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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

This tool is named deceptively. It makes it sound like Firefox has broken or missing support for PWAs. Firefox has great support for pwas. My team shipped our app as a pwa in May and it was easy to do and works 100% in both chrome and Firefox.

It appears this is more of a packager that tries to turn a website into a pwa and makes it install more like a native app. I may try it out, but the name is horrible and damaging to Firefox so I'll probably not ship until that name is changed.

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> This tool is named deceptively.

It's a trademark violation, in that "FirefoxPWA" improperly implies that that Firefox is the brand behind the product. This isn't likely to go all the way to a court of law, but if it did it would be an open and shut case. The author should do the polite thing and rename their product.

Legally proper alternatives would be "PWAs for Firefox" or more clearly, "PWA Installer for Firefox" as suggested elsethread. Those aren't necessarily great product names, but they illustrate a point: the inversion makes it clear that this is a third party offering, rather than something coming from Firefox.

For what it's worth I don't think the author intended to create marketplace confusion, because the full product description "Progressive Web Apps for Firefox" makes it clear it's a third-party offering. It should be possible to resolve this amicably.

>Firefox has great support for pwas

It doesn't and the relevant bug is marked as WONTFIX.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407202

Isn't being installable as an app kind of the most baseline feature of PWAs? To my knowledge desktop Firefox doesn't let you do that without an addon like this.

IIRC Firefox did use to support installing of PWAs until about a year ago. It still boggles my mind why they dropped it.

Bizarre decisions about features is run of the mill these days for Mozilla. I had to use FF a few days ago (WebKit derivatives can't load massive GitHub pull requests) and I truly missed the browser. But I use PWAs, so I have to use Chrome.

I'm not sure why you find Chrome necessary for PWAs, I use Discord, Spotify, Zoom, etc. all exclusively from within Firefox.

That's not what a PWA is, a PWA is installable, and Firefox doesn't have that.

> Firefox has great support for pwas

It doesn't support "installing" PWAs like native apps, and that's a core feature of PWAs, so no it does not have great support for PWAs

> the name is horrible and damaging to Firefox so I'll probably not ship until that name is changed.

I think you're being a bit harsh here. Sure, a more accurate name would be "PWA Installer for Firefox", but to say it's deceptively named is pretty hyperbolic.

What does it mean to install a webapp?

Is it different than Firefox's "Add to Home" button?

That's what it is. But only Firefox Mobile supports it, this extension is about the desktop version.

Actually, on mobile it is. Which infuriates me more than it should.

There are two ways to link to an application in Firefox: one just creates a shortcut ("Add to home") which opens the browser. The other opens a full screen application, like PWAs are designed to do.

When I hit the install button, what I really want is the latter but occasionally PWA detection seems to fail and installs a shortcut instead.

In desktop Firefox, Mozilla has decided to can this idea and not implement it. There was a bug open for this in bugzilla, but that was closed as WONTFIX.

"Add to home screen" is the option you'll get if the web app doesn't have PWA support. If PWA is supported firefox mobile will show an "Install" option instead. This works more like a native app. When launched there will be no URL bar and the status bar will take the main colour of the PWA.

When I see a name start with 'Firefox' I really do expect it to be from the team Firefox at Mozilla, and was genuinely expecting the link to have either the mozilla.org, firefox.com, or github.com/mozilla URLs. IMHO it's important to preserve the name recognition of the only open source browser that can compete with Chrome.

If you were not aware of Mozilla dropping support for PWAs, it could potentially sound that way. But to me it was pretty clear that it's a third-party thing, because why the hell would Mozilla create a separate project to do this after they dropped support?

I'm talking about an immediate first-glance reaction, not an analytical 'stop and think about it for a minute' reaction.

Not anymore is it hyperbolic. Not when you have product names like "Firefox Lockwise" and so forth. Firefox is now a brand name and also a browser name (horrible, horrible move by Mozilla, IMHO). So, FirefoxPWA is probably in some kind of IP violation.

> As of 2021, PWA features are supported to varying degrees by Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Firefox for Android, and Microsoft Edge[2][3] but not by Firefox for desktop.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_application

How do I install a PWA on Firefox? Wanted to do that just yesterday to get offline Excalibur, but could not find a button.

(Desktop, Fedora - in case that makes a difference)

I thought this install feature was for phones only, but a comment further down posted an addon link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29440657

And the add on mentioned, is this project

If anything, Mozilla was pioneering around idea of such easy accessible web applications with Prism project up until it was abandoned [1].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Prism

More precise terminology should be "Install to desktop" (or homescreen on mobile). Years ago there was a tool (or extension) called Prism, that did exactly the same thing.

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