Making progressive web apps even better: ambient badging and “pop into browser” | Hacker News Reader

Making progressive web apps even better: ambient badging and “pop into browser”

dev.opera.com

36 pointsNavarr14 comments

This hurts:

"I want people to be able to copy URLs. I want people to be able to hack URLs. I’m not ashamed of my URLs …I’m downright proud."

I was in the same boat, for a while. We stored all our state in the URL so you could just copy, bookmark, or share the link easily.

But then Apple nerfed us:

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/36650

Now our webapp is just like every other webapp, with nothing useful in the URL.

URLs were never useful - too many odd characters that are hard to vocalize and memorize. Unless you need to point to a media item of some sort (picture, video, article, etc.), they do nothing for the user beyond the domain name.

Except that the ability to "point to a media item of some sort", i.e. linking is one of the fundamental properties of the WWW.

> they do nothing for the user beyond the domain name

I completely disagree. A well-crafted URL can inform users of the publish date, product category, headline, etc. without the need to click the link.

Bitcoin wallet addresses have never been useful - too many odd characters that are hard to vocalize and memorize.

URLs allow users to share the thing they are looking at with someone else.

I just tested this on my iOS and this seems to be fixed on the latest iOS (9.3.2).

We got the error on a couple of different 9.3.2 devices.

>Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen?

I write software for a living and I honestly don't really understand what the author is saying after reading the first page. Twice. Given, I'm not a web dev, but man; too much jargon.

What is a 'progressive' web app? Have web apps become sentient and developed political leanings? What is a PWA? Why is the term 'user engagement' being used as a pejorative?

I don't get it.

And I don't get 30% of the articles on HN. I didn't know what a H1B was. Or a 'Series A' round. At one stage I was baffled by the talk of something called 'Bitcoin'.

I sometimes rage about a post title that uses an acronym I've never heard of but it's hard to get the balance right between patronising your audience and mystifying them. My hunch is that a fair proportion of HN are web devs or closely enough linked with web development that they could make sense of the majority of that article.

The "pop-into browser" feature is related to the discussion[1] of how Chrome has a bug[2] for displaying the banner for webapps with display: browser.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11770774

[2]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=596729

What is a progressive web app? Do they mean a website?

https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/

"Progressive web apps" is a relatively new term coined to describe mobile web apps that use modern APIs to behave more like native apps in the ways that matter to people.

I'm glad I'm not the only one wondering that! It would have been nice if the linked article explained this concept.

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