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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.
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General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Leave it to Microsoft
Your "ire" is a bit misplaced. Actually, PWAs are endorsed and will be supported by every major browser vendor other than Apple. They've been covered here on Slashdot multiple times over the last few years. One of those articles mentioned that Google has deprecated the Chrome App Store because they also believe PWAs are the right way to deliver Web apps to the desktop.
Push notifications
And spam.
Apologies in advance, I'm going to try to say this nicely, but have you been living under a rock (or not upgraded your browser) for the last 3 years? The W3C Push API and WHATWG Notifications API have been around for at least that long. And I would be really surprised if you haven't seen a website ask permission to send notifications.
Any bets of whether or not the push notifications will work whether the app is running or not?
A quick search shows that Chrome implemented the ability for a website to send notifications even after the tab is closed almost 3 years ago in Chrome 42. I'd be really surprised if Edge didn't implement this capability for PWAs and already support the ability for the user to disable them on a site-by-site basis.
I'm looking forward to PWAs, personally. At the moment, there are pretty much no Google apps (Gmail, etc.) in the Microsoft App Store. This will change that. Besides Google, I'd expect most top-tier web applications will also release as a PWA.
Sure, there will be plenty of junk apps, but how is that different than any app store (iOS, Android, etc.) today? You have to wade through a lot of junk on any platform, but that doesn't mean the concept isn't useful. Having these in the Windows Store at least allows user ratings to help filter out the bad ones.
True, but both Firefox and Chrome have abandoned their former proprietary methods of creating web "apps" and are also moving to the PWA spec. So maybe we can say "old concept, new standard"?
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.
Go anywhere that sells Dell stuff and check out their Precision laptops. Then go to their site, choose developer or small business, and get it pre-loaded with ubuntu. I'm guessing that it's niche enough that they won't have ubuntu to demo in stores, so your options are either to just check out the hardware running windows, or, if they are permissive enough, potentially bring a ubuntu boot stick with you.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are essentially web sites where JavaScript and some relatively modern browser APIs are used to store parts of the site locally on the device after it's been downloaded. This allows the site to "load" again later even if the user is offline or has a bad connection, to cache some data on the client side, to store pending data ready to be uploaded automatically when a good connection is available again, etc. You can also do things like adding an icon to load the site to your home screen on a mobile device. In essence, you can create something that is really a web site, but enhanced to work more like a native app.
Android/Chrome has supported most of the relevant technologies for quite a while and pretty much all of them in recent versions. Apparently Edge is getting there now too. iOS/Safari is a long way behind.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Websites are sandboxed to hell and back. When it works (which is not always) a website cant break out of the browser and mess with your PC.
But these HTML as faux-native apps can. The Node.js runtime has all the same access any native app has, can write and read from your file system, hook to arbitrary dll/dylib/.so libs, network card access, and beyond.
No, they're web apps, hosted on servers run in a sandboxed "browser" on your local machine. You're not running a node server on your own machine.