Rather than wanting the web platform to be first class, they really want it to languish as a second-class citizen. Really sad, seeing as they also fired devs, and invested in "AI" instead.
They just seem like another way to attempt to shift users from the 'proper web' into a place where blocking ads is more difficult.
Personally, I wish we could purge the vast majority of 'apps' from the world, they shouldn't be apps in the first place, most have no need to run native code, they should be links to websites, sites that can work on more-or-less any device in any browser.
Letting companies save money while still claiming they have "desktop apps".
Extensions still run in PWAs on Chromium-based browsers, so I'm not sure that's the intent behind implementing them.
> Personally, I wish we could purge the vast majority of 'apps' from the world
Out of curiosity, where do you draw the distinction between an app and a website? PWAs are largely just websites with an OS shortcut, and in some cases more integration via platform APIs. I'm sure you're familiar with the term "web app", which perfectly highlights how muddied the line is with modern tooling.
We actually shut down the project because a good PWA implementation does this better than we ever could. PWAs can have extensions like ad blockers (very difficult to impossible in Electron). PWAs get automatic browser updates (very difficult with Electron).
PWAs are great, and FF’s implementation of them is not.
Having apps that works as well as native ones, while using the same codebase and open technologies, and that is naturally as decentralized, safe and accessible as the web.
Also not needing to be politically correct, approved by Google and Apple or share large percent of revenue and marketing data with them.
It could be happening if Firefox took it more seriously and Apple didn't prevent it from happening.
On macOS this is even more important because switching windows within an app does not use most recently used order.
I'm still baffled that mobile browsers don't have the desktop equivalent of F11. Or a console for that matter, the ADB is good and all but it's not always an option.
> Firefox and Safari do not support installing PWAs on any desktop operating systems... Chrome and Edge support installing PWAs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks. [1]
Any idea what Mozilla's motivation is here? (Apple's at least is easy to understand, even if you disagree.)
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
That's not actually true, MDN needs updating. PWAs are installable as standalone apps since macOS Sonoma and Safari 17 - https://webkit.org/blog/14445/webkit-features-in-safari-17-0....
On mobile, I could see privacy reasons for wanting to use a PWA vs a native app, but every time I've seen a site that supports a PWA, they also support a native app and the PWA is usually a sad substitute in comparison.
(Not a leading question. I'm genuinely asking people who like and use PWAs: is there something cool I'm missing out on?)
I think you mean chromeless (an amusingly confusing term when it's chrome hosting the PWA). If it were headless, you wouldn't see anything at all.
Sometimes there is a standalone app available, like with Slack, but often the PWA has the same features and doesn't duplicate the entire Web Platform stack (Electron), which saves some battery.
Apart from that, I have youtube music, slack, discord, whatsapp web just for convenience of having it in alt+tab rather than cycle through a thousand tabs (admittedly, this usecase is nullified by tab search)
Cmd+Tab is far quicker than tab search for me.
But in all fairness, it’s easier to build one poorly, and there isn’t much incentive not to.
That, or something else will fill the void (maybe something built off Servo, I dunno), but that seems less likely.
I don't know anything in detail about those protocols though, and don't know why Firefox doesn't have them.