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Windows 10 Will Soon Get Progressive Web Apps To Boost the Microsoft Store (techradar.com)
The next major update to Windows 10 will bring Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to the Microsoft Store. PWAs are websites (or web apps) which are implemented as native apps, and delivered just like a normal app through Windows 10's store. According to TechRadar, "The big advantages are that no platform-specific code is required, allowing devs to make apps that run across different platforms, and that PWAs are hosted on the developer's server, so can be updated directly from there (without having to push updates to the app store)." The other benefit for Microsoft is that they will be getting a bunch of new apps in Windows 10's store. From the report: As Microsoft explains in a blog post, these new web apps are built on a raft of nifty technologies -- including Service Worker, Fetch networking, Push notifications and more -- all of which will be enabled when EdgeHTML 17 (the next version of the rendering engine that powers the Edge browser) goes live in Windows 10 in the next big update. PWAs can be grabbed from the Microsoft Store as an AppX file, and will run in their own sandboxed container, without needing the browser to be open at all. As far as the user is concerned, they'll be just like any other app downloaded from the store. Microsoft says it is already experimenting with crawling and indexing PWAs from the web to pick out the quality offerings, which it will draft into the Microsoft Store. The firm has already combed through some 1.5 million web apps to pick out a small selection of PWAs for initial testing. As well as discovering apps via web crawling, developers will also be able to submit their offerings directly to Microsoft for approval.
Yeah, I'm sure that's not going to piss off a bunch of developers.
Its apps that can be updated without going through the windows store! So long as the code was good once when it was checked it can now be made into whatever the dev wants at any time!
So it's like the java .jar implementation?
and that PWAs are hosted on the developer's server, so can be updated directly from there
I can't imagine any way that these apps would be compromised by hackers... not a single one!
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
What does 'progressive' mean in this context?
Has anybody here ever used either a Progressive Web App or the Windows 10 store?
.. As apps. Wow. Will the browsers survive?
Frankly, I'm webbed out. I'm apped out. I'm tired of being the dumping ground for corporate bullshit.
Comparitively, gopher and ftp weren't that bad at all.
Seriously.
This failed with the pre. mozilla phone, isn't going anywhere in androidland or chrome. Nobody wants this.
I like having a computer that I can use when not connected to the internet, 'forever'. Not one that can't deal with that.
I can certainly see the attraction about companies having a way to leverage you to get you to store your data in their cloud where they can comb through it at will, or start charging you subscription fees for it and other things. I can certainly see the attraction to increasing your profits that way.
Not for me though, so PWA can die in a fire.
to invent yet another innovative way to distribute malware.
Push notifications
And spam.
Any bets of whether or not the push notifications will work whether the app is running or not?
If I understand correctly these are just packaged web apps where resources (html + css + js) are bundled together and downloaded so the browser can execute them locally with no internet connection needed. If that's the case Firefox and Chrome have been doing this for years.
I disable Javascript on my phone now, there’s just too many bastard sites out there who now want to be in the store.
What a great idea. Stock your store with millions of junk apps that amount to little more than glorified hyperlinks. What people really want is to wade through heaps and heaps of garbage only to discover what they really want isn't for sale.
This tactic should win Microsoft enough attention that someone somewhere on earth is guaranteed to buy something from Microsoft by the time 32-bit time_t wraps.
App stores are evil.
Windows 10 is malware.
"It's the emptiness that's left. It's like a despair, destroying this world and I have been trying to help it. " ~Microsoft
The social justice warriors are infecting everything these days. Now we have to deal with progressive web apps. Will transgressive web apps be next?
Why should I waste space on my phone with what is literally a copy of a website?
And probably a copy of the shitty mobile website at that...
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
Apps that remove features with updates will no longer be able to be rolled back.
Twinstiq, game news
Apps
Apps
Apps
WTF Microsoft a progressive App Store??? Did you ever consider that your customers may be more mainstream conservatives or even (shudder) liberals? This is why we need to defund education, there is no reasoning with these people.
What will be next... Using a pointing device to select GUI elements?
is still write once, debug everywhere.
Also, are these based on open web standards or is MS just trying to reduce the maintenance on their lock-in?
I'm a little lost here.
In the very early days of the web, I probably would have enthusiastically supported the idea of a distributed web app. Network connections being very much hit-or-miss in those days (and typically dial-up levels of performance).
Now... I'm a little lost. What is the use-case this addresses? It relieves the vendor of having to host a web site? It still might be appealing to have a zero-network app? Maybe this is a privacy play?
year of the Linux Desktop confirmed.
As a practical matter, ALL operating systems (including Linux) ordinarily need to connect to the internet during boot. Windows is not a lot more aggressive than most in that regard, except for its telemetry if you haven't brought that under control. Windows 10 does boot without connection - stand-alone - but some things (especially some UWP and obviously these PWA apps) don't work right when not connected. That's why, for instance, I installed LibreOffice in my tablet: it takes some space (not a whole lot, really) but it works fine without calling home, unlike MS Office Mobile (which came "free" with the tablet) which reverts to "viewer" mode if offline. I do use the tablet at times without an internet connection, as well as a laptop with W10 Home (it works fine offline, too).
W10 does make it fairly simple to connect and disconnect from the network, so when doing things that don't require communication you can disconnect and not be exposed to background stuff. Not sure how easy that is with Linux. But neither of them can selectively disconnect from the internet while still staying on the local net (for servers and printers, for instance) - it's all or nothing.
Yes, I'm an altefarte who remembers dialup modems, and batching internet-dependent work so I could minimize time online, and auto-dialers that would make a connection when needed then drop it after a no-traffic timeout. It's good that we no longer have to do that. But security would probably be a tad better if we still did.
No sir, I'm not sure which operating systems do need to connect to the internet on boot... but most certainly not most linux flavours, where it is also trivial to blank the default gateway from a terminal and have full local access --- no internet.
!Equality through palindromes semordnilap hguorht ytilauqE!
Except that a browser window either doesn't open (app has its own window) or opens without the browser controls.
And if MS "drafts" your PWA app into the Store do you get paid for it when people download, or does that happen only if you actually submit it? Oh wait, these are all free, aren't they. So MS is just scraping the net for these things and adding them to the Store, with little or no testing. What could possibly go wrong?
So the advantage of "PWAs" is that you can take a website and turn it into an app and make it compatible with any OS? But ... websites already do that.
Thanks Microsoft, very useful.
Anything a laptop can do that your cell phone can't cannot possibly be that important, now can it?
Let me know when Visual Studio runs on a cell phone, even with a Bluetooth keyboard.
I'm aware of AIDE, which allows developing apps for Android on Android. Likewise, Swift Playgrounds allows prototyping apps for iOS on iPad. But I was under the impression that both needed a screen bigger than the 5" of a phone, and tablet stands that I've tried aren't nearly as stable as a laptop's hinge.
"The big advantages are that no platform-specific code is required"
I cannot wait till Microsoft dies under the notion of apps. They still think they sell phones.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
ALL operating systems (including Linux) ordinarily need to connect to the internet during boot.
I don't know what distribution you're running, but I haven't noticed this with Debian or Xubuntu. Both boot up and let me launch an IDE just fine while I'm a passenger in a moving vehicle without access to a cell phone on a tethering plan. Sure, it needs an occasional connection to download security updates (and provide optional telemetry through popularity-contest), but not the connection during every boot that you mention.
Moved my desktop and laptop to Linux
So the advantage of "PWAs" is that you can take a website and turn it into an app and make it compatible with any OS? But ... websites already do that.
The advantage of a PWA over a website is that a PWA works even when your laptop is not associated to an access point, or when the access point to which it is associated is not in turn connected to the Internet.
Interesting. Thank you. Will have to play with that in my Mint machine. Perhaps a better way to say it is that all O/S *want* to connect to the internet on boot, but Windows and Linux, at least, can boot without. How long Windows 10 can work without (how many times can you boot and run a session without internet connection?) is certainly an open question.
Awesome, will Windows 10 also soon stop trying to do a forced update that bricks my system. That way I don't have to kill the update process with task manager every time I power on! (I miss you, XP.)
Ah, sure, good luck. from a command line, you can run route -n, then route del default gw 192.168.1.1 or whatever the gateway for 0.0.0.0 is, and you're internet free. It's also possible to shutdown whatever you might have for a network control (such as networkmanager) and your dhcp client (dhcpcd or similar), and setup connections manually as you like - ifconfig for most of it and wpa_supplicant for the wireless side, toss your nameserver into /etc/resolve.conf and route for getting out of your subnet as applies.
I have a reserve block of IP's on my network which aren't assigned, I use them with my laptop (doesn't generally automatically connect to anything and I manually setup connections like above) when I need to fix something or sniff packets, etc.
!Equality through palindromes semordnilap hguorht ytilauqE!
I have a Linux (kubuntu) machine in the other room that has no internet access. It boots and does everything else just fine. It doesn't get security updates, but who needs those when not exposed to the internet?
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Will these PWA run under OS X or Linux?
"these new web apps are built on a raft of nifty technologies -- including Service Worker, Fetch networking, Push notifications and more -- all of which will be enabled when EdgeHTML 17"
Ah so, they're trying the same dodge they implementing with Internet Explorer and Internet Information Services (IIS), as in PWAs won't run on anything else except EdgeHTML on Windows 10. Are these nifty technologies available to third parties without having to pay a license to Microsoft. Meanwhile will any of these 'nifty technologies' protect the end user from getting hacked by opening an email attachment or clicking on a malicious weblink.
"these new web apps are built on a raft of nifty technologies..
I'm glad they're using nifty technologies. What do these apps do? Another calendar app? Another calculator? Angry Birds 4? How many different ways are there of coding crap that nobody needs?
Even more baked-in shit I probably can't remove. I've been fighting with Win10E trying to rip out shit like Pandora, DuoLingo, Eclipse Manager...I've done the getappx -allusers uninstalls, getappxpackage uninstalls, every registry entry I can find relating to them. Yet still, whenever a new user on a box logs in...BOOM THEIR BACK.
Why can't Microsoft have a "store free" version for Enterprises who don't want their users to install random games and apps? My organization has to be 800-171 compliant, so keeping out unknown data leaks in a must. I can't convince management to use Long Term Branch Edition, because we're not sure how the whole "no feature updates" works with the STIG requirements. WHY THE F@CK DOES AN "ENTERPRISE OS" HAVE UNREMOVABLE XBOX APPLICATIONS?
To Mod Anti-Microsoft comments to +5 Insightful, when the topic at hand wasn't even invented by Microsoft
I guess same is true for the apps.
A book length long 404 with "what went wrong" commentary will happen at the very least.
A boost to nothing is still nothing.
As a practical matter, ALL operating systems (including Linux) ordinarily need to connect to the internet during boot....
Yes, I'm an altefarte who remembers dialup modems...
I can unplug the network cable from any of my machines running OpenSUSE and it starts up just fine, thanks.
You may remember dial-up modems--I certainly do--but I don't think you remember anything about Linux, and you should be old enough by now to know better than to make stuff up.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I have no idea about Windows10, since I am not stupid enough to use it.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
...yerass
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
What's so "progressive" about them?
WINDOWS WEEKLY 556, 90% CACAO, 10% PWA, Hosted by Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, Paul Thurrott. Discussion of upcoming Microsoft PWA apps.
https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/556?autostart=false
As a practical matter, ALL operating systems (including Linux) ordinarily need to connect to the internet during boot.
Not even remotely correct. There is no such "ordinarily" need. In fact, I know of no OS beyond Chrome OS which has that need. The overwhelming majority of Linux distributions (including all the popular ones) have no such need. Nor does iOS or MacOS.
But neither of them can selectively disconnect from the internet while still staying on the local net (for servers and printers, for instance) - it's all or nothing.
So you have no idea how routing works. Tell me, what happens when you have no default route on your network interface, but have your IP and mask on the local net?
"The big advantages are that no platform-specific code is required, allowing devs to make apps that run across different platforms, and that PWAs are hosted on the developer's server, so can be updated directly from there (without having to push updates to the app store)."
Didn't Apple already try something like this? And found, malicious developers would push perfectly 'acceptable' Apps through the store, then update them independently to be malicious/spyware/etc?
It's called using Splashtop/Teamviewer to access either a full system in the cloud (such as an Azure/AWS instance)
A "full system in the cloud (such as an Azure/AWS instance)" ceases to exist if I stop paying the recurring fee for continuing to run it.
or your desktop at home
Some ISPs in some countries allow incoming connections to residential subscribers' PCs. This works because each subscriber has a separate IP address that is dynamic but changes daily or less frequently.
But not all home ISPs can allow this. Because of IPv4 address exhaustion, ISPs in some countries put most subscribers behind a carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) appliance, making no allowance for incoming connections. The "desktop at home" then has an IPv4 address in a reserved range that is not publicly routable, which per RFC 6598 is 100.64.0.0/10. They charge a substantial additional recurring fee for a static IP address, with no middle tier for a dynamic IP address that changes daily or less frequently. This can be circumvented with a tunnel that accepts connections from both the home PC and the mobile device, but that's yet another recurring fee.
/work.
I imagine very few employers are willing to allow use of a desktop PC at work for an employee's personal projects. Some don't even pay extra for a static IP address at work, especially in the IPv4-poor countries that I mentioned earlier. This can be circumvented with a tunnel that accepts connections from both the home PC and the mobile device, but that's yet another recurring fee.
In addition, all three workarounds that you suggest become inaccessible once I stop paying the additional recurring fee to a cellular ISP for a cellular Internet connection on top of what I'm paying my home ISP for an Internet connection at home. Running the IDE locally does not require this additional recurring fee.
How is an AWS instance plus additional data transfer allowance for my phone really cheaper than a laptop over the laptop's expected service life?
2. How do I turn it off/disable it/prevent it from getting on my desktop PC in the first place? (Oh, wait: "Delete Windows 10."?)
a big marketing push showing how the Microsoft App Store has grown and how great it is to world+dog.
Maybe they can pay people to use it too and get more marketing value. Like paying a big sport organization to use some Microsoft products and force announcers to talk about it and their networks to show teams using them in the dugouts too. Like MLB, since NFL season just ended and Spring Training will be winding up soon.
If you want to fuck me in the ass, just say so. I'm a cheap date.
Ya know, I just realized that the main reason I keep reading this site is to remind me of just how glad I am to be out of the tech industry. It just sucks so bad right now. It's ethos seems to be based solely on sociopathological greed, diva-like arrogance, and hipstery narcissism.
I wish I knew something about cars, or batteries, or spacecraft. 'Cause Musk seems to be the only "tech" leader that is not only just not evil, but inspiring and awesome.
Fuck you assholes in Seattle/Redmond and Silicon Valley.