5 ms·

I don't understand how we got to such misuse of "PWA" in this context (e.g, on both sides of the conversation). Progressive Web Apps are not a standard. Rather

by dwaite 6y ago

I don't understand how we got to such misuse of "PWA" in this context (e.g, on both sides of the conversation). Progressive Web Apps are not a standard. Rather, it is the idea that a an application - presented through a web browser - can use additional features provided by browser _if_available_. The term is based on the concept of "Progressive Enhancement". Everyone's pet feature - service workers, single site browsers, offline mode, push notifications, video codec support - gets branded "PWA" in their rant that such and such browser is not keeping up. However, writing your web application to require a feature that not all of the common browsers support means fundamentally your application is _not_ written for progressive enhancement. The reality is that the term "Progressive Web Apps" was coined by Google as they started pushing harder for web apps to perform like native apps - but at the time they had a strategic initiative to have web apps instead of native apps (ChromeOS and the ChromeBooks, pre Android support). None of the other browser or OS platform vendors have that level of strategic investment in supporting web apps as a new 'native' format - especially considering the security model is usually different than that of the native platform.

nottorp 6y ago
At least the first comment I ran into on HN explained what a PWA is :)
- sodapopcan 6y ago
  Ha, glad I wasn't the only one.
  - nottorp 6y ago
    It's interesting how the javascript ecosystem sucks you in until you stop being aware that there is anything else outside your bubble and assume everyone will understand your acronyms. But then, it's not new. Heard people saying they know "the Visual C language" ages ago. Guess that's how MS started its monopoly. What's worrying this time is that they're redefining "cross platform" to "runs in the same emulator".
    - oarsinsync 6y ago
      > What's worrying this time is that they're redefining "cross platform" to "runs in the same emulator". I don't think this is a recent phenomenon. Java, and many others, have attempted the same trick.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      Yeah, that happens to everyone, I think. Web devs forget that everything isn't (some form of) website, Microsoft-ecosystem folks tend to forget that there's a whole world outside of that bubble, GNOME developers... infamously... seem to think no other Linux desktops exist, functional programmers frequently seem to believe that everything should be functional. Honestly, it's probably just a side effect of only having a finite number of hours in the day; to master one system, you tend to forego having enough time for others.
masklinn 6y ago
> I don't understand how we got to such misuse of "PWA" in this context (e.g, on both sides of the conversation). Because any convenient and positive term will be coopted and misused to death, on-purpose.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Literally insane truth. edit: nobody gets me
  - neogodless 6y ago
    I did not downvote you, but I think the general spirit of the Hacker News community is to ensure that comments make good faith efforts to contribute something novel to each discussion. Humor is tricky - certainly humor contributes something, but if you're going to make a humorous comment here as opposed to a more entertainment-focused forum, it should also attempt to expand someone's perspective on the topic. It should be funny or entertain because it lights up some new parts of the brain. Grandparent comment is educating everyone on the origins of PWA to dispute the article, with a proclamation of bewilderment that we got to this place of term misuse, and parent is just giving a very general reason for this happening. Your joke, at best, is an unrelated and in this case unnecessary example of "misuse" but unfortunately doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation. Even if we "get" the joke, we do not want to trend in the direction of low effort jokes dominating our discussions.
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      A fair point. ...and I agree that this forum should strive to be most substantive than other sites.
- majewsky 6y ago
  A friend once said, "A buzzword is here to stay when people start arguing about its definition." I don't know if it was in the context of Cloud Computing or AI or Industry 4.0, but you can see the pattern.
tobr 6y ago
This is a fantastic distillation of how bitter the PWA discussion often seems to be. I had no idea that “progressive” should be understood as “progressive enhancement” (graceful degradation) rather than “technological progress”. Looks like the term was coined in [1], which describes the idea of something that starts as a website, but progresses to become app-like as technology and the user’s wishes allow. By that definition it’s your PWA not planning on supporting Firefox. 1: https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-tabs-without-losing-our-soul/ https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-t...
- appleflaxen 6y ago
  your last sentence is hard to understand. i think there is a typo or an extra word somewhere.
  - samb1729 6y ago
    It would have been helpful to have quoted the sentence you did not understand as I cannot be sure that I now see the same thing you did. However, in case we are seeing the same thing I’ll reword the following sentence for you: > By that definition it’s your PWA not planning on supporting Firefox. The above could also be written: > Under the assumption that a PWA is defined as a website which queries the browser to discover additional functionality, and then goes on to use features it discovers, it is the PWA which doesn’t support a particular browser. Specifically, the PWA likely depends on functionality which may not always be present, which means it it not progressively enhanced. Apologies if my rewording comes across condescending. I have no information about your level of knowledge on the subject and chose not to omit anything on purpose.
    - appleflaxen 6y ago
      that clarifies it; sorry for the lack of detail
- zdragnar 6y ago
  I have heard the term progressive enhancement used much earlier than that- probably by at least 5 years. In ye olden days, people used it to mean that websites should be able to work without javascript at all, and not overly rely on new CSS features. At the time we were making websites for customers that cared about IE6 support. The notion of a "web app" was a dream that most people would have considered a nightmare, given how inconsistently everything was implemented at the time.
wffurr 6y ago
The other mysterious acronym in the post is “SSB” which means “Site-Specific Browser” in this context. KaiOS (based on Firefox!) and Microsoft Edge are all in on PWAs too.
- lucideer 6y ago
  Edge doesn't really count given it's just Chromium. KaiOS is a platform built entirely on the concept of web apps as apps so saying they're all in here is a bit tautological, and not particularly compelling.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Edge was doing PWA even before it was Chromium. (Arguably better, because Old Edge had native UWP integration stories that Chromium doesn't have access to.) Even Chromium-based Edge is still doing at least a few things in terms of native integration on Windows (including Windows Store support) that probably "count" as "more than just inheriting from Chromium".
bsimpson 6y ago
Firefox made a whole phone OS based on the idea that websites could behave as apps. Apple originally pushed the web as the SDK got the iPhone. Google isn't unique in wanting the web to be on-par with native.
- dblohm7 6y ago
  This isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. Mozilla has a lot of security concerns with respect to Google’s Fugu efforts.

by dwaite 6y ago

nottorp 6y ago

At least the first comment I ran into on HN explained what a PWA is :)

sodapopcan 6y ago
Ha, glad I wasn't the only one.
- nottorp 6y ago
  It's interesting how the javascript ecosystem sucks you in until you stop being aware that there is anything else outside your bubble and assume everyone will understand your acronyms. But then, it's not new. Heard people saying they know "the Visual C language" ages ago. Guess that's how MS started its monopoly. What's worrying this time is that they're redefining "cross platform" to "runs in the same emulator".
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    > What's worrying this time is that they're redefining "cross platform" to "runs in the same emulator". I don't think this is a recent phenomenon. Java, and many others, have attempted the same trick.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Yeah, that happens to everyone, I think. Web devs forget that everything isn't (some form of) website, Microsoft-ecosystem folks tend to forget that there's a whole world outside of that bubble, GNOME developers... infamously... seem to think no other Linux desktops exist, functional programmers frequently seem to believe that everything should be functional. Honestly, it's probably just a side effect of only having a finite number of hours in the day; to master one system, you tend to forego having enough time for others.

masklinn 6y ago

> I don't understand how we got to such misuse of "PWA" in this context (e.g, on both sides of the conversation). Because any convenient and positive term will be coopted and misused to death, on-purpose.

koheripbal 6y ago
Literally insane truth. edit: nobody gets me
- neogodless 6y ago
  I did not downvote you, but I think the general spirit of the Hacker News community is to ensure that comments make good faith efforts to contribute something novel to each discussion. Humor is tricky - certainly humor contributes something, but if you're going to make a humorous comment here as opposed to a more entertainment-focused forum, it should also attempt to expand someone's perspective on the topic. It should be funny or entertain because it lights up some new parts of the brain. Grandparent comment is educating everyone on the origins of PWA to dispute the article, with a proclamation of bewilderment that we got to this place of term misuse, and parent is just giving a very general reason for this happening. Your joke, at best, is an unrelated and in this case unnecessary example of "misuse" but unfortunately doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation. Even if we "get" the joke, we do not want to trend in the direction of low effort jokes dominating our discussions.
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    A fair point. ...and I agree that this forum should strive to be most substantive than other sites.
majewsky 6y ago
A friend once said, "A buzzword is here to stay when people start arguing about its definition." I don't know if it was in the context of Cloud Computing or AI or Industry 4.0, but you can see the pattern.

tobr 6y ago

This is a fantastic distillation of how bitter the PWA discussion often seems to be. I had no idea that “progressive” should be understood as “progressive enhancement” (graceful degradation) rather than “technological progress”. Looks like the term was coined in [1], which describes the idea of something that starts as a website, but progresses to become app-like as technology and the user’s wishes allow. By that definition it’s your PWA not planning on supporting Firefox. 1: https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-tabs-without-losing-our-soul/ https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-t...

appleflaxen 6y ago
your last sentence is hard to understand. i think there is a typo or an extra word somewhere.
- samb1729 6y ago
  It would have been helpful to have quoted the sentence you did not understand as I cannot be sure that I now see the same thing you did. However, in case we are seeing the same thing I’ll reword the following sentence for you: > By that definition it’s your PWA not planning on supporting Firefox. The above could also be written: > Under the assumption that a PWA is defined as a website which queries the browser to discover additional functionality, and then goes on to use features it discovers, it is the PWA which doesn’t support a particular browser. Specifically, the PWA likely depends on functionality which may not always be present, which means it it not progressively enhanced. Apologies if my rewording comes across condescending. I have no information about your level of knowledge on the subject and chose not to omit anything on purpose.
  - appleflaxen 6y ago
    that clarifies it; sorry for the lack of detail
zdragnar 6y ago
I have heard the term progressive enhancement used much earlier than that- probably by at least 5 years. In ye olden days, people used it to mean that websites should be able to work without javascript at all, and not overly rely on new CSS features. At the time we were making websites for customers that cared about IE6 support. The notion of a "web app" was a dream that most people would have considered a nightmare, given how inconsistently everything was implemented at the time.

wffurr 6y ago

The other mysterious acronym in the post is “SSB” which means “Site-Specific Browser” in this context. KaiOS (based on Firefox!) and Microsoft Edge are all in on PWAs too.

lucideer 6y ago
Edge doesn't really count given it's just Chromium. KaiOS is a platform built entirely on the concept of web apps as apps so saying they're all in here is a bit tautological, and not particularly compelling.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Edge was doing PWA even before it was Chromium. (Arguably better, because Old Edge had native UWP integration stories that Chromium doesn't have access to.) Even Chromium-based Edge is still doing at least a few things in terms of native integration on Windows (including Windows Store support) that probably "count" as "more than just inheriting from Chromium".

bsimpson 6y ago

Firefox made a whole phone OS based on the idea that websites could behave as apps. Apple originally pushed the web as the SDK got the iPhone. Google isn't unique in wanting the web to be on-par with native.

dblohm7 6y ago
This isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. Mozilla has a lot of security concerns with respect to Google’s Fugu efforts.