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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.
who the shit would want this?
It's 2017 and programs still have a "loading screen".
Idiots, all of you.
I believe that Chrome on iOS is still using the same underlying technologies of Safari, not 100% certain that it is a completely separate code base there. More like a skinning.
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.
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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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
...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.
because the applications are doing different (sometimes actually better) things now and people want shiny shit rather than plain text, but they're not willing to (shudder) pay money for software, so a bunch of ads have to load also, in order to pay for the service, and those are not really cpu-bound but i/o-bound, and really when the value-add is in networking and information exchange why would you expect the CPU to be the bottleneck anyway?
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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.