Progressive Web Apps, a crack-pipe idea that allows you to install websites as if they were computer applications. Desktop entries, shortcuts, opens as a single window with no URL bar, everything to make it look like a computer application, but it isn’t. It didn’t take off because it’s not a very good idea, with no very good implementations. In my opinion.
Because installing a native app requires an enormous amount of trust. Every native app running as your user has read access to all data created by every other app including browsers and their secrets like saved credentials.
The Linux ecosystem mostly got away with this by being too small to be worth targeting. But several recent events (like the attacks on the AUR) have increasingly shown that we’ve passed the threshold where that’s no longer true.
So, what am I to use when I don’t have the time to go through the source code of every new version of every single app with a fine-toothed comb? Well, browsers (while not perfect) have some level of sandboxing, doing an overall decent job of keeping websites’ (apps) data isolated from each other.
Switching to use web apps whenever possible meant (at least, in Firefox) giving up a lot of the functionality of native apps (like default file associations, dedicated entry in the taskbar, and so many others). They’re basically refusing to acknowledge the open web as a platform that solves a real need: providing security and escape from walled-garden app stores (which is the bigger problem on mobile). Instead they’re spending their funding on AI, and VPNs, and random other features nobody really asked for.
While I think it’s very important that there is more than one browser implementation in the world, I have 2 choices:
Use Chromium fork to get security and convenience and privacy.
Use Firefox (or its forks) to maybe get privacy at the expense of the other two.
Viewing a web browser as the “open internet platform” is the crux of this issue that has gone unchecked for years. We turned a document reader into an application environment. This is the issue I have with PWA. A plastic bandage on a festering wound.
On your points regarding sandboxing, I believe that should’ve been rolled into OS userspaces for years as well, and only developing the technology as it relates to web browsers is a huge oversight that has and will further lead to security issues.
Not everything needs to be an application but building applications in a document viewer is a bit silly.
edit: less cynicism; I want to take a moment to charade all the efforts gone into Linux distributions that take sandboxing and immutability seriously. They aren’t very good solutions either, but it all starts somewhere.
PWA? Poopy Wet Ass? I know nothing about computing what is PWA
Progressive Web Apps, a crack-pipe idea that allows you to install websites as if they were computer applications. Desktop entries, shortcuts, opens as a single window with no URL bar, everything to make it look like a computer application, but it isn’t. It didn’t take off because it’s not a very good idea, with no very good implementations. In my opinion.
Because installing a native app requires an enormous amount of trust. Every native app running as your user has read access to all data created by every other app including browsers and their secrets like saved credentials.
The Linux ecosystem mostly got away with this by being too small to be worth targeting. But several recent events (like the attacks on the AUR) have increasingly shown that we’ve passed the threshold where that’s no longer true.
So, what am I to use when I don’t have the time to go through the source code of every new version of every single app with a fine-toothed comb? Well, browsers (while not perfect) have some level of sandboxing, doing an overall decent job of keeping websites’ (apps) data isolated from each other.
Switching to use web apps whenever possible meant (at least, in Firefox) giving up a lot of the functionality of native apps (like default file associations, dedicated entry in the taskbar, and so many others). They’re basically refusing to acknowledge the open web as a platform that solves a real need: providing security and escape from walled-garden app stores (which is the bigger problem on mobile). Instead they’re spending their funding on AI, and VPNs, and random other features nobody really asked for.
While I think it’s very important that there is more than one browser implementation in the world, I have 2 choices:
Viewing a web browser as the “open internet platform” is the crux of this issue that has gone unchecked for years. We turned a document reader into an application environment. This is the issue I have with PWA. A plastic bandage on a festering wound.
On your points regarding sandboxing, I believe that should’ve been rolled into OS userspaces for years as well, and only developing the technology as it relates to web browsers is a huge oversight that has and will further lead to security issues.
Not everything needs to be an application but building applications in a document viewer is a bit silly.
edit: less cynicism; I want to take a moment to charade all the efforts gone into Linux distributions that take sandboxing and immutability seriously. They aren’t very good solutions either, but it all starts somewhere.