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b1tr0t | 3 years ago

Hi! I'm a PM on the Chrome web platform team working on advanced apps including PWAs.

Can you tell me more about what's missing in PWAs in terms of support and UX?

PWAs are well supported in Chromium browsers. Can't speak to Firefox support, but I hope as adoption and usage grows we'll see them add more support.

discuss

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doodlesdev|3 years ago

Hi I'm happy to provide some context: When it comes to support on Chromium it works well but there a few things that still make them less than ideal such as the toolbar that includes the extensions icon and doesn't use the system styling (at least in the case of Linux with Gnome).

Something else I feel would make PWAs much more interesting to most people is if the browser _prompts_ the person to use the PWA, if I'm not forgotten Chrome does this on mobile but not on desktop. You also don't really have much option when it comes to customizing the PWA if the provided manifest gives a bad icon or something like that.

But overall the Chrome browser is the best for PWAs right now on both desktop and mobile. Firefox however has dropped support _completely_ for PWAs which is why I personally don't even consider it an option anymore. Some discussion here: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/bring-back-pwa-progress...

AFAIK Apple doesn't really support them too (although theoretically Steve Jobs really liked them when the iPhone first launched) because it undermines their business model of the App Store. I wish companies would use them more because they truly are the best way to develop cross-platform right now (and the PWA size is just the size of the page load for the SPA!)

throwawaycuriou|3 years ago

while Mozilla has dropped official support I've had no issues using FirefoxPWA addon for similar functionality