Similarly, Rubino says web apps in Firefox will not use a minimal browser frame and will continue to show a main toolbar with address bar, extensions, bookmarks
But why, the whole purpose is to behave like a stand alone app.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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What the ...? Then why do it on the first place. Mozilla being stupid again.
I mean there's a solid chance not a single coder now is the same as back when it was removed? It's been quite a while. 😅
A) Because they suffer from some kind of weird delusion that they will some day gain mote than single digit market share and then subsequently lose it because somebody hacked your grandmother‘s computer with a YouTube video that was running in full screen?
B) They are the worlds laziest coders and google paid them 20M a year to do nothing for… however many years it’s been.
They are the worlds laziest coders and google paid them 20M a year to do nothing for…
Only a fraction of a fraction of this is actually used in relation to the browser, and only a fraction of this goes to the actual coders/developers.
I am sure the devs do the best work they can do and are allowed to do. This is entirely a management issue.
I wouldn't say they're lazy. Quite the opposite in fact. They're just so under-resourced compared to Chrome, which has the benefit of a massive for-profit company backing it, in addition to a much larger range of third-party contributors (from Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, and more). They struggle to keep up with the fast pace at which web standards evolve.
Man, they really fuck up everything they touch now.
On desktop I think that's less valuable, and personally, I like the confidence of knowing that eg uBO still works, and the predictability of how it will behave.
The Connect thread is interesting; PWAs are a nebulous term and everyone has different use cases for them, so if this allows to cover some of those with significantly less investment, that makes sense to me.
Yeah when they removed it there was virtually no comment on it. At the time everybody understood PWAs were just... you might as well use a new window and press F11. It's just window dressing.
I mean I get it, there's some marginal use cases. Sure. And it looks pretty in the end. But I also get why from a dev perspective there's just very little actual point to them.
Because it’s low effort.
Less time and money spent on useless features like progressive web apps means more time can be spent on useful features like data harvesting, AI bullshit, and Facebook-approved advertising.
PWAs are not a useless feature. It's an incredibly useful and powerful set of web standards that allows sites to provide excellent user experiences more akin to what apps could provide, without users needing to go and download an app—which a lot of users, especially more privacy and security focused users—hate being asked to do.
That was clearly a comment that should have ended with /s
Yeah, I thought that calling Facebook approved advertising “useful” would make it obvious.
Thank you. I work on (as in develop) PWAs on a daily basis, so none of this is new to me. I think my sarcasm just didn’t quite hit the mark. I appreciate you standing up for PWAs. 💖
Honestly I just love the idea of PWAs so much, but I've so rarely seen anything that truly seems to take advantage of what they can offer, so I'm just a little sensitive to dismissal of them.
I definitely get it. I remember reading Mozilla's blasé attitude towards them years ago, with them justifying not supporting PWAs because no one uses them, and thinking that obviously no one will use them if you don't make Firefox a good alternative for using them!
The customer my company works towards have chosen to move a lot of their operations to PWAs because they're so versatile and can be easily integrated to all the systems they need to run them on. We target phones, tablets, heavy machinery, and desktops.
Originally when the iPhone launched the entire idea was to not have apps, but use PWAs. That was maybe a bit early since PWAs weren't that mature yet, but with modern web platform technologies you can do a lot with PWAs, so I think if that sort of concept was launched today it'd do better.
That was maybe a bit early since PWAs weren’t that mature yet
Not only were they not mature yet, they didn't exist. Web apps as a concept did...sorta, barely, but the ServiceWorker API that defines true PWAs wasn't introduced to Chrome until 2015—and Safari (on both Mac and iOS) didn't get it until 2018, over a decade after the original iPhone launched.
Can't you just hit F11 or whatever to full screen? Personally, I hate losing the bar. Makes grabbing the URL annoying, and I like being able to interact with my extensions.
Fullscreen will hide the window decorations, but that won't solve the use case of "behaving like a desktop application". I use PWAs for websites that are applications (Outlook, Teams, Spotify etc). I want these windows to be dedicated to those applications and nothing else. They should appear in my window list on alt+tab, not be able to navigate away to something else etc.
Ah I see your point now. So is that how Outlook behaves now if launched via Web on chromium browsers? I'm still using the installed version, and am on Firefox now (playing around with Brave just this week).
Yes, if you want it to. There is a pwa button that appears on pwa supported sites that lets you toggle between app window mode and normal browse tab mode.
I could maybe understand from a security perspective - make sure it's not a malicious URL, but... that seems rather thin.
Whole point is to give the aesthetics of a standalone app... Ridiculous executive slop.
... after removing them and ignoring them for several years.
About time.
If i told you i have a way to do that with 1/100 of the code on both sides?1