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Mozilla prioritizes security far more than possibility, and that's been an extremely sad thing to see. If a user "installs" a PWA, that app should have some cha

Mozilla prioritizes security far more than possibility, and that's been an extremely sad thing to see. If a user "installs" a PWA, that app should have some chance to have something at least semi-competitive with a native app. But Mozilla is terrified, sells a story about how horrible it would be, how apocalyptic having ambient light sensors or midi or webusb support would be. Mozilla has become proud of being anti-featureful. There's room for disagreement about what the future of the web should look like. A ton of people are incredibly loud about not wanting the web to grow, have opinions that the existing organic growth is all bad and horrible & the worst thig that's happened to computing. I happen to disagree, but I recognize that desire, and I think factoring in the tension here is important. What's immensely important to me in talking about a site like web.dev is recognizing what is represented now. If there were other progressive browsers that were interested in trying & expanding, your caution would perhaps be deserved. Web.dev could be an unfair mono-culture. But right now there's no second peer that actually wants to expand the web. So web.dev is fine, represents the only voice of hope and possibility the world wide web has. No one else is playing that game, alas.

jamespo 4y ago
Here's a basic feature that seems to be unimplemented by Google, how can we change the URL for what we see on the "new tab" screen on Chrome?
- rektide 4y ago
  That is a matter of the chrome around the page. It has nothing to do with the web platform & web page's capabilities. There are definitely WebExtensions that give you what you want. The extensibility of the user agent is a supreme superpower that is almost entirely absent in the rest of computing.
  - jamespo 4y ago
    I'd be happy for you to point me towards them, I don't believe they exist. They do exist for Firefox.
PaulHoule 4y ago
PWA is one of the worst ideas in the history of the web. It is something that only Google could love because they can hire 1000 people to build a Rube Goldberg machine to do the most trivial things. Push notifications? No thanks. We all get too much spam. It’s bad enough that it spams you with a spamification popup even if you say ‘Spam? No thanks!’ That whole service worker thing is insane, particularly considering there is no completely reliable storage service for the front end. The more you know about http the more you know there are edge cases that can and will bite you. Back in the late 1990s there were systems like Netscape Netcaster that worked with the caching mechanism built into the browser and despite having complete access to the browser code, Google went ahead anyway and built a Rube Goldberg machine that makes you build a Rube Goldberg machine if you want to try to build an application that tries to work offline. Then when users say ‘No Thanks!’ and the industry says ‘No Thanks!’ the monopolist Google says they are being oppressed.

jamespo 4y ago

Here's a basic feature that seems to be unimplemented by Google, how can we change the URL for what we see on the "new tab" screen on Chrome?

rektide 4y ago
That is a matter of the chrome around the page. It has nothing to do with the web platform & web page's capabilities. There are definitely WebExtensions that give you what you want. The extensibility of the user agent is a supreme superpower that is almost entirely absent in the rest of computing.
- jamespo 4y ago
  I'd be happy for you to point me towards them, I don't believe they exist. They do exist for Firefox.

PaulHoule 4y ago

PWA is one of the worst ideas in the history of the web. It is something that only Google could love because they can hire 1000 people to build a Rube Goldberg machine to do the most trivial things. Push notifications? No thanks. We all get too much spam. It’s bad enough that it spams you with a spamification popup even if you say ‘Spam? No thanks!’ That whole service worker thing is insane, particularly considering there is no completely reliable storage service for the front end. The more you know about http the more you know there are edge cases that can and will bite you. Back in the late 1990s there were systems like Netscape Netcaster that worked with the caching mechanism built into the browser and despite having complete access to the browser code, Google went ahead anyway and built a Rube Goldberg machine that makes you build a Rube Goldberg machine if you want to try to build an application that tries to work offline. Then when users say ‘No Thanks!’ and the industry says ‘No Thanks!’ the monopolist Google says they are being oppressed.