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Comment by tallowen | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised that part of Mozilla's never introduced an Android launcher for progressive web apps.

Given that they already have Firefox on Android and their history with FirefoxOS, I expected this to be a key lever to get app/website developers to consider this as an option.

Are there barriers such as performance or API issues (e.g. double click behaviors) that prevent the webmanifest and other approaches from gaining traction here?

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Bad leadership + weak board = lost decade.

I am curious what do you mean by Launcher here. Firefox Allows installing app to your android laucher home screen and you can add any website as a shortcut to the homescreen.

AFAIK, they are refusing to implement BLE in Firefox(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674737) saying that, "implementing it is harmful to the web."

Pretty hard to have a PWA future, if you can't access standard app APIs.

Seems like it would require a big mindset change for Mozilla to get on board with PWAs.

Their official position cites security as the reason they haven't implemented it yet. https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth

There’s a stack of Blink-only Google specifications that people are pushing as “standard” that are anything but. Both Apple and Mozilla reject them on privacy or security grounds, then get criticised as being “behind” (or in Apple’s case, “deliberately holding back the web”). No, a specification created and implemented unilaterally by Google is not a standard.

Most standards start by being implemented by one browser. I would rather a standard exist based off a real implementation than one thrown out of an ivory tower.

The whole point of standards is that there should be multiple implementations that can support it. Now I do agree with your point on that standards should be based on feedback from implementations but as the above comment said, this is just google making adding features and making standard documents to shift blame on other browser for not implementing them.

To be fair where are the other browser's proposals for giving apps the capabilities they need? Browsers should be shamed for not making an effort to support common use cases that apps need.

Is BLE a PWA requirement? I think they explained their position pretty well here, regardless of whether I agree:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95#iss...

PWA requirements are always whatever it currently can't do. There's never been a singular tech term more plagued by moving goalposts.

For my use case, yes BLE is a hard requirement.

Their example of hijacking a BLE keyboard to get passwords seems a bit farcical. I would love to see a PoC of that attack. The API has been available in Chrome for quite a while. I don't think it has been a large attack vector.

All the more reason to use Safari or Firefox, since Chrome is doing something that I don't want any browser to have. (Whenever I install Chrome, I go through and turn off all of the stupid stuff that chrome should never have like web midi, webscsi, webble, etc.)

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