Comment by tinyvm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tinyvm | Hacker News Reader

A couple months ago I started studying PWA.

I realized PWA's potential was on Desktop and not really on mobile.

I came to realize that PWA missed really two things to change Desktop for good :

- Sandboxed FileSystem API

- Standard Operating System Support

Most apps like Slack, Discord or Twitch can barely justify their usage of Electron... beside the possibility to have those apps in a separate OS Window they don't make an extensive usage of Node.JS like VSCode which spawn "child_process".

They just seat there , in a separate OS Window and they can launch at OS startup too..but in order to have those two features you must completely give up on security and give access to almost everything on your computer...

PWA really bring a new dimension to Desktop App, if Windows and MacOS brought native support to PWA ( using Edge and Safari without the need for Chrome ) this would change the industry for ever.

Problem with PWA: Native access, Browser versioning and seperation of processes.

1. If when you ran a .net application all .net applications shared the same parent process that'd be a significant problem.

2. Many electron clients control their versions because there are bugs, quirks, removal of features, or other changes in chromium versions. Discord last time I checked is still on 56.

3. PWA's do not have native access. Discord requires that to spawn IPC communications with game overalys, which are another native process.

PWA's are meant more for mobile, but even there you are of course, limited.

Firefox and Safari would change the world if they actually cared about doing that. They're about market share, not about the technology anymore. Firefox was in a position of making it possible to simply ship the firefox binary, and you could add your js and css changes, effectively having the full firefox browser as your 'app'. Which means it could be triggered to auto-update like normal firefox, but still have your UI and act as a browser.

Firefox abandoned that route and instead is focusing upon whatever Chrome impliments, like Custom Components. Safari also doesn't care about anything but linux and mac.

Safari... cares about Linux?

Maybe they meant WebKit?

Agree that PWAs have a lot of potential on Desktop. But they're also really good on mobile. Both Facebook and Tinder have PWAs that I prefer to their native apps...

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