Firefox: Mozilla is working on Progressive Web Apps (PWA) support
Mozilla has been diligently at work recently to introduce highly requested features to its Firefox web browser. It launched one of these features, vertical tabs, in Firefox 136 already. Other features, including tab groups, are also on a good way and will be released in a future update.
Firefox already has an advantage in some areas feature-wise. The mobile version of Firefox, for example, supports browser extensions. Microsoft just recently introduced extensions for Edge on Android, but the feature is in beta and very limited. Google has never enabled extensions in the mobile version of Chrome.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
While Firefox has reached feature parity already in some regards or is beating its main competitors in other areas, it is still lagging behind in some areas. One of these is support for PWA.
Chromium-based browsers have supported Progressive Web Apps for a long time.
What are Progressive Web Apps (PWA)? Simply put, they move websites or services a bit out of the browser so that they work more like native applications. Means, you get window controls and functions, including the ability to pin PWAs to the taskbar or Start menu, responsiveness, offline support, and more.
Not every Internet user needs access to PWAs, but those who do or want that access, have a hard time using Firefox. While there is an extension for Firefox, called Progressive Web Apps for Firefox, that brings support, it is far from ideal.
Good news is that Mozilla is working in bringing native PWA support to Firefox. Mozilla calls these Taskbar Tabs and the feature is in active development. While that is the case, no version of Firefox exists right now that supports this in a functional way.
While you can enable the preference browser.taskbarTabs.enabled in Firefox Nightly, even there you will notice that the feature does not work right now.
Mozilla employee David Rubino shared Mozilla's vision regarding web apps just recently on the Mozilla Connect website. According to his post, Mozilla's main focus is on bringing some of the app-like features to web apps. These include the ability to add icons of web apps to the taskbar of the operating system and to have them open links that they support.
Other features, Rubino mentions the option to uninstall PWAs from the operating system's preference, may not be introduced, however.
Closing Words
It looks as if future versions of Firefox will support a base set of PWA features. While the initial implementation may not be as complete as that of Chromium-based browsers, it at the very least adds basic support for web apps in Firefox.
With that said, it is unclear at this point when the feature is going to see the light of day.
Now You: what is your take on Progressive Web Apps? Is that a feature that you use already, or something that you do not really need? Feel free to leave a comment down below. (via Windows Report)
After reading the following article, I think PWA have a place in modern computing:
https://medium.com/iquii/progressive-web-app-pwa-what-they-are-pros-and-cons-and-the-main-examples-on-the-market-318f4538c670
Something like Turbo.net?
The Medium article with a front-end for those who dislike the Medium environment yet appreciate the articles it hosts:
[https://scribe.rip/iquii/progressive-web-app-pwa-what-they-are-pros-and-cons-and-the-main-examples-on-the-market-318f4538c670]
Interesting article, but it doesn’t mention connections established by a PWA nor how cookies are managed : do these follow the rules of the browser or the rules of the site attended by the PWA?
Globally speaking and to summarize : browsers have (native, by dedicated extensions) prefs regarding privacy and security, do these prevail when the browser uses a PWA? Is a PWA a guest or an intruder?
Several large corporations (ahem… eg. MS) want to revert everybody to using dumb terminals. They desperately want you to RENT the use of programs and also to have to pay for access to your own data. “Progressive Web Apps” are just another step in that direction because they fool people into mistakenly believing that web services are installed applications.
I refuse to buy into this kind of a future in computing.
All I want is a firefox Android native cookie management that allows for individual cookie management, not the all or none that Android FF has. Most of the stuff FF has come out with is just junk filler that is not really necessary.
“Now You: what is your take on Progressive Web Apps?”
A absolute misnomer.
Trying to ride the ‘progressive’ sticker to appeal to a certain americanism.
Very regressive.
Reminds of ActiveX “”””apps”””” running in a undecorated msie window back in the day, with all the scary associations that this conjures from those dark times if msie 4,5…
Just another step in the war to turn the browser into a half-assed VM, without all the necessary insulation and isolation, towards the end goal of complete full access for (any) website to all of your machine and everything on it without any way for you to filter it, say no or opt out.
It is not that people failed to learn from the horrors of that past. It is a convergence of interests that work against us, combined with new generation who has not lived though that and just want to be able to do more stuff without realizing the dangers, because they did not live though that like those who are more experienced in years.
It is aggravated by the fact that so much more of the world is online today. In the days of activex, crime was not as organized and online. Things back then did not go as much to shit as they would have if it was on todays internet.
Yet here we are, people don’t see it for what it is and where it is going.
App this, app that, PWA here and there, you can be sure they are always pushing for more access, taking away control and breaking out of sandboxes when they can, to loot, pillage, root and infest.
People complained for years about lack of PWA support on Firefox and now Mozilla decides to add support but people still complain? PWAs are useful when you want app like experience but do not want to install a 500MB program because almost every desktop app is basically a browser as a wrapper for webpage nowadays.
Mozilla Foundation spends most of the income on “social causes”, stock investments outside its business scope and bloated salaries. Not the company that is going to stay in the business for long unless somebody buys them out. Personally, I hope a few companies will do forks of Firefox code and hopefully continue updating it for a while. But I feel really gloomy about Firefox future.
Maybe Trump will release the Trump browser that blocks everything you hate. It will contain fact blockers, reality rewrite scripts and will blur images of non white, non male persons.
Is it too much to ask for Browser maker to spend 90% of income on technology/software and not on politically motivated causes, extremely high salaries to top management and irrelevant financial investments? If some other Browser maker did the same with donations to causes that I like, I would say exactly the same: it will not last. Technology is a cutthroat business. If Mozilla continues on the same path of squandering money, it will continue losing market share. All this money that have been wasted or hoarded could have been spent on marketing and partnerships to improve market share.
I want Firefox to survive. I had used it personally for more than a decade. But they follow the path of Wikipedia into irrelevancy under current management.
There already is Tusk browser, but it’s just a reskin of Chrome.
Firefox based Floorp browser will probably replace Firefox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OUjWdAtGbs
Lets hope librewolf keeps pwa’s out.
My first thought was, “ohh, they’re going back to 2009 for their ‘new’ feature”. It was a pretty solid guess:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Prism
Active 2007 to 2011. I was really excited about it at the time (and very disappointed that they cancelled it), but that was before most of us got used to just living in our browsers with tons of tabs.
lmao, took their time. I already have Ferdium now.
For my personal case, being aware it is not universal, I’ve never been interested by vertical tabs nor tab groups, nor PWAs, whatever the browser be. For the analogy and for what it’s worth I perceive PWAs like a second head on a body generally fit to have but one. Not fond of mixing things up on a browser, felt sometimes as the X (Twitter) syndrome : a central place governing more than itself. I run the browser and if I need a specific service I open its page. Yet I can imagine situations where having dynamic data updated right in the browser may come handy (weather, stock markets), though I wouldn’t be concerned. I may of course be totally wrong in my perceptions, yet being fond of browsers browsing and browsing only, free of (what I consider as) gadgets remains a guideline here : simplicity and efficiency.
PWAs are potential security hazards. Implementing this is (from a security point of view) a terrible idea, because it further blurs the otherwise clear distinction between “local” and “online”.
On mobile phones that’s anyhow already the case, because the vast majority of apps are just webpages in disguise, because apps have far higher permissions to access local data (granted at the time of installation by the user), than a normal web page, which is why everybody wants you to install his/her app, instead of just proving a web page. It’s not good to see, that this is now also spreading to real computers, although Chrome started that mess a long time ago.
It’s very sorry to see, that Mozilla now also does such things, just because others, who don’t care also did it.
Yeah, it might be somewhat convenient in some cases, but convenience at cost of security is rarely a smart choice.
Could be handy to have a dedicated “YouTube” icon in the taskbar, to launch YouTube in a new private window with uBlock Origin installed so that it won’t nag about adblocking or signing in. This for people that normally don’t block cookies or ever clear out any browser data.