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Comment by mattl | Hacker News Reader

How would PWA work in a world where your phone has multiple browser engines? Pick one for each PWA?

If you add the PWA to the home screen from say Chrome then Chrome should run the PWA. If you uninstall Chrome then the app is removed from the home screen.

...or the next time you run that PWA, you should decide between running it with another browser or deleting it.

That's not a bad idea.

How do you ensure that it works? does chrome have all the hooks needed to have this actually work correctly?

A third party browser should be able to do the same things as Apple's browser. Same for all apps: they should have access to the same features of the device as Apple's apps.

Apple's rationale in their letter about this was essentially that they would need to ensure that it works (create and review use of a framework for non-Safari-backed PWAs in iOS) and that (usage of PWAs) x (percent of userbase affected) was too small for them to bother.

Use the system default browser engine (which would require system browser engines to support PWAs).

You could let people customize it per-PWA, but that's extra complexity for a small niche. Just let people pick a system browser.

Which is exactly how it works on Windows and Android.

You choose whatever browser you want for any PWA you happen to want to use. The OS will put a small badge on the icon which shows the browser responsible for running it. If things go south you know which browser to blame. You can install multiple versions of the app using different browsers and compare them, then only keep the one which you like best.

Freedom of choice is a good thing - for users.

Just let me pick if I want multiple browser engines. I would rather have only WebKit, but still being able to use PWAs.

Especially since this is a stupid geofenced restriction: "only because I live in the wrong part of the world I can't get notifications" sounds like quite a stupid thing to do.

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