Mozilla does not want to support PWAs in Firefox, yet MDN has a PWA manifest and can be installed in Chromium.
Mozilla does not want to support PWAs in Firefox, yet MDN has a PWA manifest and can be installed in Chromium.
33 comments
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Firefox supports PWAs, at least on mobile.
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Are they PWAs tho, or just shortcuts?
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They open in a window separate from the browser and don't display the browser toolbar, so not just shortcuts.
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Real PWAs, though PWAs aren't that different from shortcuts tbh
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On Android at least, Firefox PWA's don't seem to support registering system-level things (like 'Share To' handlers) - you need to use a Chrome PWA for that....
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Erm... Writing a manifest is like, an hour of work for a dev? Supporting PWAs is like... years? So um, not really comparable.
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For what is worth, the pwaforfirefox project works beautifully, I use it with discord, teams and tidal everyday.
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I don't like or use Discord but what's the benefit of using it as a web app vs the downloadable client?
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The native client has application level access to the rest of your machine. They use this to run process loggers "for the activity display", or the button that allows you to quickly stream a game if it's running. They could theoretically use this access for keylogging or accessing the mic without explicit user permission. Running the Discord web client keeps the source of collected telemetry within the webbrowser, which doesn't offer keylogging or process logger features, and requires explicit user permission to give websites access to a microphone, camera, or the screen for streaming.
Yes, they do process log on the native client, and from my own GDPR data request it appears they keep this data in detail for a couple of years: https://github.com/snapcrafters/discord/issues/43
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- better privacy as no process scanning or direct access to cam/mic
- better performance as discord desktop app for windows still uses 32bit electron, which makes it slower than the web app
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In Linux the native client is quite bad,especially streaming, as its not hardware accelerated and doesn't stream sound. The browser version doesn't have any of those issues.
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33 comments
I don't think it was "do not want to support" it was more of a "cannot support".
Only so much developer time to go around, have to pick your battles.
Also, mobile Firefox has supported PWAs for a long time. I wouldn't say PWAs on desktop would be useless, but they make much more sense on mobile than on desktop.
I like them as task bar icons...
Have to use an extension for that.
It's a native feature of Edge, and a buggy version exists in Chrome.
Only use I've found for them on desktop personally is the web interfaces for local hardware. I did use it when I was playing with stable diffusion for a bit but never fine tuned it because stable diffusion kept crashing.
PWAs are useful on desktop if there's web apps you use a lot every day. For example, some people at my Workplace are in Google Docs a lot, so a Google Docs PWA would be useful. Separate taskbar/launcher icon, separate window in Alt-Tab, and at least in Chrome, Google Docs has some basic support working while offline.
Not really, they dropped them wuth the massive layoffs during which they dropped various projects (or more like the entire teams behind them) and increased executive pay... :/