Ask HN: Why is HN not PWA yet? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is HN not PWA yet?

8 pointsjackhalford13 comments

Asking Dang but also the HN community at large. I know HN development is purposefully slow, but PWAs [1] seem to have caught on as a technology. Anyway I’m asking because I don’t like hn ios apps and just add the web page to my homescreen (ios pwa).

1: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps

View on HN

Something I like about HN is that it isn't a moving target. It doesn't seem anxious about keeping up with the joneses techwise.

I haven't really noticed many changes in the 10+ years I've wasted lurking here and that's a beautiful thing. It's also in stark contrast with most of the rest of the software I interact with.

A nice thing about PWAs is you don’t notice it, you probably don’t know a lot of websites you browse are PWAs

I kind of hope dang does this just once, maybe on April 1, just deploys the site exactly as is - same layout, same design, same font, no extra features, just as a PWA.

People would lose their minds, but they couldn't post the typical complaint because that would mean running javascript. They would just have to sit there staring at a blank page, malding.

What would be the benefit of making HN a PWA?

I noticed each time i click the HN button on my phone it opens a new tab in safari… pwas run in a separate browser/app/container

I just use Firefox mobile to view HN on my phone. Clicking on the button essentially refreshing the fronpage, or goes to it. Seems like a safari issue...?

If it was a PWA, would links open in Safari and then the user switches back to the HN PWA?

What would be the benefits of this?Hundreds of man hours+maintenance, for what purpose exactly? It's working perfectly as it is.

Adding a shortcut to your homepage is really easy if you're that addicted to HN: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-add-a-website-shortcut-to-your...

It’s actually just a manifest to publish and voila, you don’t need to use all apis to get all the pwa goodness

As someone pointed out in another thread, Y Combinator probably doesn't put a lot of resources (money or human) into HN, so I doubt this a high priority. If it's a priority at all.

The employ at least one moderator. That’s not peanuts!

Never touch a running system?

Quite the opposite because IIRC this site gets tweaked in production using the Lisp REPL (and sometimes that has gone awry).

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