. The idea of requiring an entire instance of Chromium just to run a few megabytes of JavaScript drives me crazy (and is a nightmare for low resource systems).

There are PWAs for a ton of privacy respecting software and/or services: Mastodon’s official web client is available as a PWA, plus alternative clients like Pinafore. Element, a very good Matrix client, is available as a PWA. The official Telegram web client is available as a PWA as well as Telegram React. You can self-host all of these and audit exactly what they’re doing.

While I prefer native clients for these things, this is very helpful to people on OSs who may not have native clients for all (or any) of these services.

Like most technology it’s level of evil depends on who uses it and for what.

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Maybe they’ll be more important on a world transitioning from x86 to arm :man_shrugging:

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I run an arm64 machine with PrawnOS almost exclusively. The funny thing is that GNU/Linux has the best program support since most stuff is libre software anyway. If something somehow hasn’t been ported yet it’s most definitely being worked on.

It’s very interesting to see Microsoft and Apple have horrible program support for once. It will definitely help Windows on ARM and macOS ARM users though. It should also be very helpful for those running more obscure OSs like Haiku or Plan9. Or that one version of OS/2 that’s still being maintained for some reason.

Yes.

Mostly because of the ease of implementation. No need to maintain 5 different codebases for all of your frontends.

With Vue (and likely others) it’s as simple as including a module and you’re up and running.

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Coming from a testing perspective, some of the languages/tools/frameworks were built with test automation in mind from the ground up, so you can get a lot of your validation done early, reducing that development feedback loop. So much better than the Android/IOS testing story.

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Test in production, right?

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fireship released a video today about our topic

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If it makes L1 forum discourse notifications better, I am down. Right now mobile FF notifications will automatically dismiss themselves.

Also if it pushes FF to support pwa, that would be better. I currently have chrome installed on Fedora to have calls on MS Teams. This would also help for discord too, the mobile and desktop versions are updated differently. Mobile doesn’t always have features from desktop.

TechAltar did a video on PWAs 4 years ago
I can’t find it for whatever reason

Was about to post this!

Love thier videos

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fucking media codecs

I’m here hoping it does

I’ll dig more into performance and such coz this seems to be “the future”

although I’ve used “pinterest lite” once and it was terrible, wasn’t responsive enough, maybe because my phone is an oddball screen, idk

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Browsers are becoming an OS within an OS, but they’re not giving the user enough control over its inner workings, imho.

I agree with the point that PWAs running in your browser is ∞ times better than having a full orbit of standalone Electrons floating around, but it’s still heavy. The web overall has become heavy.

Another argument: the always-online requirement. I’m glad to have some native programs that “just work” and are very fast, with proper scrolling (no unloading of elements - like the Matrix client) and offline data/caching. I could go on, but it’d mostly touch on poor GUI/UX of whatever webdevs spit out these days.

For mobile: something like Discord drains battery. Not all Android apps are necessarily done better in terms of performance/optimizations, but at least “they could be”. I don’t see that path with PWA. We were supposed to get HTML5+CSS3+JS games, guess what’s lacking. It’s been almost a decade.

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