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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

I agree that this was a terrible idea from day one and am glad it has been killed and will soon be buried.

But this: "typical Google cancelling a product" is still an important message.

Google routinely floats out APIs, services, and platforms and encourages their use despite fatal flaws that mean they are doomed from day one. And some developers fall for it and later have to pay the price. Hopefully, the repeated warning will minimize this. Think of the devs right now that are mistaking Flutter for a platform that will last.

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> Google routinely floats out APIs, services, and platforms and encourages their use despite fatal flaws that mean they are doomed from day one.

For most use cases, there are better options now than Chrome apps. ServiceWorkers didn't exist when Chrome apps were introduced. Neither did wasm, and its precursors NaCl and PNaCl were scoped to just Chrome apps, not to the public web.

Chrome did a very good job at a) building a platform that developers could use right then and b) working with other browsers and standards committees to get enough features implemented to replace what they built. They said, no, we shouldn't have a proprietary thing called "Chrome apps," we should just build it into the web platform so that people who don't use Chrome can use them too.

And they set a very long (many years) timeframe for shutting down their initial version of the thing.

This is exactly what I want a platform provider to do. I don't want "Chrome apps" any more than I want Flash or ActiveX or "Best viewed in Internet Explorer." But also, I do want platform providers to build platforms - I don't want them to refuse to build platforms on the grounds that they don't know the right answer yet and they can't immediately standardize something right now. I'm glad Flash and ActiveX are dead, but I'm glad they existed because they proved that the platform is valuable, if only you could implement it in a reasonable way. I'm glad ActiveX's original version of XMLHttpRequest existed because it proved that there was demand to standardize the version we now have.

Is there any way to bypass CORS in a PWA? Because Chrome Apps were a really handy way of writing GUI utilities without having to go full Electron.

No, you can't. PWAs are just "glorified" web pages. Nothing more or less. Electron is the only viable choice for desktop apps with web technologies.

Unsure, but I think if you have an extension, you can make the request in an extension page, which isn't CORS-restricted.

(I don't totally understand the difference between a Chrome app and an extension that turns itself into a PWA, both are browser-specific and both are distributed through the Chrome web store, right?)

A chrome app has access to normal sockets, local filesystem, etc.

Not sure how they'll handle this... given the risk of losing a local db store's data in chrome, I'm hoping they normalize on something.

Ideally, a directory for access/storage enough to use SQLite as via WebAssembly should be available to plugins with a request/approval for read (and optionally write) access ... to me, that should be a goal of any file system interface presented via WebAssembly, is the option for something that at least supports that use case.

There's a standardized File API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File and a nonstandard FileSystem API being driven by Google https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileSystem

But yeah it seems network sockets are going away. Honestly that seems good from a security perspective but I will miss the mosh app for CrOS.

If the endpoint you are requesting says it does not want to expose itself to unknown origins, that should be respected in the default config.

For testing, security research and so on you can always modify the browser config or use a proxy.

> But this: "typical Google cancelling a product" is still an important message.

But it's one that appears with such regularity in HN comments that it drowns out all other discussion.

I've frequently seen otherwise interesting posts related to Google derailed into yet another pile on - or even worse full of people that think they are being witty by posting "how soon before it's cancelled?"

You’re interpereting it as someone being witty, but consider that people have legitimate concerns and are supplying mountains of concrete evidence for their position.

I wasn't disputing the validity of their complaint. That's orthogonal to being unfunny through repetition.

Claiming that them saying it is them thinking they are being witty is disputing the validity of their complaint.

For example:

I could constantly remark on the current bad weather using an unfunny joke.

Somebody could complain about my terrible sense of humour without implying it was actually lovely outside.

You're still claiming that people are saying it just to be witty/funny. They aren't. It is a legitimate concern that people should be informed of, if they aren't aware.

> You're still claiming that people are saying it just to be witty/funny.

You see that word "just" in there? That's the bit I disagree with.

It is possible to both agree with someone and dislike how they express themselves.

Hacker News is not a person, and you will only drive yourself insane if you treat a conversation with a collective like it is a person.

> But it's one that appears with such regularity in HN comments that it drowns out all other discussion.

See, for example, the second ranked subthread in this very story, from a user who apparently thinks this change is going to brick all Chromebooks; and the flood of responses talking about things like refund policy drowning out the tiny handful of comments pointing out that this the premise was a complete misunderstanding of what is happening.

HN can't rationally talk about Google any more. It's kind of depressing.

> HN can't rationally talk about Google any more. It's kind of depressing.

Unfortunately, it's not the only company where threads turn into this. Every Apple product thread is about removing the headphone jack (still), every Amazon thread is about counterfeit products someone bought. There are others.

> people that think they are being witty by posting "how soon before it's cancelled?"

I legitimately don't think most people are trying to be funny when they say things like this. I think they feel (as I feel) that it's not worthing becoming reliant on Google's new fancy products, because there is a high likelihood they stop working in a few short years.

I don't think anyone is saying that web based apps were a bad idea from day one... Wouldn't the success of PWAs and pushing the web forward to support this type of open computing a good thing? Essentially, Google took a bold move, the tech world liked the idea of a more app-centric look a the web and pushed for PWAs. By all accounts, this is a success for all the web. It's okay for a product to go away if better stuff comes of it.

That something is an important message is not a sufficient reason for it to appear on the comment page. Being important and tangentially related to the topic is also not sufficient. Otherwise, all comment pages degenerate into discussion of the closest available hot-button issue.

Flutter is an open-source framework that targets Android, iOS, Web & Desktop. That's rather different to something that just targets Chrome. The developer experience is amazing. Personally I'm using it and not too worried about Flutter lasting. Just like I use react on the web and I'm not worried about that either.

This is probably going to happen and soon... And then next they'll kill off extensions, and then Chrome will become the next "Internet Explorer"...

One of the things that people will take for granted is the effectiveness of extensions that work as Ad blockers which brought online tracking to a grinding halt. Google because of their advertising services has always wanted to suppress the ability of people in blocking ads. Most of the changes they make to Chrome, now that they have captured majority of the market share are geared towards generating profit, and preserving their status a dominating company.

What's probably going to happen and soon? The comment you're replying to does not suggest some event will happen.

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