This tool is named deceptively. It makes it sound like Firefox has broken or missing support for PWAs. Firefox has great support for pwas. My team shipped our app as a pwa in May and it was easy to do and works 100% in both chrome and Firefox.
It appears this is more of a packager that tries to turn a website into a pwa and makes it install more like a native app. I may try it out, but the name is horrible and damaging to Firefox so I'll probably not ship until that name is changed.
It's a trademark violation, in that "FirefoxPWA" improperly implies that that Firefox is the brand behind the product. This isn't likely to go all the way to a court of law, but if it did it would be an open and shut case. The author should do the polite thing and rename their product.
Legally proper alternatives would be "PWAs for Firefox" or more clearly, "PWA Installer for Firefox" as suggested elsethread. Those aren't necessarily great product names, but they illustrate a point: the inversion makes it clear that this is a third party offering, rather than something coming from Firefox.
For what it's worth I don't think the author intended to create marketplace confusion, because the full product description "Progressive Web Apps for Firefox" makes it clear it's a third-party offering. It should be possible to resolve this amicably.
Isn't being installable as an app kind of the most baseline feature of PWAs? To my knowledge desktop Firefox doesn't let you do that without an addon like this.
It doesn't support "installing" PWAs like native apps, and that's a core feature of PWAs, so no it does not have great support for PWAs
> the name is horrible and damaging to Firefox so I'll probably not ship until that name is changed.
I think you're being a bit harsh here. Sure, a more accurate name would be "PWA Installer for Firefox", but to say it's deceptively named is pretty hyperbolic.
> As of 2021, PWA features are supported to varying degrees by Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Firefox for Android, and Microsoft Edge[2][3] but not by Firefox for desktop.[4]
More precise terminology should be "Install to desktop" (or homescreen on mobile). Years ago there was a tool (or extension) called Prism, that did exactly the same thing.
That's interesting. AFAIK, Steve Jobs didn't want installable app on the iphone. The phone should come with a few features and everything external should come from the web. He changed his mind after android included installable apps.
We also need to protest against the ongoing effort to misuse the web for fscking web apps nobody wants, to the detriment of the original purpose of the web as a hypertext delivery mechanism.
I support Apple because I think they are sticking up for their users. If they had great support for PWAs a lot of companies and developers would go that route and there would be no native app option.
You have a choice. If you want to run PWAs, get an Android phone.
I've been using this extension for a while, not bad so far but the big plus for me is the possibility to "install" any website as a PWA, making the website containerised and not messing with the normal browser (like Google cross logins)
I've also dedicated a user guide to install FirefoxPWA for my own PWA but generic and easy enough for the average user I think, at:
I've been running firefox like this manually for years. My method for this is basically just create a profile for any service I want to run standalone. Works great
1. Create a profile for the app you want to run...e.g. Spotify. Set the home bag
2. Create a startup file for your Firefox/Profile combo, e.g.
$ cat .local/share/applications/Music.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Music;X-AudioPlayer;AudioVideo;Spotify
Exec=/usr/bin/firefox --class=musicplayer -P music
How hard would it be to work together with Mozilla to ship this functionality in Firefox officially? Their excuses not to work on SSB (that's what they called installing web apps to desktop) were: 1. "no perceived user benefit" and 2. "feature is costing us time in terms of bug triage". Evidently, some users and developers find mentioned feature useful, because many projects like FirefoxPWA exists. Get other projects that are trying to achieve the same goal on board (Web App Manager from Linux Mint comes to mind) and everybody wins. As an added bonus, Firefox might even increase their user base a little.
What exactly is the motivation for this project? I read the readme but I'm still at a loss.
If my company chose to build PWAs, I would choose to use a browser that supports it in the way that is required. It would be totally bonkers to choose something like this just so that I can run them on firefox. Especially considering that this quite literally doesn't support half the feature set that might make PWAs desirable over a native app(like access to a lot of native APIs).
Even if we wanted to build PWAs, and then for some weird reason needed to use firefox, then the lack of support for them in firefox would be more likely to lead to not building PWAs instead of trying to wrangle firefox into something it doesn't really support.
Mainly the goal is to create standalone Firefox apps, as a lightweight replacement to Electron apps, with their own permissions and desktop notifications.
Chromium/Edge make this super easy, and I use it to create standalone versions of Youtube Music, Fastmail, YNAB, WhatsApp so that they share the same Firefox process, instead of having four separate Electron apps written by third-parties that are just a fancy way of wrapping a website in their own window
And for some reason, Mozilla isn't interested of having this feature in their own browser.
If you open Spotify in Chrome (or any Chromium browser), you'll get a little popup, like this: https://i.imgur.com/vw5diI2.png
If you click "Install", you'll get an app-like Spotify icon, it'll show up in applications, you can Cmd+Tab/ Alt+Tab to it with its icon, so on. It's basically an app - but it's running in a separate Chrome window and managed by the browser. Electron but you don't have to install a copy of Chrome every time, basically. (Also, if you're like me and use Brave, this is better in every way.)
This is a brilliant start. Maybe rename it to avoid annoying Mozilla unnecessary.
I'm one of those who want a softfork(?) of Firefox: a set of patches on top of official Firefox that keeps getting expanded until it eclipses the official Firefox.
The problem with soft forks is that virtually no one wants to maintain HTML rendering or implement CSS color for fun, and eventually when the underlying engines change, the soft forks have to keep up, leading to the same sort of complaints that we see about macOS requiring significant annual reworks.
I've been doing this manually for a while by creating a FF profile for an app, adding some userChrome.css to hide some of the chrome at the top, and creating my own .desktop files to open FF in the new profile.
It's a bit tedious but it works.
I'd love to try this if I didn't have to use a FF extension to do it. It looks like it does it better than I have been doing it.
Firefox, thanks to "Firefox Lockwise" and other Mozilla products, is now a brand name, not just a browser name. The product title sounds like it came from Mozilla, which is probably not ok.
Last I checked geolocation was still busted on FF Android when you actually "install" it and launch from the install-icon. Put in a bug report like 2 years ago. PWAs are ok for little internal widgets, but I couldn't recommend them for user facing stuff. For the uninformed, the principle reason to avoid PWAs is you need more granular control over the hardware than is available through a webAPI also indexeddb data will get deleted by Apple after a week for your privacy.
It is a glorified bookmark. But the JavaScript kids like how some of there scripts still run offline. As long as you don't use their website in any normal way, like clicking anywhere.
OT but, is anyone else having issues with Gmail and YouTube in FF after left open for, sometimes, just a few minutes? Lately for me, they stop refreshing properly and things like changing email folders or loading more comments as I scroll on YT just don't work and I have to refresh the page to fix it.
No problems and I do what you say all the time. I often leave youtube playing music in the background and it will play for days if I let it. Almost every problem I ever had in firefox I chased down to an errant plugin so turn off all your plugins (or start in safe mode) and go from there.
[+] [-] indymike|4 years ago|reply
It appears this is more of a packager that tries to turn a website into a pwa and makes it install more like a native app. I may try it out, but the name is horrible and damaging to Firefox so I'll probably not ship until that name is changed.
[+] [-] rectang|4 years ago|reply
It's a trademark violation, in that "FirefoxPWA" improperly implies that that Firefox is the brand behind the product. This isn't likely to go all the way to a court of law, but if it did it would be an open and shut case. The author should do the polite thing and rename their product.
Legally proper alternatives would be "PWAs for Firefox" or more clearly, "PWA Installer for Firefox" as suggested elsethread. Those aren't necessarily great product names, but they illustrate a point: the inversion makes it clear that this is a third party offering, rather than something coming from Firefox.
For what it's worth I don't think the author intended to create marketplace confusion, because the full product description "Progressive Web Apps for Firefox" makes it clear it's a third-party offering. It should be possible to resolve this amicably.
[+] [-] alex_smart|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't and the relevant bug is marked as WONTFIX.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407202
[+] [-] ryukafalz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KoftaBob|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't support "installing" PWAs like native apps, and that's a core feature of PWAs, so no it does not have great support for PWAs
> the name is horrible and damaging to Firefox so I'll probably not ship until that name is changed.
I think you're being a bit harsh here. Sure, a more accurate name would be "PWA Installer for Firefox", but to say it's deceptively named is pretty hyperbolic.
[+] [-] resoluteteeth|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_application
[+] [-] turbinerneiter|4 years ago|reply
(Desktop, Fedora - in case that makes a difference)
[+] [-] pndy|4 years ago|reply
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Prism
[+] [-] butz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blowski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcodiego|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woutr_be|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tannhaeuser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|4 years ago|reply
You have a choice. If you want to run PWAs, get an Android phone.
[+] [-] thepra|4 years ago|reply
I've also dedicated a user guide to install FirefoxPWA for my own PWA but generic and easy enough for the average user I think, at:
https://collanon.com/en/installation#firefox-desktop
[+] [-] erickj|4 years ago|reply
1. Create a profile for the app you want to run...e.g. Spotify. Set the home bag
2. Create a startup file for your Firefox/Profile combo, e.g.
$ cat .local/share/applications/Music.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Music;X-AudioPlayer;AudioVideo;Spotify
Exec=/usr/bin/firefox --class=musicplayer -P music
Icon=Music-icon
StartupWMClass=musicplayer
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Name=Music
Comment=Firefox music container
[+] [-] butz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skinkestek|4 years ago|reply
Mozilla gets $500m - in theory for having Google as the default search engine - I reality to just to not challenge Chrome.
Anyone have a good explanation for why this isn't true?
[+] [-] IceDane|4 years ago|reply
If my company chose to build PWAs, I would choose to use a browser that supports it in the way that is required. It would be totally bonkers to choose something like this just so that I can run them on firefox. Especially considering that this quite literally doesn't support half the feature set that might make PWAs desirable over a native app(like access to a lot of native APIs).
Even if we wanted to build PWAs, and then for some weird reason needed to use firefox, then the lack of support for them in firefox would be more likely to lead to not building PWAs instead of trying to wrangle firefox into something it doesn't really support.
What am I missing here?
[+] [-] 1_player|4 years ago|reply
Chromium/Edge make this super easy, and I use it to create standalone versions of Youtube Music, Fastmail, YNAB, WhatsApp so that they share the same Firefox process, instead of having four separate Electron apps written by third-parties that are just a fancy way of wrapping a website in their own window
And for some reason, Mozilla isn't interested of having this feature in their own browser.
[+] [-] pgcj_poster|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d3nj4l|4 years ago|reply
If you click "Install", you'll get an app-like Spotify icon, it'll show up in applications, you can Cmd+Tab/ Alt+Tab to it with its icon, so on. It's basically an app - but it's running in a separate Chrome window and managed by the browser. Electron but you don't have to install a copy of Chrome every time, basically. (Also, if you're like me and use Brave, this is better in every way.)
[+] [-] indymike|4 years ago|reply
Firefox does support PWA. This is a browser extension for packaging and installing like a native app. Pwa is a web spec and it is very nice.
[+] [-] skinkestek|4 years ago|reply
I'm one of those who want a softfork(?) of Firefox: a set of patches on top of official Firefox that keeps getting expanded until it eclipses the official Firefox.
I already tried to donate but failed.
[+] [-] floatingatoll|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maccolgan|4 years ago|reply
Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409675 & https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460412
[+] [-] neilsimp1|4 years ago|reply
It's a bit tedious but it works.
I'd love to try this if I didn't have to use a FF extension to do it. It looks like it does it better than I have been doing it.
Also the name should be changed.
[+] [-] brutal_chaos_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newacc9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WallyFunk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thepra|4 years ago|reply
And there isn't a real flow that does explicitly say "Install" which is crucial for the final user to understand.
And overall after PWA installation the screen is filled with app alone in a clear and native looking way.
[+] [-] tommek4077|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kgwxd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Narishma|4 years ago|reply
I don't know about Gmail as I use the HTML view, which is much faster in general and only updates when you tell it to.
[+] [-] thepra|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|4 years ago|reply