Firefox is Finally Adding Support for Web Apps
A few months back Firefox announced it was finally adding support for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) after years of ignoring its own user's requests to do
Similarly, Rubino says web apps in Firefox will not use a minimal browser frame and will continue to show a main toolbar with address bar, extensions, bookmarks
But why, the whole purpose is to behave like a stand alone app.
What the ...? Then why do it on the first place. Mozilla being stupid again.
I mean there's a solid chance not a single coder now is the same as back when it was removed? It's been quite a while. 😅
A) Because they suffer from some kind of weird delusion that they will some day gain mote than single digit market share and then subsequently lose it because somebody hacked your grandmother‘s computer with a YouTube video that was running in full screen?
B) They are the worlds laziest coders and google paid them 20M a year to do nothing for… however many years it’s been.
Man, they really fuck up everything they touch now.
On desktop I think that's less valuable, and personally, I like the confidence of knowing that eg uBO still works, and the predictability of how it will behave.
The Connect thread is interesting; PWAs are a nebulous term and everyone has different use cases for them, so if this allows to cover some of those with significantly less investment, that makes sense to me.
Yeah when they removed it there was virtually no comment on it. At the time everybody understood PWAs were just... you might as well use a new window and press F11. It's just window dressing.
I mean I get it, there's some marginal use cases. Sure. And it's nice they're back!
Because it’s low effort.
Less time and money spent on useless features like progressive web apps means more time can be spent on useful features like data harvesting, AI bullshit, and Facebook-approved advertising.
PWAs are not a useless feature. It's an incredibly useful and powerful set of web standards that allows sites to provide excellent user experiences more akin to what apps could provide, without users needing to go and download an app—which a lot of users, especially more privacy and security focused users—hate being asked to do.
Can't you just hit F11 or whatever to full screen? Personally, I hate losing the bar. Makes grabbing the URL annoying, and I like being able to interact with my extensions.
Fullscreen will hide the window decorations, but that won't solve the use case of "behaving like a desktop application". I use PWAs for websites that are applications (Outlook, Teams, Spotify etc). I want these windows to be dedicated to those applications and nothing else. They should appear in my window list on alt+tab, not be able to navigate away to something else etc.
I could maybe understand from a security perspective - make sure it's not a malicious URL, but... that seems rather thin.
Whole point is to give the aesthetics of a standalone app... Ridiculous executive slop.
... after removing them and ignoring them for several years.
About time.
If i told you i have a way to do that with 1/100 of the code on both sides?1
If only they could allow extensions to work with iPhones.
afaik, they really can't. IIRC apple only allows webkit browsers on the platform, so that alone rules out any and all extensions made for firefox. Firefox on iphones is essentially reskinned safari - and that's about it.
At least this is what internet has led me to believe, dunno, not an apple user.
Orion, an iOS webkit browser can run many (not all) Firefox and Chrome extensions.
Ah, did not know that it was on Apple’s side. Still hoping they will allow it (or being forced to - like with sideloading).
Browsers were not allowed until recent years to use another engine on iOS/iPadOS. The EU's DMA changed that (from within the EU). Work is still being done to port Firefox's Gecko/GeckoView
Is that up to them though? Aren't browsers on iPhones only allowed to be wrappers around the built in safari engine? If that's still true extensions that interact with the web page it's self would probably be pretty limited.
Browsers were not allowed until recent years to use another engine on iOS/iPadOS. The EU's DMA changed that (from within the EU). Work is still being done to port Firefox's Gecko/GeckoView
If I understood correctly they're coming close to being able to release their Gecko powered Firefox on iOS after the EU's Digital Market Act. This could open the door to allowing extensions then