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.
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?
Nobody. Nobody wants anything "push". Everybody hates loading screens. If sw even have a splash screen, it is TOO SLOW.
Ad people may want push, that drives this. Too bad for them, I turn js off.
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.)
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.
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.