Max_P

jlou , 4 months ago to Technology

Apple Is Trying to Kill the Open Internet!

https://youtu.be/up-zUEFNMww

@technology

Max_P , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Firefox is just a browser and has nothing to do with PWAs that require OS support.

It does. PWAs are browser installed apps. On Android, they show up as independent icons with the Firefox logo on it:

Lemmy icon as a Firefox PWA

Those behave like independent apps, they have their own icon, their own entry in the app switcher, they're full screen with no browser UI elements. Just a full screen web page. This has been possible for a long time on iOS too with Safari.

It has nothing to do with sideloading. PWAs were a way to make web apps feel as close as possible to real apps as possible. Things like https://vger.app feels almost like native apps.

Apple's decided they'd rather get rid of it than let third party browsers be able to do that, as they can't control how much those apps can do. Chrome can just make WASM really good and make native apps less necessary, and make the AppStore tax more avoidable, and they won't let that happen.

And Firefox does indeed also kinda suck in the PWA department, and have kind of soft-abandonned them, and they're buggy. On Chrome, a good PWA can feel as good as native.

Max_P , 4 months ago

I think they fear someone will make a browser that makes native apps less desirable.

Google could wrap all the iOS widget, expose them to WASM and basically let people bypass the AppStore entirely and install everything as Chrome "apps".

Safari conveniently lacks a lot of the features that would compete with native apps in features, like refusing to implement WebPush until very recently.

They don't want web apps to even have a chance to compete with their AppStore. With Safari being the only allowed browser, they could make sure the browser is always less desirable than downloading the app.