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They mean progressive web apps, and they exist in other browsers. Firefox, eg: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Add_to_home_scr

They mean progressive web apps, and they exist in other browsers. Firefox, eg: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Add_to_home_screen#How_do_you_make_an_app_A2HS-ready https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web... More info: https://web.dev/install-criteria/ https://web.dev/install-criteria/

sorenjan 5y ago
They write "Now that web apps are capable of reading and writing files", and link to their article about the File System Access API, which is a Chromium only API. They're trying to make it look like Chrome only apps are regular web apps, and if they doesn't work in other browsers that's on them and you should just switch to Chrome instead. They want Chrome to be thought of as the default web experience. https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api
- dfabulich 5y ago
  There are basically four votes that matter, corresponding to the four major browsers: Google (Chrome), Apple (Safari), Microsoft (Edge) and Mozilla (Firefox). Google claims that "browsers" support an API if it's supported in Chrome and in Microsoft Edge, a Chromium-based browser. I think that's a fair claim, because MS does sometimes block Chromium features that they don't like. https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-becomes-latest-browser-to-disable-googles-floc https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-becomes-latest... Microsoft could have blocked File System Access, for some of the same reasons that Mozilla did, but they didn't; they elected to enable the feature. Since Microsoft + Google together have 70% share of desktop web, and since Microsoft agrees with Google that the File System Access API is a good thing for the web, I think it's not wrong to say that "browsers" support this feature. Now, you might say, "Microsoft shouldn't count!" but Edge's market share is bigger than Firefox, and we all agree that Mozilla's vote should count (at least as long as they can hang on to 3% market share).
  - OJFord 5y ago
    > Now, you might say, "Microsoft shouldn't count!" but Edge's market share is bigger than Firefox That honestly surprised me, but you're right [0] - though only 0.01% (StatCounter) or 1.65% (NetMarketShare) in it, depending who you listen to. I'm not sure about the latter, but I'd have thought 0.01% is down in the noise of misreported user agent, which FF users are probably the most likely to be doing. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
    - gentleman11 5y ago
      Largely because they are falsely and anti-competitively claiming that Firefox is unsafe with warning text and/or pop ups if you try to install it on windows
  - Sleepytime 5y ago
    Mozilla is also funded nearly half a billion dollars a year by Google, so that makes three that are controlled directly or indirectly by G.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      In practice I don't think google exerts much control over Mozilla.
      - staunch 5y ago
        Sure, Mozilla just decided "independently" that building in ad-blocking would not be a competitive advantage vs Chrome.
        nicoburns 5y ago
        They did independently decide that they'd maintain the extension APIs that allow ublocj origin to work even though Chrome is probably dropping them
- spystath 5y ago
  This might be me being pessimistic but there are no web standards any more. It's Chrome standards. You can fall in line or drift into obsolescence. We never really got rid of the IE dominance on the web, we merely exchanged one boss for another. I get it it's not _quite_ the same since we don't have the ActiveX nonsense any more but it certainly feels like we're living in Google's vision of the web. Monocultures are harmful but that's we get to live with.
  - theturtletalks 5y ago
    We are living in Google's vision of the web, but isn't that the cost of disruption? The Chrome team set out to build a better browser and even open sourced the core, Chromium. Many browsers are built on Chromium now and there is a standard for extensions on the horizon. No one is stopping another company from disrupting Chrome and making their own vision of the web by building a better browser. It's not going to be easy, but neither was it for Google. Many new web technologies like PWAs originated with Chrome and are slowly diffused to the other browsers. Apple, on their own, would never have pushed for PWAs and even now, their support for them are lackluster.
    - Karellen 5y ago
      > The Chrome team set out to build a better browser and even open sourced the core, Chromium. I think that rewrites history a bit. They started with a Free Software browser - Konqueror/KHTML - and were required to release changes under a compatible license. We should be thankful that Konqueror/KHTML was released under a Free Software license, rather than a permissive open source license that would have allowed Google to deny us the rights that they had been granted by their upstream.
      - zepto 5y ago
        I think that rewrites history a bit. They started with a Free Software browser - WebKit…
        5y ago
- 1234fef 5y ago
  It is actually sad that other browsers are not going ahead supporting this API. The authors of this spec are really trying hard that other browsers also move forward with this API, but the maintainers of the other browsers confusingly think this is a threat to the web ecosystem. [1] Mozilla https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154 [2] Brave https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/11407 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/11407
jfrunyon 5y ago
Firefox doesn't support PWA and has no plans to. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593#c8 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593#c8
- kevincox 5y ago
  Note that PWA is a concept, not a specific set of features or APIs. This makes a lot of this discussion confusing and mostly meaningless. Furthermore this bug is about a browser feature. The similar "PWA" API here would be https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Manifest/display https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Manifest/displa... which is supported by Firefox for Android so it isn't like Firefox won't support "PWA" as a whole and will reject all of the related APIs. And remember that PWA is Progressive Web Application. The P is from Progressive Enhancement[1]. This means that missing an API or two doesn't mean that your browser doesn't support PWAs. It just means that some PWAs will have less functions or give a less "app-like" experience. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement TL;DR that bug is mostly meaningless, the underlying APIs are what matter.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    "Sure, they don't support PWAs, but they support pieces of PWAs, so really they support PWAs"

sorenjan 5y ago

They write "Now that web apps are capable of reading and writing files", and link to their article about the File System Access API, which is a Chromium only API. They're trying to make it look like Chrome only apps are regular web apps, and if they doesn't work in other browsers that's on them and you should just switch to Chrome instead. They want Chrome to be thought of as the default web experience. https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api

dfabulich 5y ago
There are basically four votes that matter, corresponding to the four major browsers: Google (Chrome), Apple (Safari), Microsoft (Edge) and Mozilla (Firefox). Google claims that "browsers" support an API if it's supported in Chrome and in Microsoft Edge, a Chromium-based browser. I think that's a fair claim, because MS does sometimes block Chromium features that they don't like. https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-becomes-latest-browser-to-disable-googles-floc https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-becomes-latest... Microsoft could have blocked File System Access, for some of the same reasons that Mozilla did, but they didn't; they elected to enable the feature. Since Microsoft + Google together have 70% share of desktop web, and since Microsoft agrees with Google that the File System Access API is a good thing for the web, I think it's not wrong to say that "browsers" support this feature. Now, you might say, "Microsoft shouldn't count!" but Edge's market share is bigger than Firefox, and we all agree that Mozilla's vote should count (at least as long as they can hang on to 3% market share).
- OJFord 5y ago
  > Now, you might say, "Microsoft shouldn't count!" but Edge's market share is bigger than Firefox That honestly surprised me, but you're right [0] - though only 0.01% (StatCounter) or 1.65% (NetMarketShare) in it, depending who you listen to. I'm not sure about the latter, but I'd have thought 0.01% is down in the noise of misreported user agent, which FF users are probably the most likely to be doing. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    Largely because they are falsely and anti-competitively claiming that Firefox is unsafe with warning text and/or pop ups if you try to install it on windows
- Sleepytime 5y ago
  Mozilla is also funded nearly half a billion dollars a year by Google, so that makes three that are controlled directly or indirectly by G.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    In practice I don't think google exerts much control over Mozilla.
    - staunch 5y ago
      Sure, Mozilla just decided "independently" that building in ad-blocking would not be a competitive advantage vs Chrome.
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        They did independently decide that they'd maintain the extension APIs that allow ublocj origin to work even though Chrome is probably dropping them
spystath 5y ago
This might be me being pessimistic but there are no web standards any more. It's Chrome standards. You can fall in line or drift into obsolescence. We never really got rid of the IE dominance on the web, we merely exchanged one boss for another. I get it it's not _quite_ the same since we don't have the ActiveX nonsense any more but it certainly feels like we're living in Google's vision of the web. Monocultures are harmful but that's we get to live with.
- theturtletalks 5y ago
  We are living in Google's vision of the web, but isn't that the cost of disruption? The Chrome team set out to build a better browser and even open sourced the core, Chromium. Many browsers are built on Chromium now and there is a standard for extensions on the horizon. No one is stopping another company from disrupting Chrome and making their own vision of the web by building a better browser. It's not going to be easy, but neither was it for Google. Many new web technologies like PWAs originated with Chrome and are slowly diffused to the other browsers. Apple, on their own, would never have pushed for PWAs and even now, their support for them are lackluster.
  - Karellen 5y ago
    > The Chrome team set out to build a better browser and even open sourced the core, Chromium. I think that rewrites history a bit. They started with a Free Software browser - Konqueror/KHTML - and were required to release changes under a compatible license. We should be thankful that Konqueror/KHTML was released under a Free Software license, rather than a permissive open source license that would have allowed Google to deny us the rights that they had been granted by their upstream.
    - zepto 5y ago
      I think that rewrites history a bit. They started with a Free Software browser - WebKit…
      - 5y ago
1234fef 5y ago
It is actually sad that other browsers are not going ahead supporting this API. The authors of this spec are really trying hard that other browsers also move forward with this API, but the maintainers of the other browsers confusingly think this is a threat to the web ecosystem. [1] Mozilla https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/154 [2] Brave https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/11407 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/11407

jfrunyon 5y ago

Firefox doesn't support PWA and has no plans to. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593#c8 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593#c8

kevincox 5y ago
Note that PWA is a concept, not a specific set of features or APIs. This makes a lot of this discussion confusing and mostly meaningless. Furthermore this bug is about a browser feature. The similar "PWA" API here would be https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Manifest/display https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Manifest/displa... which is supported by Firefox for Android so it isn't like Firefox won't support "PWA" as a whole and will reject all of the related APIs. And remember that PWA is Progressive Web Application. The P is from Progressive Enhancement[1]. This means that missing an API or two doesn't mean that your browser doesn't support PWAs. It just means that some PWAs will have less functions or give a less "app-like" experience. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement TL;DR that bug is mostly meaningless, the underlying APIs are what matter.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  "Sure, they don't support PWAs, but they support pieces of PWAs, so really they support PWAs"