Progress report on cross-platform Open Web Apps | Hacker News Reader

Progress report on cross-platform Open Web Apps

hacks.mozilla.org

74 pointsrnyman21 comments

I feel like its worth mentioning phonegap / cordova for a good start on the ability to run open web apps on ios.

I love this functionality, was very surprised when I seen some open web apps I had made install on mac with breeze a few months ago.

The article has been updated to reflect the collaboration between Cordova and Mozilla.

I know that this is just a demo, but it featured a very laggy map on Android, an ugly menu bar and scrollbars on Windows, and perhaps more importantly, UIs on desktop that looked like nothing but scaled up phone UIs. To the extent that this is representative of the real thing - which, again, could be 'not very much' in the future - useful in a pinch, but not something I'd want to use on a daily basis. (I don't think there is even currently an API to populate the menu bar...)

You are correct that there is currently not an API to populate the menu bar.

Regarding app scaling, It's up to each app developer to do the required work to have a responsive design, using existing web techniques.

Firefox already supports native context menus[1][2][3] so it shouldn’t be that difficult to extend this to top level menu bar.

Of course they should fix them first: 1) don’t show the browser options otherwise it’s completely useless 2) (optionally) if you want the browser options/extensions etc. use something like the clipboard/dnd api to set the application specific mime type on right click and connect that to web intents.

[1] http://davidwalsh.name/html5-context-menu

[2] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

[3] http://caniuse.com/#search=menu

I used my own app in the demo video; as you point out, it is hardly a paragon of responsive design! I think you'll find that properly written apps will behave a lot more as you hope/expect

I'm really excited about this, I use Epiphany's web apps on Gnome every day, but it is noticeably slower than Firefox. Is Linux supported or are there plans to support Linux?

Yes, Linux is already supported, but the desktop platforms are a little behind Firefox OS and Android with some niche features. They will catch up in the near future.

Linux support for unprivileged apps is already shipping; Linux support for privileged apps should be in Firefox Nightly by the of the year

Creating a native wrapper for Android apps seems like a smart idea. I don't think the current method (not quite sure how it's implemented) works particularly well. I have noticed some times they don't appear in the multitasking bar and even if they do they often reload.

The current code on Android relies on putting shortcuts on the Android homescreen, which has exactly the kind of shortcomings you mention. It was pretty easy to implement, but now we have to go back and do it right.

Will this only work for apps installed from the Marketplace or will it also work for self-hosted manifests?

This is really exciting. This looks like a great way to get minimum functionality for your project onto these given platforms. Yes, you'd probably want to have a real, natively developed app at some point, but this is looking good for prototypes.

"iOS does not, at this time, include the option to install a Gecko-based web browser" sounds fair, if you can't install one plug-in - Flash, you shouldn't be able to install some other plug-in - Gecko.

That does not make any sense. How is Gecko a plugin?

Well, you need something between the actual platform and your application. What's the big difference between Flash and some-specific-browser?

Flash is a plugin that lives inside browsers, a browser is... not. It's an entirely self-contained application.

Another way to look at this is that iOS is the least hacker friendly platform.

That is a fair point. But "Open Web Apps" focuses only on JS and HTML - that is not very friendly as well.

> But "Open Web Apps" focuses only on JS and HTML - that is not very friendly as well.

How so? You can compile pretty much anything to JS...

I've edited the article to point to some great stuff Mozilla are doing with the Cordova community, that work might lead to some possibilities on iOS.

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