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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.
It gets better, they reinvented ActiveX. And everyone knows ActiveX was always secure trustworthy, and never crashed windows.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
Its a *huge* difference, especially if the app is linking off to random-ass CDNs to pull code off the net every time you open a window.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.