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'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.
Don't Apple users use Chrome also? Now's a good time to start if they want all these new gimmicks. I say we should stick with good old basic HTML, or even go back to Hypercard...
who the shit would want this?
It's 2017 and programs still have a "loading screen".
Idiots, all of you.
I'm more in favor of Conservative Web Applications.
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.
--
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?
If it's important to you .. buy an Android device?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
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.)
Is this a way to bring back the features of IE6 and ActiveX controls, only now they can install themselves more easily?
Who would not want this?
Progressive Web Malware
Life is not for the lazy.
Translation: Their way of making money is a detriment to the way you make your living, or wish you could make a living? There are many ways to do each of the things you list without doing PWAs; no one has to share your infatuation with PWA
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.
Apple is having discussions. You're not invited.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
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.
The real detriment is the continued use of HTML (a display page layout language) and Javascript (a scripting language meant to add limited behavioral capability to said layout) for the development of applications that need high quality, good security, high maintainability, etc.
Flush those things down the drain (except for their intended purpose!) and start building something reasonable for building webapps.
Flash/Silverlight were crap implementations that failed, but at least they had the right idea of marrying a well thought out declarative UI language with a decent object/type modeled language (hence why those ideas carry over into mobile development).
Instead of just building an ecosystem with that in mind, we have to make due to hacks like Angular/Ember/etc. which are the best of breed attempts to emulate that, but still are horrendous and often difficult to work with and maintain hack jobs.
If you boil a PWS down it's just a website/webpage that has a manifest and icon in its root folder. Just about everything else is preexisting technology. The only real advantage is that you wrap a browser window around the site and make it work more like a desktop app... like what Chrome Apps use to be. Ever wonder why Google / Alphabet abandoned that technology?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
How old were you when you realized that Java and JavaScript are bad languages?
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.
Safari is consistently incompatible browser technologies like WebRTC and PWAs. This isn't for ads, it's for offline apps. It's for apps that don't need to be installed through the iTunes store.
It's fine if Apple has $80trillion dollars in an overseas bank and doesn't want to make a decent browser, but let's not fanbois fantasy this is about push notifications. It's about centralized web, and that is good for Apple.
PWAs are about building interesting offline web applications that don't have to go through someone's "store".
Just like Flash!
Despite being a relatively minor product from Apple, and one that these days only really runs on macOS or iOS, it turns out that a lot of people use Safari.
According to recent browser stats, iOS Safari has about 10% of the browser market.
This is well above Firefox for Android's 0.03% (yes, that's right, it's way less than even just 1%!) share of the market.
macOS Safari has about 2% to 3% of the market.
To put that into perspective, macOS Safari has more users than Edge does (which has about 1.5% of the market).
Even Firefox, which also runs on macOS, in addition to many other platforms that Safari doesn't currently support (like Windows, Linux, *BSDs, Solaris, and so on), only has about 4% to 5% of the market.
While Chrome is clearly the dominant browser, it's safe to say that Safari is now the second-most used browser across all platforms.
Firefox has made itself irrelevant, by totally dropping the ball on mobile and by driving away so many of the users of desktop Firefox.
Most web designers today test in Chrome, Safari and IE/Edge. More and more of them are ignoring Firefox just because its share of the market has fallen so much. Firefox has essentially become a "dead" browser in the eyes of many web developers and web users.
Google is FAR worse when it comes to "My way or the highway" because the handset maker, carrier, and app developers ALL get to say that to the end user far more frequently. Apple has kept forced carrier bloatware off their phones and ensured reliable updates without having to be vetted by said carriers. They also have a better and earlier track record for users who want to use an app without forced permissions disclosing their exact location, social security number, and dental records.
You lost me at "push notifications". "App loading screens" sounds like "Ads I don't want".
Pass.
Flash died because Flash died. Trying to imply Apple was a major factor is an error.
They used to innovate, but as they have grown larger, they are becoming less likely to innovate (think large cellphone screens). they prefer their users in a walled garden and not free to make too many choices. For many people, that's just fine.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Plus you don't need three different codebases written in three different languages by three different teams thus ensuring a lack of feature parity in all of them. Or have to publish them in three different places in three different ways with three different release windows.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
...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
In college as an intern I remember talking to the experienced engineers about this interesting video I saw about a guy talking about the concept of a "paradigm shift". The response was something like, "Oh, you mean that guy that couldn't sell his funny looking bicycle seat?" Apparently this guy had already developed a reputation.
The video was about a funny looking bicycle seat, and it was interesting from an engineering perspective. What was wrong though was the product he was trying to sell was crap. I remembered the video and as someone that then rode a bicycle regularly I'd see people start to use bicycle seats with features he mentioned in his video, but the idea he was trying to sell was not a great idea.
Progressive web apps sounds like just another funny looking bicycle seat. There's some good ideas there but the product they want to sell as a "paradigm shift" is crap. The article even spells out the problems, like needing a constant internet connection to work. Data still costs money even if it's real cheap, and people might not be fond of constantly getting charged for using "too much" data on their cell plan.
Progressive web apps are stupid. Apple is smart to be reluctant to support them. Maybe they have some good ideas here that will find their way into future products and services but this just sounds stupid.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This sounds to me like the latest exploit-vector.
I DO NOT WANT "worker processes" being shoved onto my computer, regardless of Sandboxing.
Just wait. There WILL be an exploit or hundred that use this.
And I will sit back and laugh.
that there STILL is a web that doesn't care for Google.
I mean, take a web server, and a database and a couple billion of browers and you have something. Add Google and you have what? More ads! What if you don't need them? THIS is the thought that Google can't stand.
20% of what market? did you forget the laptop/desktop market that apple also sells product in?
Like BLOAT! ...Even SLOWER webpages that further frustrate the end user's experience... I disabled JavaScript last year on my phone/tablets and have been whitelisting sites because it's gotten so bad. It's bothersome that desktop sites are still a faster and in general a better experience than these bloated web-aps from HELL!
a web application for offline use. so...an app. what part of that needs to be web if its offline? name ONE interesting offline "web app". and it can't obviously notify because its offline.
As someone who blocks Javascript by default, the fewer sites doing the PWA thing, the better.
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
I would think, given the typical Apple user profile, that they would demand Progressive web apps! Except Apple, by nature, is non-PC, so there is already a problem.
In PWAs, service workers allow you to store data on your device - so that the next time you load the page, the last information you saw is there again without loading time.
You mean like cookies?
Here's an honest question: I don't see a single reason why, as a user, PWAs are in any way beneficial, and I can think of several downsides to them. Can you tell me why I would want such things to run on my devices?
Push notifications on web pages? No way in hell would I trust that, are you crazy? Kudos to Apple for avoiding it. Just like Apple helped kill Flash, I hope they help kill this new invader.
Apple didn't support that resource heavy anti-security program either.
Because their customer experience is better without that old crap. Or this new crap.
The app is going to take time to load regardless of whether or not there's a splash screen.
Applications for the Family Computer (released as Nintendo Entertainment System outside Japan) loaded in less than 1000 milliseconds, which was more than enough time to decompress 5 KiB of title screen data into video memory. It had a 1.8 MHz processor. Devices nowadays have a processor clocked at closer to 1.8 GHz, which (to slightly oversimplify) is 1000 times as fast as the one in the NES. Why don't applications load in 1 millisecond?
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.
Which in turn require for-pay platform upgrades. Want to run this application? Buy a Windows license. Want to run that application? Buy a Mac and put it on a KVM with your existing computer. Want to run all desktop applications without having to carry multiple computers around with you? A MacBook with a Windows 10 license in a virtual machine and GNU/Linux in another virtual machine is your only (legal) option, as only a Mac runs macOS applications.
In at least the United States, "conservative" also encompasses social conservatism, which tends to entail being opinionated in a discriminatory way. A conservative application may not support character sets other than US ASCII or user interfaces other than English, discriminating against users from minority cultures. A conservative application may not support screen readers, discriminating against users with vision disabilities.
If I want an app I'll downloads it.
That doesn't help if the application isn't in the App Store because it's only on Google Play Store, with a notice on the developer's website to the effect "Please back our Kickstarter campaign to fund porting this application to iPhone and iPad."
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I really do appreciate it.
Agreed, most push notifications are a pain. However, the post-after-post of "Nobody will ever want push notifications!" on this story is somewhat knee-jerk, as there are *some* reasonable uses of the notification bar.
For instance, I appreciate that my media player shows up in my notification bar with currently-playing information and controls, and I appreciate that some websites do somewhat likewise when I stream via their web page rather than my player. Likewise, notifications of updates from things that I've explicitly subscribed to are generally welcome. These may not apply to you, but "nobody wants this" is an overstatement.
Well, Duh. That's just what Apple wants. PWAs are a cornerstone of Googles "Everything is Web" Strategy. Apple and Google are direct adversaries in this field.
Apple says "Buy our devices". Google says "Buy what you want, but use our services."
However, if Google lures everybody to the web for everything using PWAs, WASM and such, they will create further incentives for people to move to Chrome OS and the Google ecosystem entirely. This is something Apple does not want. All-in-all Google has a significant long-term edge with Chromebooks basically being the poor mans MacBook and Apple relying on being percieved as a high-profile luxury brand for hardware.
Apple would so whish to be able to kill off the uibiquitous web in favour of native platforms and their strength which in turn would strengthen the Apple position. Yet it may actually be to late for that.
We'll see how this plays out.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I don't need offline support. Who does?
People who don't have hundreds of dollars per year for cellular Internet on top of the hundreds of dollars per year they already pay for home Internet. Offline support allows a user to load a web application on a laptop, board a bus, read the downloaded works in the web application, reply to them if necessary, and upload the changes when he returns home to his Internet connection.
Cookies are for storing tokens that represent authenticated sessions, usually smaller than 1 kB. Because a cookie is sent along with every request to an origin (or to other origins in the same registered domain), it's not ideal for storing an entire document that the user has chosen to make available for reading later while his laptop or tablet is out of range of home Wi-Fi.
.Net is fairly close; but lacks actual solid cross-platform implementations for desktop applications.
Now we're getting somewhere constructive. What is Gtk# missing in solidity?
If the browser loads the complete user experience for every online service, there are no apps from the app store and there is no revenue from the app store.
Apple wants apps that install on the device, and has done so ever since they started the app store. They want the money from the app store and they want the control over what runs on the hardware they sell.
This isn't the first time that Mobile Safari has been seen to be deficient in capabilities compared to other mobile browsers, and it's because Apple doesn't want browsers, they want apps, via their app store, giving them control over the whole device user experience and revenue from the whole user experience.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Safari does exactly what I want from a browser: Gives me a web view with a minimal UI and gets out of the way, while integrating with the rest of the system cleanly (e.g. using the keychain for storing credentials) and using OS sandboxing to isolate renderers. Well, actually, unlike Chrome, the Apple devs did the split in WebKit so Safari doesn't actually do this, any consumer of the WebKit framework gets sandboxing for free, whereas Blink requires everyone to implement their own sandboxing.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You've also got to read between the lines to see what's really going on here. PWA isn't some global internet standard, it's something Google made up. The complaint is that Apple isn't supporting Google's pet cool idea of the week. Nor, by the looks of it, is anyone other than Google. Because it's Google's pet idea of the week, and it's nearly the end of the week. There'll be a new pet idea appearing on Monday.
There's a valid viewpoint that the web would be a better place without JavaScript running in the client. John Gruber has been saying this recently.
It's too late to go back now of course - we have got used to web apps (as opposed to sites) that are responsive, dynamic and mimic desktop applications. But if client-side scripting had never been invented, the web would now be a better place in terms of having much less of the crappy payloads we get with modern sites.
I love the open web but the problem is that JavaScript has been abused by people in the marketing/advertising/big-data space, and notifications and worker processes would be their next target.
Flash died because it is a security hole. Not a single month went by without there being at the very least 20 critical patches for Flash, usually connected with remote code execution. Every CISO on this planet who didn't just hold that title because "we needed some idiot with that title so we hired this bum" pretty much outlawed anything remotely bordering on Flash in their company.
Which means that any "professional" web presence had to be done without Flash, because nobody in a commercial setting could watch it. And a technology can only get so far with cheap time-waster games if it's not backed by Steam...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Lacks synergy, strategy and vision.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
First: Ignore apple, when apple ignores you.
Second: Who wants a loading screen for a webapp? When i use a webapp, i do so because i just want the interface without the crap, which needs loading screens until the program started. Push notifications from a website? No thank you I am not missing it.
Fck Apple