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> Google routinely floats out APIs, services, and platforms and encourages their use despite fatal flaws that mean they are doomed from day one. For most use c
by geofft 7y ago
> Google routinely floats out APIs, services, and platforms and encourages their use despite fatal flaws that mean they are doomed from day one.
For most use cases, there are better options now than Chrome apps. ServiceWorkers didn't exist when Chrome apps were introduced. Neither did wasm, and its precursors NaCl and PNaCl were scoped to just Chrome apps, not to the public web.
Chrome did a very good job at a) building a platform that developers could use right then and b) working with other browsers and standards committees to get enough features implemented to replace what they built. They said, no, we shouldn't have a proprietary thing called "Chrome apps," we should just build it into the web platform so that people who don't use Chrome can use them too.
And they set a very long (many years) timeframe for shutting down their initial version of the thing.
This is exactly what I want a platform provider to do. I don't want "Chrome apps" any more than I want Flash or ActiveX or "Best viewed in Internet Explorer." But also, I do want platform providers to build platforms - I don't want them to refuse to build platforms on the grounds that they don't know the right answer yet and they can't immediately standardize something right now. I'm glad Flash and ActiveX are dead, but I'm glad they existed because they proved that the platform is valuable, if only you could implement it in a reasonable way. I'm glad ActiveX's original version of XMLHttpRequest existed because it proved that there was demand to standardize the version we now have.
- mmebane 7y agoIs there any way to bypass CORS in a PWA? Because Chrome Apps were a really handy way of writing GUI utilities without having to go full Electron.
- geofft 7y agoUnsure, but I think if you have an extension, you can make the request in an extension page, which isn't CORS-restricted. (I don't totally understand the difference between a Chrome app and an extension that turns itself into a PWA, both are browser-specific and both are distributed through the Chrome web store, right?)
- tyingq 7y agoA chrome app has access to normal sockets, local filesystem, etc.
- tracker1 7y agoNot sure how they'll handle this... given the risk of losing a local db store's data in chrome, I'm hoping they normalize on something. Ideally, a directory for access/storage enough to use SQLite as via WebAssembly should be available to plugins with a request/approval for read (and optionally write) access ... to me, that should be a goal of any file system interface presented via WebAssembly, is the option for something that at least supports that use case.
- geofft 7y agoThere's a standardized File API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File and a nonstandard FileSystem API being driven by Google https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileSystem https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileSystem But yeah it seems network sockets are going away. Honestly that seems good from a security perspective but I will miss the mosh app for CrOS.
- thefounder 7y agoNo, you can't. PWAs are just "glorified" web pages. Nothing more or less. Electron is the only viable choice for desktop apps with web technologies.
- SahAssar 7y agoIf the endpoint you are requesting says it does not want to expose itself to unknown origins, that should be respected in the default config. For testing, security research and so on you can always modify the browser config or use a proxy.