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Comment by ainar-g | Hacker News Reader

Have we ever found out, why did Mozilla actually remove PWA support from Firefox? Apart from the buzzwordey stuff like “focusing on delivering real value to our users” that the C-levels have been spouting. Between this and their abandonment of Servo, it really seems like they keep shooting themselves in the feet, which, considering their position on the market, just really baffles me.

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They didn't. They support all the PWA APIs (ServiceWorkers, Manifests, Push, etc.), they just don't support having PWAs open without browser chrome on desktops only. On android they can be added to the homescreen and they open without browser chrome just like Chromium does.

Your point is correct - they removed it from desktops - but it still doesn't answer the question about the why it was removed.

You are technically correct, but removing a feature for a large number of important platforms is still a weird move, especially in the context of PWAs becoming more and more widely used on all platforms.

It’s still a weird decision, because if I’m going to want a PWA anywhere it’s most likely to be on desktop, not mobile.

On mobile OSes there’s usually mobile apps available for a given service, but that’s not the case on desktop, where it’s sometimes useful to eschew browser chrome and defer window management to the OS window manager.

I'm guessing they did it for similarity with the chromeless browser windows that created all kinds of security problems at the early 00's for every browser, except Firefox, that gave the control of the chrome appearance to the user instead of the site.

Or maybe it's for similarity with the xul applications, that created security problems by the second half of the 00's because they got control of the chrome appearance.

As a rule, every time browsers gave control of the chrome to the content, it went badly. It's the kind of problem that can certainly be solved by creating the right set of capabilities, but the Firefox developers decided to focus on some other problem.

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