Slashdot Mirror
'Apple's Refusal To Support Progressive Web Apps is a Detriment To Future of the Web' (medium.com)
From a blog post: Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) are one of the most exciting and innovative things happening in web development right now. PWAs enable you to use JavaScript to create a "Service Worker", which gives you all sorts of great features that you'd normally associate with native apps, like push notifications, offline support, and app loading screens -- but on the web! Awesome. Except for is one major problem -- While Google has embraced the technology and added support for it in Chrome for Android, Apple has abstained from adding support to mobile Safari. All they've done is say that it is "Under Consideration." Seemingly no discussion about it whatsoever.
who the shit would want this?
which gives you all sorts of great features that you'd normally associate with native apps, like push notifications
There you have it. Push notifications are not great features. They are evil, distracting, manipulating, crud that leads to more and more advertising.
Let's hope Apple at least has the sense to contain this disaster.
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Happy happy oh my friend
Google's test bed for developers might be ok to put this to play around with. But the real world USES are very little if any. These things are beyond fucking annoying. I've blocked every single request for a page or site to send me updates. It's not needed or wanted.
I view this functionality as a gaping security hole and a resource hog. It's not needed. Who the fuck wants this other than the site owner to push more ads?
Why the fuck would I want a website to have push notifications? Or worker threads on my machine? Or use this shit to have even more ads? Or let it access more of my information?
Sorry, but the web is insecure in large part because every asshole web developer thinks the default should be for us to enable everything so their crappy site can work -- which makes us vulnerable to malicious ads, viruses, and all sorts of shit.
I will never trust a fucking web application the way I would a native application, because we have seen time and time again, the web isn't something you can trust.
Boo goddamned fucking hoo ... your new web technology may not be something we want anyway.
I let javascript run on a whitelist basis only. I'm sure as hell not letting arbitrary websites have even more access to my machine.
Fuck you, fuck off.
You can tell that the entire concept is bullshit just on how they are marketing it ... "Progressive Web App" -- who are you trying to fool? HTML5 was progressive, they didn't need to call it "PHTML" to sell us on it because it proved its own merrit.
If you're trying to do something complicated that requires native binaries, but you're using Javascript instead, you're doing it wrong. Period.
(And regular old javascript can run offline already ... PWA is utter nonsense.)
Compare: modern application startup time on windows 10 (or 7 if you prefer) 4Ghz processor with SSD and DDR4 memory, vs similar application on windows 95 era pentium 133 with SDRAM and an IDE hard drive.
How the fuck did we get here 2017?
Apple charges a 30% fee for apps to do business on their app store. This would allow web sites to dilute the need for those apps. Apple isn't about to give away that kind of control.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
A slashvertisement for push-marketing software that's also a marketing attack piece aimed at an industry holdout.
Who voted for this dreck while in the firehose, or did it simply get "inserted"?
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I'm more in favor of Conservative Web Applications.
If by "conservative" you mean limited in scope, efficient in their use of resources, and cautious in their assumptions - security and otherwise - then I'm right there with you.
I do not want web apps to be "first class" citizens. We got rid of Flash precisely because of the security issues giving unknown apps system-level access entailed...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Push notifications are evil. I have one iphone app that I turned them on for, then turned them off, and they still come through any way from time to time. Now I'm starting to see more and more websites that want to send them. I don't need offline support. Who does? And what are "app loading screens" and why do I supposedly need them? All this post has done is make me very grateful to Apple.
Fuck web apps as 'first class' citizens. If you want that level of control over the user's machine, then the user should have that level of control over access and use of the software. The last thing I'd want is a 'web app' having control of my system's layout/rendering layer.
Currently, users understand web sites as ephemeral, as any services they provide can disappear at any time, and like users, developers see them as something they can change at any time. This is very different from conventional standalone programs, where users see them as something they have control over (and can thus trust more), and developers see them as for-pay version upgrades. Blurring this line is consumer hostile.
...which gives you all sorts of great features that you'd normally associate with native apps, like push notifications, offline support, and app loading screens -- but on the web! Awesome.
Here we go again. Web devs trying to pretend they're making native apps. Folks, there are so many reasons why you would not want that. Native and web are two separate disciplines with two very different roles. You're screwdrivers not hammers. Quite trying to turn nails.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Yeah. Time to switch back to safari.
Bad or lazy developers and designers adding more "features", relying on frameworks on top of frameworks, ignoring critical thinking and not culling what is not needed.
That is how we got here.
You can witness it firsthand year by year on the internet archive by looking at popular web pages. They start with handcrafted html that is byte-level sensitive. Then automated generators and css that add no functionality, on to plugins, php where it isn't needed, endless javascript. Now even the most basic websites need to load scripts from half a dozen domains and relies on layered frameworks. Not to mention the endless threat vectors this brings.
Web pages that were once less that 1KB sans media are now over 10MB and have dozens of single points of failure with no discernible increase in usability or features. Even slashdot became this way.
Go to slashdot.org, it tries to load from:
fsdn.com
pro-market.net
slashdotmedia.com
stacksocial.com
janrain.com
taboola.com
truste.com
multiple subdomains of cloudfront.net
ml314.com
rpxnow.com
google-analytics.com
crsspxl.com
There are one or more scripts running from each, I don't know how many, I block them. Just to get slashdot to render properly 2,524 CSS rules must be loaded. Why is there a 123KB "app.css" file of 1204 rules that must load?
What a mess. We ought to be following best-practices, saying "No" more often to marketing, vendors, pr, sales, and the army of people in IT that don't have the talent need to get the boot.
A LOT more.
The heart of is that people want an "app" experience on a phone/tablet. You could say it is just a browser page, but it isn't. They don't like running shit in browsers. Browsers are for reading crap that apps redirect them to. They aren't for, say, music players, video players, or games.
Yet html5/javascript can do all that.
PWA, through the manifest, is a way to package the html5 application so that it doesn't need the heavyweight crap that a Cordova/PhoneGap packaged app carries. You like this app? Add it to your homescreen. Great, now it will act independently of a browser tab, use full-frame so you don't see the address bar (the ugliest part of the browser experience and the most wasted space), and just like a real app with its background services (something ALL apps have the ability to add, things you're VERY used to like Facebook notifications, email notifications, twitter notifications), it can do polls against a server and let you know stuff, and a click on that will bring up the app. JUST LIKE Facebook, Twitter, Email.
From a development perspective, it takes all of the platform specific bullshit out. I get to write a service worker in javascript that will run on every hardware platform because javascript is what it is, and my clients will have the same experience. That's even IF you want a service worker and have a need for that.
For one app I maintain, a basic music client for Subsonic, I don't even need that. All I need is the manifest file to be respected so that when launched from the homescreen, it takes over full-screen instead of being treated like a browser tab (hello firefox, fix that crap), because NOBODY likes a music player that sits in a browser.
THAT is what PWAs give you: the ability to write your application code, including its background processes, in javascript, to standard APIs.
Treating "push notifications" as if their only purpose was to shove advertising in your face is totally ignoring the very experience of notifications in apps you have been living with since the invention of the iphone in the first damn place.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe