Firefox not planning on supporting PWA
bugzilla.mozilla.org
bugzilla.mozilla.org
Progressive Web Apps are not a standard. Rather, it is the idea that a an application - presented through a web browser - can use additional features provided by browser _if_available_. The term is based on the concept of "Progressive Enhancement".
Everyone's pet feature - service workers, single site browsers, offline mode, push notifications, video codec support - gets branded "PWA" in their rant that such and such browser is not keeping up. However, writing your web application to require a feature that not all of the common browsers support means fundamentally your application is _not_ written for progressive enhancement.
The reality is that the term "Progressive Web Apps" was coined by Google as they started pushing harder for web apps to perform like native apps - but at the time they had a strategic initiative to have web apps instead of native apps (ChromeOS and the ChromeBooks, pre Android support). None of the other browser or OS platform vendors have that level of strategic investment in supporting web apps as a new 'native' format - especially considering the security model is usually different than that of the native platform.
But then, it's not new. Heard people saying they know "the Visual C language" ages ago. Guess that's how MS started its monopoly.
What's worrying this time is that they're redefining "cross platform" to "runs in the same emulator".
I don't think this is a recent phenomenon. Java, and many others, have attempted the same trick.
Because any convenient and positive term will be coopted and misused to death, on-purpose.
edit: nobody gets me
Your joke, at best, is an unrelated and in this case unnecessary example of "misuse" but unfortunately doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation. Even if we "get" the joke, we do not want to trend in the direction of low effort jokes dominating our discussions.
Looks like the term was coined in [1], which describes the idea of something that starts as a website, but progresses to become app-like as technology and the user’s wishes allow. By that definition it’s your PWA not planning on supporting Firefox.
1: https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-t...
> By that definition it’s your PWA not planning on supporting Firefox.
The above could also be written:
> Under the assumption that a PWA is defined as a website which queries the browser to discover additional functionality, and then goes on to use features it discovers, it is the PWA which doesn’t support a particular browser. Specifically, the PWA likely depends on functionality which may not always be present, which means it it not progressively enhanced.
Apologies if my rewording comes across condescending. I have no information about your level of knowledge on the subject and chose not to omit anything on purpose.
In ye olden days, people used it to mean that websites should be able to work without javascript at all, and not overly rely on new CSS features.
At the time we were making websites for customers that cared about IE6 support. The notion of a "web app" was a dream that most people would have considered a nightmare, given how inconsistently everything was implemented at the time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement#Hist...
Sounds fairly recent to me (so long after first versions of CSS and js) - but also not entirely unreasonable. 2015 is certainly much too recent.
KaiOS (based on Firefox!) and Microsoft Edge are all in on PWAs too.
KaiOS is a platform built entirely on the concept of web apps as apps so saying they're all in here is a bit tautological, and not particularly compelling.
Even Chromium-based Edge is still doing at least a few things in terms of native integration on Windows (including Windows Store support) that probably "count" as "more than just inheriting from Chromium".
Google isn't unique in wanting the web to be on-par with native.
Mozilla has a lot of security concerns with respect to Google’s Fugu efforts.
Service Workers, push notifications and such are still supported.
And I believe you can install PWA:s on Firefox for Android?
And I thought some of the comments in the Bug Tracker were quite hostile.
It would be nice to not have 80+ slightly different chrome installs on a desktop for all the apps these days.
Shipping just the app code and using the runtime (edge or chrome i guess, would've been nice to have firefox as a modern xulrunner successor) on the end users machine makes more sense to me.
also chakra that could've been close to that is deprecated.
basically if nobody provides an up to date hostruntime package, it will be the same case as it is now.
I understand people don't care about supporting multiple version of the runtime, but there should be a way to reduce the cruft of multiple bundled Chromiums on systems that might have storage constraints (thanks Apple and soldered SSDs)
Certainly can't work on mobile platforms where everything is sandboxed.
Chrome already supports it. You can install eg Twitter or GitHub Codespaces locally and they will appear as apps on your desktop system.
Chrome supports it on windows.
(don't get me wrong: this is a wonderful technical feat, but it still is a substantial tradeoff from a native binary).
"WebApp Manager" uses the Chrome/Chromium/FF installed on your machine and creates a separate browser profile for each "WebApp" you configure and launches the "app" or "site-specific browser" in a new window. Details: [2][3]
Works well for simple sites where you're mostly visiting links in the same site, like Youtube.
[1] https://youtu.be/UCzL8P3WDd4?t=407
[1] https://github.com/linuxmint/webapp-manager/blob/4a879d11ef2...
IMO, the UX was horrible. I tried to keep Slack as a pinned Firefox tab, but it was far too easy to accidentally move over to a different website, at which point I stopped getting notifications. I also felt like I had to constantly keep my web browser open—I can't say why that's substantially different than having to keep a Slack application open, but for some reason, the separate dock icon helps me to mentally compartmentalize.
When I finally switched to a standalone Slack app, it felt much nicer.
I've been on Linux for a while now and have not come across the word shareware in a long time. Odd the it makes me feel nostalgic and (oddly) hopeful (that is: a business model that doesn't rely on tracking, ads or some nebulous behind the scenes actions to monetize you).
Nice, straightforward, simple business transaction. Software sales (especially shareware) is really tough. Wish the author some success for his efforts.
It'll check for updates on launch, performing a single HTTP request, but if you really like you can disable that with an environment variable on first launch and a configuration option going forward.
We need more software like this, honestly. I hate how we as users have to depend on enormous multinational entities to get back the privacy we once had. I happily paid for my Ripcord license and I'd recommend it to anyone else who cares about the same things I do :)
Especially considering that old versions of Chromium are likely to have more security vulnerabilities.
On the iOS platform, Apple essentially forbids the use of any browser engine other than the WebKit/Nitro engine provided by the OS itself. From the user's point of view this has the advantage of guaranteeing the absence of old and vulnerable browser engines on their system (provided they're up to date with iOS updates, and of course provided Apple hold up their end and maintain their software well).
As AnIdiotOnTheNet points out, this requires app vendors to stay on top of testing their app as the iOS browser engine is updated by Apple.
It's why I liked Microsoft's HTA (HTML Application) approach:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms536496(...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/ms536495(...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
It had lots of potential but never really took off. Looking at Sciter[0] as a lightweight Electron alternative (and a modern HTA replacement).
Granted, I could always have that tab in a separate window, but that groups it with other Firefox windows, making it harder to navigate to when compared to PWA.
This is precisely why Firefox should support adding websites as desktop apps.
Electron is Chromium. Anyone who installs Slack as a desktop app is using Chromium. The more people who use Chromium, the less incentive Slack has to make their website compatible with anything which isn't than Chromium, which is presumably why you can't, for instance, make Slack calls in a browser other than Chrome or Edge.
If the purpose of Firefox is to give Mozilla a say in the direction of the web, they should be supporting and encouraging users to install websites as "apps" through Firefox.
So the “mobile Firefox” there isn’t really a mobile Firefox just the desktop browser used in a mobile context? Or does Mozilla support such platforms in any official way?
Even the Android Firefox app just got fairly recently rebuilt, mobile isn’t really Mozilla’s strong game after they shut down Firefox OS (which though strangely lives on as KaiOS)
Also: Both Android and Jolla are also Linux based
AFAIK the kernel plays practically no role in how a browser works.
On your comment though: I think maybe MacOS Big Sur disagrees with you: https://twitter.com/voxpelli/status/1343323353294262272?s=21 Not sure if kernel level or other level, but it sure has made eg VS Code pretty slow for some people ;)
Which is fine. The Single-Site Browser experience, putting an icon on the desktop that opens a browser with no url bar, extensions, back button, or any of the other features of the browser, isn't actually good. There's a better way to approach web apps with notifications and offline support.
> If there is some hard data somewhere we've missed that shows we would gain more market share by implementing [SSB] than other projects then that would sure be useful though!
This is a rare opportunity for everyone on HN disappointed about this removal (myself included) to put together a convincing argument with data about how important PWA desktop integration could be. The pessimist in me thinks there's just going to be more derision and complaints without action though. Hoping to be proven wrong.
I would consider being able to install the app to the homescreen part of having a "native app-like user experience". And installing to homescreen is listed as part of PWA on that MDN page.
Pretty much: Have a Service Worker and/or a Web Manifest and you are well on your way to claim to have a PWA
There's some more relevant discussion on this bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407202
For now you can supply --ssb on the command line - but I suppose that will go away, if the feature discussed in op is axed (it's not entirely clear to me if axing the pefrence/feature flag includes axing the command line flag - but it seems so).
At any rate - most desktop os' should allow shortcuts to urls - so should support "installing" apps.
That's just part of it though. What about hiding browser chrome, or making sure it opens as a new window instead of a new tab, or having seperate window preferences (such as size and location) for it? And I believe one goal of PWA is that "installed" apps have additional permissions, such as being able to use keyboard shortcuts that are normally reserved.
I never thought I’d be backing Apple, but at this point I’m hoping that safari remains independent of Google to provide some decentralization.
You got this wrong. Currently it's Chrome that pushes its own standards at neck-breaking speed with utter disregard to any objections. For example, all of the standards that Mozilla considers harmful are enabled by default in Chrome. Or standards that both Safari and Mozilla consider woefully under-specced or badly implemented? Well, Chrome ships them to Google's own teams and then refuses to hide them back under a flag.
Apple may not give enough resources to Safari, that's true. But don't for a second assume that Apple is unequivocally bad and Google is unequivocally good when it comes to the web. I'll take Safari over Google any day of the week.
Maybe we overrate the value of PWA features? I mean they're great and all but will not having them affect my workflow?
- Having to restart after package manager upgrades (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1492023)
- Issues with graphics when using Nvidia on linux
- Automatically opting in to using Cloudflare's DNS with DoH
- Several sites I've used that have reduced functionality on Firefox
- Absence of the ability to automatically open dev-tools on new tabs, or at least capture network requests as soon as a tab opens in the dev tools.
I really want Firefox to be a great browser, and I haven't given up on it yet, but it is getting harder to put up with things like this.
Stop buying nvidia graphics cards.
Expressing a desire for open-source software:
> no need to support proprietary platforms and most importantly no need to be a slave to the Play store, App store or Microsoft store
While seemingly replacing it with closed-source web software. Spotify and Figma are listed, but presumably there's others too.
Here's the thing. These web apps are much worse from a freedom perspective than the client-side software they're replacing. You're less likely to be able to run them if the company doesn't want you too, e.g., they normally can't be run without having an account. But more importantly, with closed-source web software you've taken the one thing you actually did own, your data (which once lived on your hardware that you have full control over) and now you've given that to the company too. And you still don't have the source code.
In a freedom sense, this is absolutely the worst of all worlds. Slowly losing ownership of your data as we move to web apps is a path to a Kafkaesque nightmare where a tech company can arbitrarily cut off access to your life's work on a whim. This is already happening.
You can still get by only using apps that let you own your data today, but it becomes harder and harder every year. And at least in the tech community, a lot of this is driven by a mind-bogglingly paradoxical-on-its-face preference among open-source advocates for closed-source web apps over native apps (which are actually "freer" from a data ownership perspective).
Moving from streaming music from my Spotify Javascript client to streaming music from my native iTunes Swift app does nothing for me. I'd say it's actually worse because now my solution isn't cross-platform anymore and I've lost the browser chrome's dev tools like the network inspector.
A browser client puts much more control in the hands of the user. It's one of the last bastions of freedom that we have before all software in locked behind app stores and app approval processes.
Right, that's why I mentioned "entirely local".
Sure it's physically on your disk, but data is only useful if you own the mechanisms to read and write it. If that software is proprietary you don't own the data.
It's a crappy terminal emulator that has poor support for everything and requires you compile plug-ins yourself to mitigate said poor support.
Some users feel this is good because it has little "bloat". It has pretty high latency[0] to show for it but saves 500 or so KiB on their hard drive[1].
Firefox, I love you, but you're bringing me down. We need a powerful, semi-native, offline capable architecture for the web. I don't care about the PWA spec, it's quite messy handling the implementation of one. But I do think it has always been the vision that the web is accessible regardless of physical connection to it.
As long as I can remember in this industry we've swung back and forth between "thin" and "thick" clients as if one way is the right way. Microservices over monoliths, etc. It's all the same symptom that naturally we don't want to grapple complexity. This announcement is yet another entry in the cannon of thin vs thick. It's a hard problem and any PM who only cares about optimizing time spent will say everything they can once they've zeroed in on the perceived waste.
Are we really imagining Apple brought out a public SDK, set up the app approval system, certification, all that stuff, updated Xcode to support it all on a whim in under a year (starting with iPhoneOS 2) just because Cydia existed No way, José.
Apple are good but even they can't pull all that out of their ass overnight. Web was clearly a stop-gap because the SDK wasn't ready and iPhoneOS was, at the time, an outlier in purposefully not supporting Java ME apps.
As someone who developed a couple of the first round of web apps for the original iPhone, while waiting for the first SDK, I can tell you that this it not true.
To someone evaluating it from the outside using a list of release dates, it may seem logical. But an SDK isn't invented overnight.
> As someone who developed a couple of the first round of web apps for the original iPhone, while waiting for the first SDK, I can tell you that this it not true.
Were you given early access to the SDK before release?
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/25/21455343/amazon-luna-appl...
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/apples-widened-ban-on-temp...
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-revises-its-controve...
Chrome has solved it with a modal/dialog that ask users to add the app to the home screen, but I think the modal/dialog in Chrome is too spammy. It's better if users can do it manually, but its currently hidden too deep in the Safari UI, and Im not even sure you can reach it in mobile safari UI.
Isn’t that covered by Share -> Add to Home Screen?
It is interesting that Apple devices are far from having a monopoly in the mobile market. Yet their influence is so great that they can kill platforms just by not supporting them.
By contrast, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the mobile device market, the browser market is dominated by Google's Chrome, and the majority share of browsers use Chrome's Blink engine.
'PWA' is a Google-invented term to describe technologies already implemented in their own browser; none of it constitutes a single standard unto itself. Apple not fully implementing Google's standard, made not for the benefit of the open web but to make ChromeOS a little more functional than a glorified web browser, is only a threat to those who've forgotten that coding for one browser is what got us stuck in the code-only-for-IE mindset and halted progress for browsers for about a decade.
Apple isn't the biggest threat to the free and open web. Google is. Everybody's using Google's browser, based around Google's own standards designed to force people to stay using Google, to access Google's search which displays Google's ads above Google's curated AMP results.
Whether you agree with these decisions or not Apple is clearly and deliberately using its influence to limit what a web app can do.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi...
As to why not mobile Safari, perhaps Apple doesn’t want to be tied to limitations of the design?
Apple’s push notifications on mobile have evolved significantly over time.
Just because they could do something, doesn’t mean it is a good design.
Not so with websites. The bar for including new functionality in browsers is way higher than it is for native apis because there is no way to police abuse.
As it is, developers and management recognize that Chrome !== Browsers, which means that they also budget in Safari, and sometimes FF.
This old chestnut? This many years on and people still say this?
Adobe killed Flash through their own engineering incompetence, not Apple through policy. Apple's policy merely reflected the liability that the Flash plugin posed.
Adobe could not deliver a version of Flash on mobile that didn't chew up CPU cycles. They tried on Android, it was rubbish, and Adobe themselves deprecated it in 2012. That's only two years after Steve Jobs published Thoughts on Flash.
For Flash content to make any sense on mobile, with its lack of mouse pointer and persistent keyboard, developers could use Adobe AIR, a separate SDK from that used to make Flash web applets. One of the earliest apps ported from Flash to AIR, Machinarium, was a memory and battery hog — not even a new runtime could let Flash content from running unacceptably on iOS.
And all this in addition to Flash spinning up fans on desktops and laptops due to its inefficiency, let alone mobiles. Not to mention the security vulnerabilities in the Flash plugin and renowned instability that caused it to be the major source of browser crashes in Mac OS X.
Between Adobe deprecating their own mobile Flash plugin for running applets in Android browsers, the abysmal performance of Adobe AIR apps, I'm quite happy to say the one to kill Flash was Adobe, not Apple.
Can we put this one to rest at last?
> Yet their influence is so great that they can kill platforms just by not supporting them
Well, aside from not supporting a platform from a vendor that can barely support it themselves, I'd say Apple is more responsible for the rise in adoption of HTML 5 features (WebKit invented <canvas>, iPhone and Android together accelerated websites to display video in HTML players rather than depend on Flash/Silverlight, etc.) than the killing of something that was already dead.
Apple merely saw the writing on the wall. Perhaps they did contribute to making it happen quicker but it would always have happened.
When Adobe shipped an AIR-based cross-compiler for iOS, Apple amended the App Store terms to disallow building with anything but Obj-C or WebKit.
There was certainly more pettiness there than "Steve didn't think Flash was performant enough."
> There was certainly more pettines there than "Steve didn't think Flash was performant enough."
It's important to distinguish between Apple not wishing for Adobe to create a meta-platform atop UIKit (which started just prior to the release iOS 4, roughly the start of 2010) and not bundling or allowing the Flash plugin (since day one, mid-2007). Thoughts on Flash reflected criticism received against Apple for that three year run.
It wasn't performant in 2007. It wasn't performant in 2008. It wasn't performant in 2009. It wasn't performant in 2010. It certainly wasn't performant in 2011 when Adobe killed it for Android.
It's not that anybody, let alone Steve Jobs, thought it wasn't performant enough; it wasn't performant enough. Anywhere. On anything. Full stop.
And to say Adobe's technologies made for a lesser experience when used on iOS wasn't entirely unjustified. Reviews for Adobe AIR games released in 2010 and 2011 all centred around one major point: they were CPU hogs that chewed up battery life noticeably worse than other games at the time.
https://developer.apple.com/app-clips/
It also protects against advertising and tracking penetration that Google's PWAs encourage.
It looks like Apple is moving toward kicking all the "websites in a native wrapper" stuff out of the App Store, so PWA may well be the future.
The real issue people should be discussing is Apple not supporting PWAs, or in fact, any browser engine other than Safari on iPhones. It's the real blocker to wider adoption of PWAs (and many other features!)
Until that happens, whether Firefox desktop / other platforms support this specific behaviour (Single-Site Browser) is a bit moot as it's an edge case compared to 50% of mobile users.
You can have fullscreen apps that run offline, launched from the home screen.
However, you can not trigger an installation prompt like on Android.
This is not true, it's a misconception about how the seven-day-counter works when the app is installed on the home screen.
Nevertheless, persistent data is a concern, because the standards do not specify how long data must be kept, so it could get wiped at some point, for example when the device is low on disk storage.
Why anyone considers iOS any more than a terrible joke is beyond me.
You can't trigger a native prompt automatically, but you can detect if your web app is installed as a PWA. With that information you can show instructions.
That said, while I don't have access to the user research they quote, I do wonder if this move is short sighted in the bigger picture of desktop apps being built with web tech.
Given the popularity of Electron and the recent gaming platforms built as PWAs, it seems likely apps will probably start being distributed as desktop PWAs in the near future. With this move Firefox have cut themselves out of the running though so they'll get caught off guard when some big name player releases a popular desktop app through this channel.
I can only hope that someone at Mozilla is taking business strategy into account and not only technical complexity.
This was previously implemented behind a feature flag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site-specific_browser https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-site-specific-browser-...
Hoping Epiphany will get WebRTC support soon, it's the most promising browser on Linux phones UI-wise, and I plan to use one of those when there's one powerful enough to be a daily driver.
The upside is that eventually the hype cycle will again turn in their favour. Hopefully they can capitalize on that once it comes.
Because unfortunately not enough people care about it.
Not necessarily. The market can stay rational much longer than they are acting solvent.
It’s not about PWAs more generally than that.
> there is currently no plan for PWA support in Firefox.
Now it sounds like they're not killing the mobile PWA yet, but it's a big selling point of firefox as far as I'm concerned.
I was also just starting to switch to firefox on desktop (just installed my main plugins yesterday) for my main browser, but this is really making me reconsider.
Being able to have a desktop window and traditional shortcuts per 'application' is 80% of why electron exists and is so big in the first place. Chromium powers that whole market. Moving all of that to PWAs that could share a runtime and use Firefox internally would be a huge step in a good direction.
Controversial take: I want to see this happen sooner rather than later. So the internet can finally wake up. And we will be forced to build something that actually works for ALL the internet.
What makes you think anyone will wake up to anything? We’ll end up with the most closed system ever created.
If you want something else to be built - why not argue for for it, rather than arguing for the worst possible outcome?
The reason I'm arguing for the worst possible outcome is so that we can have the change we badly need. We cannot take back Firefox while Mozilla is still at the helm of the browser.
Not listening to your user base and making iron-fist decisions like this over & over again will make this a reality sooner rather than later.
As far as I can either both Chromium and Firefox could be forked right now, just as easily as they could be in an objectively worse future that you seem to want.
The reason Firefox and chromium are supported is because it’s an insane amount of professional work to develop a browser, and they are both funded by money from Google search.
Where is the funding to develop an alternative going to come from?
> What makes you assume anything would different if Firefox dies?
At the very least we would be free from the clutches of Mozilla and it's gross incompetence.
Chromium & Firefox browsers have been forked plenty times by different developers/corps for different reasons.
The internet battle won't be won by a fork. The most famous of forks being Microsoft Edge, another evil player. Which is surprising close to surpassing FF btw [0] It's so bad even Safari is ahead of Firefox on the desktop market share.
As for funding Firefox, they can and should be actively pro-donation. I would be willing to pitch in even if it made a slight difference. Pocket & VPN should be marketed and developed upon. Am sure there's more the mother entity can come up with to add to its revenues. These alternative projects should be pursued using an R&D budget from its revenue. Firefox is still a large enough player in the browser game, its search engine default is a gold mine commanding hundreds of millions from top investors.
If they fire their top dollar guzzling CEO [1] and continue to trim down on non-essentials, I don't see any reason why Firefox couldn't get back on track to its former glory.
[0] https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/ [1] https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
I don’t see Google funding anyone else at this point.
If the battle won’t be won by a fork are you suggesting someone build a clean room browser?
If so, who is going to fund it?
The point of trying out new products like VPN, relays SHOULD be to find alternative funding for Firefox's development. Also what makes you think it is only Google who can fund Firefox? This is a pretty shallow (and lazy) reasoning, pardon my language.
I'm suggesting we disband Mozilla as it is the core problem with Firefox. Clean browser from scratch or not, we need a chromium alternative.
Direct question that cannot be answered at one go. Though I sure do know I don't want Google directly involved with the funds to the browser engine alternative. This poses the biggest threat to internet freedom and privacy in general.
Setting the insult aside - this is the basic question I’ve been asking you.
Who do you think is going to fund the alternative, and why does Mozilla have to die before that can happen?
Glad to see you can put emotions aside in your arguments though. Above remark on Google's funding wasn't meant to be an insult.
I don’t see any answer to the question of how an alternative browser would be funded in what you have said, only your statement about it being lazy to think that only Google could fund them.
Maintaining a browser is expensive. I think if Mozilla dies, either another major sponsor would be needed or we’ll just end up with the web becoming even more Google’s platform.
In the absence of an answer to who pays for the development, I don’t see how a new browser will emerge. Killing Mozilla doesn’t create funding for a new browser.
Why I have continued to ask you this question, is because you seem to be convinced that an alternative would arise if Mozilla died.
This leads me to think that you must be aware of someone who would be motivated to pay for it. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, and you just hope someone steps forward to pay for it.
Why can't Mozilla's user research be open?
> The pile-on isn't helping, nor is questioning Dave's motives (or those of other Mozilla employees), so I'm going to restrict comments on this bug.
I can forgive a decision I disagree with.
I can never forgive silencing open discussion.
Edit: the downvotes on this comment are particularly ironic given the subject matter.
Opening the user research would make this more obvious, so that's probably why they don't allow this visibility, even though it would make sense according to their published principles.
Why are they doing this? I've no particular inside information, but occam's razor says it's follow the money - that Mozilla's true reason for existing is as a protection for Google, and that Mozilla's published positions are virtue signalling, but their actions serve their real masters at Google.
It sounds controversial, right? But if you are ever interested in the red pill, explore this possibility by considering these facts.. (and if you're not - leave this post up so others get the chance to think about it for themselves)
- Google provides 95% of the money for Mozilla
- Mozilla is a lightning rod that attracts and focuses the user centric parts of the ecosystem/market, but ultimately fails to achieve the goals of giving users power and instead year after year the power remains with google
- Mozilla must play a fine line between virtue signalling to prevent competitors who would truly organize for users benefit, vs actually doing things that would tip the balance of power towards users
- Mozilla thus talks about lofty goals to capture the idealist mindshare, but consistently fails on good execution so the pragmatic choice remains to use google products instead
- This pattern has been so consistent over the years I've come to the conclusion it's deliberate .. and the reason is probably because: follow the money, ie Mozilla is funded by Google
- If Mozilla leadership isn't doing this intentionally then they are being used/played by Google, however Mozilla's CEO is now a corporate lawyer not an idealist, who's taking home big bucks, so that's an indication that Mozilla's leadership is in on the game
.
So in answer to your question, Mozilla's user research can't be open because that would increase visibility of situations where Mozilla's conflict of interests cause Moz to do things that benefit Google rather than general web users, and Moz's leadership don't want their hypocrisy to become known or their game will be up and the paychecks stop.
> No the user research was not performed on the implementation in Firefox.
> Unfortunately I think that the research is confidential at the moment.
Right. Of course the source is confidential. Not a lot of people are comfortable with uploading photos of their own ass on the internet.
If there is no alternative to shipping apps via electron and chromium PWAs, there unlikely will be an open alternative that works everywhere.
I honestly don't understand this decision.
In Firefox, however, it still requires an application.ini file and an xul:webview to do so. XUL cannot be removed as long as something like a simple webview isn't possible. And something like --pwa=url via CLI is pretty much the correct way to offer this type of featureset in my opinion; as all other Browsers (read as: really all, even Edgium) have support for PWAs.
WebKit, compared to Chromium, has due to the availability of its bindings (like webkit2gtk) even better sandboxing capabilities; with an isolated userdata cache and an isolated webdata cache that you can set to e.g. /tmp/websandbox.
Trident, the old engine behind Internet Explorer, also had this kind of featureset; similar to how WebKit's bindings are built...which is the reason why they still stick around on Windows WPF based apps, and probably is the reason why Edgium and Chromium are working so much on the CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) in order to replace it.
Additionally, firefox's profile manager concept doesn't allow to fully sandbox a web application in /tmp - not even with an XUL based webview, because it'll always leak out settings in various ways (on Windows, on MacOS, and on Linux).
Other than that, I pretty much value having actual privacy when browsing, and firefox is really really good at that with ad-blocking (which may easily go away with chrome and with the pace of development on it, forks will be in a pretty bad situation), containers, etc.
But none of my clients even ask about Firefox support anymore. They don't care and neither do 99% of their users. Supporting FF maybe be the morally correct and heroic thing but it's like being vegan. You're a rounding error on policy decisions that matter.
As a thought experiment - what has the existence of FF done to prevent Apple & Google from going their own ways lately on web features? Not much if anything at all.
I don't know... my bank launched a new web interface for online banking and they seem to take my firefox bug reports seriously.
Show me another browser that runs uBlock Origin and has both a facebook and google container...
There is a couple of antitrust lawsuits going up in the US against Google. If we're lucky, one of them may break up the Android and Chrome arms of Google (or Alphabet, I guess) and/or require a ballot screen to choose a browser on Android, like the EU did for Windows and IE.
And there may be other opportunities in the future for Firefox to regain some equal footing with Chrome. But that can't work if we declare Firefox dead.
Most likely it will be executed so ineptly it will end up strengthening Google too.
I use Firefox as my primary browser. I'm pretty disappointed to see the Firefox team continuously abandon features I've been hoping to see.
If Mozilla did this then Google would officially control the world wide web. It would be like back when IE6 ruled, except quite possibly even worse.
I'd trust a chromium based browser controlled by mozilla over google chrome. Even now when I want chromium on windows I choose edge over chrome. I'd love to be able to choose something from mozilla instead.
I've used firefox for years and will continue to use it. But at some point firefox will be a niche product trying to find it's niche.
In theory they could be great but apple/google make too much money off app stores.
Telling your customers to install a pwa is a terrible user experience and borderline rude
My company’s payroll admin system uses a PWA as a mobile interface. I don’t need slick ui there, I need to view my payslips (click a link to open a pdf) and request time off (fill in a 4-field form). It’s perfectly fine for this usecase and there is no conceivable business value in pouring more resources into it.
News flash: a majority of applications is simple CRUD like this. They don’t need a native UI or performance. They just need an icon on your homescreen.
But they are telling users to install apps. Sites that depend on advertising want to force the app down your throat to eliminate ad blockers and to better track you.
PWAs have always seemed like one of those beautifully idealistic yet totally doomed to fail ideas (at least for several years relative to native-based-approaches). Don't get me wrong, I think the web will ultimately evolve into the new JVM (read: via WASM), and the beatific promise that was foretold by PWA will finally reach the masses.
Reality Check: We're not quite there yet. Firefox deleting a legacy, buggy, and dev-time-sink attempt at this, makes total sense to me so they can focus on the other awesome stuff they're doing that actually creates real value for the masses today.
To be fair - perhaps they could've handled the ticket on this a bit more gracefully...? But then again - they know their stuff, so I don't blame them entirely :)
That thing is 100% native code, don't act like web apps are the only thing to do this. You can be a bad actor regardless of the tech stack.
But try to use them, and you get dumbed-down ‘mobile sites’ with massive ‘use the app instead!’ nags. The web on a mobile device is an unnecessarily lousy experience.
Also – on desktop many apps are Electron apps today, which is a user hostile workaround for lack of installable PWA:s.
Basically: It’s a way to verify that an app represents your site and then that app can open up the PWA inside it (a bit tricky to explain, but it’s great if one wants to be in the store and/or have an existing non-PWA app that one wants to upgrade to a PWA)
More info: https://firt.dev/pwa-playstore
Using a PWA for any of those (provided it gets rid of their terrible app banners) solves that problem for me as a user. I don't want to try and guess which app has broken their copy/paste or back button and have 20 different slightly broken UI's and experiences.
The advantage of the web is a consistent U.I. interface, with all the basics working (copy/paste, back button). This means there's a much higher chance of those working for the user, I don't see how you can say that's bad.
Even ignoring that, which do you think would be better, a platform that they put 3* the amount of time into or 3 separate platforms (if the devs are forced to build the same thing 3 times)?
There are many user benefits.
PWAs don’t solve those problems for marketeers either. They just annoy end users by making them do some funny dance to get the app on their home page, which then barely works and doesn’t support all the features a native app can handle anyway.
So you end up in a world where developers say “we have a mobile app, it’s a PWA, just install that” and then no one installs it because they don’t know how, and the marketeers get frustrated that the current web app isn’t sticky enough on mobile and so they add banners in to make people download the “real” app and you’re back to square one.
The only real solution is cross platform development toolchains (like electron) as they reduce the development overhead but allow for native apps.
Web apps are all about freedom. They're free for the developer to distribute, they allow the user freedom to run on any device they own and they also allow the user some freedom to alter the app via extensions/ad blocking/etc.
Nothing else.
It has certainly nothing to do with any "agile apps development" and there is little to no market for it outside of mobile (i.e. desktop).
Edit: grammar fix.
Especially a locked down one, full of unblockable ads? (cf Youtube app on mobile which is happy to insert 10 adds in a 10 minute video ...)
Moreover, it is a complete red herring - there is not much advantage in a "much more up to date browser" in an app that will ever open/download a single page (so security or newer standard support is rarely a problem). Never mind that even the Electron apps can be (and are) updated frequently.
Also, PWAs are unable to do many things that Electron apps can as PWA is still ultimately in a browser sandbox whereas Electron runs a Node.js backend that can do pretty much anything a regular desktop app can (networking, access hardware, etc.).
That said, I am certainly not advocating Electron, it is a horrible kludge leading to poorly designed applications that break desktop usability conventions constantly, are enormous resource hogs and require weird workarounds for doing basic stuff only for the sake of being able to do user interface in HTML and javascript.
This is precisely why I would prefer many of the Electron apps that I've used to be PWAs instead. For many apps I don't trust them with access to e.g. my entire filesystem; a PWA would get me the nice UI, notifications, etc of a native app while still keeping them in their sandbox.
Is it? The prospect of a single standard is still pretty enticing to me. Granted, you have things like Cordova, Flutter etc that already solve the single codebase problem. But under the hood they all “convert” things to native XY and Z. Don’t you think that a single standard like PWA would be better for the industry in general?
It will kill a lot of monetization, which is probably why it failed to get much traction with Apple.
What you are arguing for is the most closed platform the world has ever seen, completely driven by one company.
1. The iOS App Store is popular because of safety and privacy. Obviously that involves trusting Apple which is undesirable even if they happen to be good custodians right now. The play store is no better. If we had a decentralized solution to these problems, it would be a lot easier for other platforms to emerge.
2. It seems like we are close to the point where you could build an ‘app player’ which is based on a small subset of web technologies such as webgl, wasm, websockets, and webrtc.
Implementing this could be done much more easily than supporting the giant stack required to browse the modern web, so it could be done by a genuine open coalition without a controlling corporate sponsorship as is required for a browser.