PWA was an awesome idea and should have been the way forward.
Unfortunately both Google and Apple very early on identified that it was in their best interest to keep the concept around in a half-dead state and ensure nobody really built on it...
You get notification. You can autoplay video/audio. You get whaterver video or element full screen with all necessary UI. You get rotation lock. You have a fullscreen to do what ever you want for any purpose. You probably can't touch hardware APIs(for example: bluetooth/nfc) like native app. But that isn't really needed for most apps either.
On the other side. Apple seems sabotage the PWA as much as possible. You can't autoplay video/audio. You can't even fullscreen anything other than video, and when fullscreen video, UI is ignored. Also there is no way to disable gesture so your app will misfire system gesture. And you can't lock the rotation either. There is no way to auto rotate the video player or whatever when maximized either.
It's really a golden example for pretend to do something while actually not. It seems you can do pretty much everything with ios pwa. And when you try to do it. You will figured out it will have a worse experience than native app because all sort of issues.
To be fair, Android also sabotages PWAs, it's just done behind your back. You see, in order to get a PWA to properly install, you'll have to use Chrome, and you'll have to have a Google Play account and Chrome will submit the PWA manifest for validation to a Google server, which in turn will decide whether the PWA is worthy, and if it is, it will generate a so called WebAPK, which is then installed on your device. If it's not worthy however, then it will become a bookmark instead, and many of the features that can be described in the manifest will not work at all.
So if you wanted to use a different browser or install a PWA without a connection to the internet, or without Google Play, all you get is a bookmark.
In my personal experience, it only validate whether manifest is malformatted though. Although it's still up to google if they want to do something wonky.
I saw someone claim on SO that they were not able to get a PWA to install properly until they changed their IP address, supposedly because they were from Iran, a sanctioned country.
To my knowledge, every PWA installed from Firefox on Android will become a bookmark. For Firefox I believe that means for example that if you try to open a link elsewhere that is within the manifest scope, it will not open in the PWA. That's because it's not possible to deep link to the PWA without it having an AndroidManifest with a corresponding intent filter, which is what the Chrome WebAPK achieves and why they can support for example custom protocol handlers or share targets or launch handling options.
Google invented PWAs and broke their back trying to make them a thing. I'm not a fan of Google but credit where credit is due.
They were also highly incentivized to develop the APIs that make it all work as Chromebooks are basically hosts for browser apps. Apple, as well as the other tech giants involved in the W3C had no such incentives and were dragging their feet.
Admittedly I am not up to date on the latest developments but as far as a couple years ago the PWA runtime on both ecosystems was significantly stymied in comparison to the APP runtime. No access to real storage functionality, significantly less platform APIs, yada yada.
Sure, you could build "better (installable) websites" but even to get standardized stuff like background execution or notifications working was either impossible or a long series of jumping through hoops. Even installation prompts bugged out way too often.
But to be clear, if that isn't the case any more I will be positively surprized by either platform provider.
I respect PWAs, but they take away so much that I personally want. No address bar, no tabs, no history, no extensions. It's a reversion from the glorious amazing user agency of the web to the sad state that computing had held us victim to for decades.
They also don't require a dump truck load of third party dependencies just to have a serviceable set of widgets to use. Every time I start looking into web app development I'm always shocked at what's required to replicate what one gets for "free" in a UIKit app.
Swift doesn't need a service worker to proxy all browser behaviour, and make use of local storage, with unspecified limit, to prentend to be working offline.
You do realize that there are many APIs that exist so that your Swift app works offline, right? There are specific persistence frameworks, tools for controlling caching, extensions for managing external files, etc. The argument that writing JavaScript that doesn’t make network requests and needs to store state to disk is somehow super special and different than any other regular JavaScript makes no sense.
You do realize that neither do browser apps require having a network card on your laptop, right ? You can run local browser apps (HTML + CSS + JS) on a computer with no network card.
No, not at all. Lots of apps using the system webview nowadays. I would urge you to revise your deeply outdated knowledge. Lots of frameworks making this convenient too. Capacitor (Ionic) Apps, Cordova (PhoneGap) Apps, Tauri (non-Chromium modes), etc.
A network card is not required for:
- Loading local HTML files into a WebView
- Packaging an app that embeds the WebView (e.g., WinUI WebView2, macOS WKWebView, Android WebView, blah-blah)
- Running JavaScript, CSS, DOM APIs
- Using local storage, IndexedDB, etc
- Accessing file:// resources
- Communicating with native code (e.g., JS <-> native messaging)
Btw, there are a lot of non-Chromium apps! Are you aware that Microsoft Teams now uses the System WebView on mobile (iOS WKWebView / Android WebView) ?
Linux apps like GNOME Notes, Foliate, ReText, Liferea etc use the system webview.
Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Podcasts, App Store, Dash, etc use WKWebView
> I don't quite think companies realize how bad it would be if EG AWS was hacked.
I don't think they'd care. Companies only care about one thing: stock price. Everything rolls up into that. If AWS got hacked and said company was affected by it, it wouldn't be a big deal because they'd be one of many and they'd be lost in the crowd. Any hit to their stock/profits would be minimal and easily forgotten about.
Now, if they were on prem or hosted with Bob's Cloud and got hacked? Different story altogether.
> Companies only care about one thing: stock price.
Its rarely affected in any case. Take a look at the Crowdstrike price chart (or revenue or profits). I think most people (including investors) just take it for granted that systems are unreliable and regard it as something you live with.
I think that's more of a indicator that it hasn't effected their business. They lost nearly 1/5 of their stock price after that incident (obviously not accounting for other factors; I'm not a stock analyst). Investors thought they'd lose customers and reacted in obvious fashion.
But it's since been restored. According to the news, they lost very little customers over the incident. That is why their stock came back. If they continued having problems, I doubt it would have been so rosy. So yes, to your point, a blip here or there happens.
Well it's a helluva lot faster to make for one. For two, just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now. Reducing the barrier of entry has obvious advantages.
I just opened the app to see what else I can bring up, and while clicking through UI I noticed I had some crappy key bindings extension installed, which apparently caused many of my annoyances.
I've probably installed it very long ago, or even by accident.
For example, I was always annoyed that open file/directory shortcut (one of most common operations) is not assigned and requires mouse interaction -- fixed by disabling the extension.
Go to file shortcuts does something completely different -- fixed by disabling the extensions.
I likely won't adopt Cursor as my main IDE/Editor, but it's miles better than I thought just an hour ago.
Not the person you asked, but I hate how it screws up keyboard shortcuts.
It overrode the delete line shortcut with its own inline chat one, for example.
Decided to ditch it for claude code right after that, since I cannot be bothered to go over the entire list of keyboard shortcuts and see what else it overrode/broke.
I've found that annoying too, but you can always rebind them as you wish. It's only a few new keybinds that get in the way of my muscle memory.
That said I also have moved to CLI agents like Claude Code and Codex because I just find them more convenient and, for whatever reason, more intelligent and more likely to correctly do what I request.
> just about everyone knows how to navigate in vscode by now.
I don’t know and honestly I hate the assumption of the software industry that everyone knows or uses vs code. I stuck to sublime for years until I made the switch to Jetbrains IDEs earlier this year.
I quickly looked up the market share and VS code seems to have about 70% which is a lot but the 30% that don’t use it is not that small of a number either.
Like I get it it’s very popular but it’s far from the only editor/IDE people use.
This is only a problem when you look at the micro level of cultures or individual states. Sure, some culture may die out, but that's been happening forever.
There's 8 billion humans on this planet, and we're still fucking like we always have been. The human race will be safe from prosperity.
Humans will number 10 to 11 billion before the curve starts pointing downward. Even China, the supposed basket case of population collapse will "collapse" to their level of a few decades ago. The current population was supposed to be catastrophically overpopulated.
I don't agree with them but there are significant numbers of people who think 10 or 11 billion is way beyond sustainability.
It's the new age of propaganda. It's not just on HN; it's just slightly easier to spot here because we can easily look at history. Bots are everywhere, trying to drive the narrative in the direction their owners desire. They're playing a really long game here and we don't even know who the players are.
At least they tried something different/interesting with 3. It might not have felt like a PS game but it was unique I guess. I still think they made up for it with 4 though.
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