this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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190
Firefox Nightly Preps Progressive Web App Support (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments
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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

I dont use many PWA's since I had to run them on chromium before. But as a web Dev and even more so as a user, I feel like PWA's are the way to go. They completely avoid all the app stores drama plus the 30% fees. Also the devs get to deploy instant updates without the delay going through the app stores. Just like any other web app. If done right I could see them replacing most native apps. Assuming we can get apple to allow PWAs full CPU usage. Currently they are throttling them from what I understand.

Edit: To clarify I'm speaking about mobile. I've never even tried PWAs on desktop and can't imagine why I would use that over browser+bookmarks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

I wrote a little background app and extension that opens links from a Chrome PWA in the same named Profile in Firefox for exactly this reason. Probably shoupd have released that...

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago

But it's easier to block trackers & ads on a PWA, and life made me very cynical about "the industry" 😅

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

And FWIW, Firefox already supports them on android; this is about desktop support.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I was going to say, "am I losing my mind?" I've had PWAs on Firefox for years. I've never once cared to use one on the desktop I guess.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Indeed. I'm not sure when they added mobile support back, but it wasn't there when I last looked for it. Guess its time for me to move my PWAs out of brave now. Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My only problem with PWAs is that they have arbitrary security requirements. Anything non-localhost needs https. No self-signed cert allowed. Enforcing people to buy a router that supports dyndns for their self hosted apps is odd. I'm wondering who makes these rules.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You can do DDNS for free, using a client app on your server, rather than router.

I use cloudflare-ddns

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh right. Thanks, indeed. However, for private apps on LAN addresses it's still a problem.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Yes it is. PITA to work within your own network.

I run a DNS server for this purpose.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

PWAs are god awful on IOS.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They are god-awful everywhere. I don’t get why people can be like “yeah I want all of my apps to be janky crap that is usually missing a lot of features you’d get for free using the platform toolkit”. The only exception I’ve seen thus far that was actually good is Figma and god knows how much effort they had to put into that to make it behave even remotely reasonably.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

The idea is that Google and Apple on Android and iOS have purposefully gimped PWA functionality in order to maintain the popularity of their app stores. Which I get, because web apps are much more useful and functional on full computers. So it’s not really the fault of the PWAs that PWAs suck. But unfortunately, they do suck.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Didn’t apple disable PWA’s in Europe?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes, they did that when the EU made the ruling about allowing other app stores. Apple doesn't like PWAs cause they lose their 30% cut. Hopefully we some ruling or law that they have to treat them equal to native apps.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Apple doesn’t like PWAs

Which would probably have Jobs rolling in his grave. He was all for web apps. Hell, their first attempt at widgets on macOS were just web apps. That's why he was so adamant about getting rid of Flash. He knew the technology was viable.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Ive been using PWAsForFirefox for couple of years now and it's pretty good tho a bit clunky at times as firefox updates tend to break some settings.

And reading through this article seems like I'll be sticking with PWAsForFirefox:

web apps in Firefox will not use a minimal browser frame and will continue to show a main toolbar with address bar, extensions, bookmarks – though the ‘new tab’ button will be replaced with a button to open a normal Firefox window.

Lame.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What's even the point if they do that, might as well just use bookmarks

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Yeah what a wasted opportunity which is very typical for Firefox

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I wanted a taskbar button for Navidrome at work. This is so I could quickly find my music in between the several open Firefox windows.

As the IT admin, I could've installed this. But I knew I REALLY shouldn't. It needed administrator rights, and I had no idea how secure it was.

So instead I used Brave for Navidrome PWA. Brave was installed as local user, so it couldn't bring down my entire organization if it got my password.

Now I'll be able to switch back.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

Yess finally. Switched off of Chrome after seeing uBlock Origin was going to go away, but I have a lot of PWAs which has been hacky to get working.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

What year is it?!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

most wanted feature