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Comment by seumars | Hacker News Reader

PWA still sounds to me like a 2015 buzzword from Google that never quite took off as everyone hoped it would. Perhaps the lack of support on Firefox could have something to do with it.

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Firefox does support most features for a PWA. It's iphone and their safari lock in that's the problem. No support for features like web push.

It's clear apple will happily cripple it's own browser to keep people using the app store.

Firefox removed support for installing PWAs on the few platforms it used to support that on, which is one of the more important features for my usage. I don’t want to see browser chrome on apps that are intended to be peers with traditional apps, and having presence in OS process/windows management is useful.

I understand but you are in the minority. Most people don't use firefox and most firefox users didn't even know firefox supported installing apps that way on desktop.

If you yourself want to install PWAs on desktop then chrome, edge, and maybe even desktop safari all do it fine. You won't see the browser's chrome and you probably won't even know it's not running in firefox.

A browser with less than 4% market share probably has not that much to do with it. Firefox is barely used by "non-tech people" anymore. If PWA "never quite took off", it's not because of Firefox, because 2/3 of the people online use Google Chrome, which used to and still supports them.

Market share source: https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share

Firefox supports PWAs fine, it's just the desktop installing part they don't have. Offline works, push works, installing works on Android, pretty much everything works.

"Install app" is available on Firefox for Android. So yeah, only desktop install I guess

Sure, on mobile, until they decide to drop it from there too. And "pretty much everything works" doesn't make for a compelling user experience.

> Perhaps the lack of support on Firefox could have something to do with it.

I'd put this more in the category of natural consequences of trying to push a lot of different things forward under one umbrella. Firefox shipped a ton of stuff but there are plenty of cases where the Google team raced ahead on a proposed functionality which reasonable people might have wanted to implement differently, and since PWA was a Google marketing campaign that means that any pressure to implement it is going to be balanced by questions about whether it really benefits many users.

is more relevant the lack of support from safari specially in ios who is in 17% of the device instead of 0.09% of Firefox (3% of 31% (windows +linux))

iOS Safari does support service workers and "add to home screen". You can't however prompt the user for "add to home scree" - the user has to do it via the Safari menu. The notification dialog is a disaster in Chrome as all sites asks for it, few sites asks to be installed on the desktop though. Safari does lack some functionality that Chrome has - maybe Safari could add that functionality if the user adds the web site/app to the home screen... like native file system, Bluetooth api, etc.

You're probably using PWA sites without realizing it. Many SPA frameworks add a basic service worker automatically. It's the 'install this page as an icon on home screen/desktop' that's super rare and not well supported.

"PWA" is a buzzword, that Google invented to categorize a group of APIs.

Different browser support a different bunch of these APIs that some people call "PWA".

Firefox only recently dropped PWAs[0]. Though not sure how feature complete they are/were apart from Chrome.

[0] https://9to5google.com/2021/01/27/firefox-discontinues-work-...

What do you mean? I confirm I can install a PWA using Firefox on Android.

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