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Comment by butz | Hacker News Reader

"Create and develop full web applications inside your browser tab". You know what would be even better? If we could add an icon for this app to the desktop and run it as standalone application, while using the same browser engine installation. We are practically at that point where OS needs only web browser installed and all applications could be web based.

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You're talking about PWAs, right? It's still bizarre to be that the feature was dropped. PWAs are the top idea on their feedback site as well.

I suppose while it has your attention, please vote for that feature https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/bring-back-pwa-progress...

Crazy that they removed it. It works well on Firefox for Android, and it used to work fine in Firefox desktop too.

Mozilla seems to stray further and further every day. Some stuff is great, but like we still can't install whatever extensions we want on Firefox android without deeply jumping into dev features.

I currently use the Lynket browser (which can leverage Chrome Custom Tabs to present each Firefox tab as an Android app per tab) and shortcuts to web links to get most of the feel of a PWA. Would recommend it if you're interested. :)

I had no idea this was removed. Ugh that's really distressing.

What the hell? When did this happen? PWAs are some of the most exciting developments in web development. Did they give any reasoning about this decision anywhere?

The reasoning was that their implementation was buggy, and added tech debt, and they didn't think that PWAs on Desktop were useful.

Can't find a lot of info about this. Is it desktop support only that's been dropped?

I believe so.

Terrible disappointment for this. I can't give up this feature so I can't go Firefox. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593

I'm not a fan of PWAs, even despite being a fringe OS user for which many applications aren't available (FreeBSD). So while technically I would benefit from them, I don't use any.

I don't like the way web apps tie in with the pervasive tracking on the web, and the way they don't fit in well into the native UI and waste resources.

But it is indeed weird to remove the choice altogether.

Yeah, I agree. I will love PWA support on Firefox desktop.

One recent example, I pay for Spotify, but recently I started to pay for YouTube Premium to get rid of ads in the native mobile app, and it comes with YouTube Music.

I try YouTube Music and seems fine, was thinking to ditch Spotify and save that money, but YT Music do not have a desktop app like Spotify, on desktop is just trough https://music.youtube.com and has PWA features like "install", notifications and stuff.

I'm used to have that Spotify icon on my desktop and open the app, and being a Firefox user, with YT Music I can't have that experience, I can add a shortcut to my desktop, but it opens as a tab with all my other stuff opened. I don't like it. I guess I will stick with Spotify because of that.

In Chrome desktop, which supports PWA, you can install music.youtube.com, will add a desktop icon, opens in a individual window without tab/address bar etc. Is awesome. But is Chrome.

I'm considering use YT Music with Ungoogled Chromium to get the PWA features.

This is what most people who want a 'desktop' YTM use these days, it's mainly a webwrapper but has some decent extensions built in to make it easier to use. https://github.com/th-ch/youtube-music

Firefox recently removed support for SSB (Site Specific Browser) and PWA (Progressive Web Apps). That's the only reason I have Chrome installed, since I like to have different apps in different windows, and keep my browser tabs for websites.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1348811

I think it would be better to have chromium or brave installed of chromium, since you use FireFox.

You could use different Firefox profiles for this...

But the icon in the task bar would always be the Firefox one. PWAs solve all the problems here.

I've tried a lot of things. Every option I'm aware of sucks. Even using multiple profiles (which would mostly break the reasons to want to use the same browser) is not really supported (lots of issues with window switching on both Linux and macOS).

I just open multiple browser windows...

I don't need or want the browser chrome like tabs and toolbars on those windows, and I usually pin them in the taskbar using their own icons. Makes alt-tab nicer too. I don't use it myself, but PWAs can also register as file handlers and be used to open files like any other installed program, which would be handy for image editors and similar.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/progressive-...

It seems like Big Corps are afraid of PWA. Apple made a lot to make it harder to make a web app in ios safari; not talking about PWA.

Well, the recent EU regulations are certainly going to force a change in Apple's behaviour.

This is probably the most insane thing Mozilla has done in recent times, and they have done a lot of insane things.

> That's the only reason I have Chrome installed, since I like to have different apps in different windows, and keep my browser tabs for websites.

I'd do the same thing, but Firefox is the browser I'd like to share data with. That's where my cookies, add-ons and user scripts live.

Electron exists entirely because the web platform does not have access to lower level APIs. When the web incorporates these features (e.g. FileSystem Access), PWAs will replace electron.

Throw in "when Web Assembly can interact with the DOM and browser APIs" and you have the most powerful cross-language, cross-platform UI toolkit in existence.

It'll mark the year of the Linux desktop... probably, maybe - please.

Can PWAs use multiple windows, native menu bars or context menus, etc? I would not call those APIs "low level."

You’re right, and I actually think the web would benefit greatly from a native context menu API!

Depends if the browser is based on Chrome, thus an extension of ChromeOS, or not.

https://web.dev/learn/pwa/windows

https://web.dev/app-like-pwas/

https://whatwebcando.today/

100% of the web apps I currently use in the browser don't need these APIs to function (Twitter, Tidal, HN, YouTube, whatever really).

What is the benefit of everything being web based over setting up automatic building of traditional packages for existing OS or building containerized packages EG flatpak.

It always depends on the use case. A good example for an application being better because it is web-based is vscode. With code-server the possibilities are almost endless. This was revolutionary for me as a developer.

That's remote development, and you don't need a web-based UI to do it. There's also JetBrains IDEs, any terminal editor over SSH, and probably plenty of other editors I haven't looked into.

Yes and no. There are some differences which make vscode superior to tmux/screen, ssh/fuse or rdp/vnc/nomachine based solutions.

- incredibly easy to setup (only a browser is needed) and use everywhere. Even management compatible.

- can be automated easily with ansible and/or docker

- remote pairing without a third-party cloud in between

- plug-ins just work even when being used remotely

- headless chrome can be proxied to the webview of vscode (a real browser running remotely in your browser)

Almost everything mentioned can be done with the tools you suggested BUT IMO it is not as smooth then just using vscode. This is coming from an arch (using arch BTW) / i3 guy.

My opinion, I tried to make a quick side project, not for money,just to help someone. So the idea is what is the tool that takes me less of my free time and works for doing the job, fuck look and feel I need buttons and test only, I am also on Linux but the app needs to be cross platform and I will not buy Apple shit or Windows to do this, I done the project in Electron , I don't love it, I think is kind of a shit architecture, a duck-taped thing but it does the job for me.(also I personally prefer GC languages over c/c++ and Python syntax is not for me). But if you pay me tons of money I would build you native apps, on my free time and money I will use a shitty toolkit that does the work it suppose to do. IF Microsoft would not be an evil and stupid company maybe we could all have been now making cross platform C# apps but the bastards really wanted it to be Windows only, nice job MS.

.Net MAUI?

Because creating cross platform apps has always been really difficult. And creating web pages that work cross platform is less difficult.

If your objection is that it's inefficient and sometimes leads to bad quality output, I'd agree. But it's the option with the least friction so people gravitate towards it, we might as well make it work better.

The benefit to me as a user is that I don't need to basically give access to my full computer to an app I may not trust.

Firefox command line has multiple options for passing a URL.

But none of them allow you to open the url in a new window, with minimal chrome, where clicking on a link opens in your main browser instead of a new tab in the current window. And you can't customize the appId so the window manager treats as another firefox window, not a separate app.

> And you can't customize the appId so the window manager treats as another firefox window, not a separate app

IIRC that's actually possible on Linux, but a big pain and, like most command line switches, pretty undocumented.

But yeah, Firefox generally sucks for this use case and it's insane. It would be borderline trivial to implement, immensely useful and they've actually gone backwards on this type of stuff in many instances.

They did that awhile ago. It's called ChromeOS.

The browser is essentially an overlay operating system.

Kind of a crap one though.

Web assembly could be the basis for something that could break out of the browser.

This can be done today:

Chrome: Menu -> More Tools -> Create Shortcut -> Check "Open as Window"

Edge: Menu -> Apps -> Install this site as an app

I think the point is that you can't do it on Firefox anymore. You used to be able to, but the (partially incomplete) feature was removed instead rather than developed into an easy to use feature. The feature still works on Android, but the Mozilla team doesn't see a future in installing web apps apparently.

PWAs are my main use for Chromium.

> but the Mozilla team doesn't see a future in installing web apps apparently.

It's absolutely the future, Firefox just isn't in that future.

> PWAs are my main use for Chromium

Mozilla already lost big when everyone decided to use Chromium for Electron-style apps and now they're actively running into losing big again.

All applications and all malware. You don't want web apps to get write access to your HDD.

Web apps run in the browser sandbox. They don't generally have access to the filesystem.

This uses the file system API, which users can use to grant read and write access to entire folders.

Malicious apps will never trick users into granting access to folders they shouldn’t, whereupon they won’t have their files exfiltrated, encrypted, and held to ransom.

Parent writes about all applications to be web based, all appliactions without access to the filesystem are hardly possible.

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