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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Firefox
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Firefox supports PWAs, at least on mobile.
Are they PWAs tho, or just shortcuts?
They open in a window separate from the browser and don't display the browser toolbar, so not just shortcuts.
The main purpose of PWAs is not to remove the browser toolbar but rather cache most of the website to improve speed and reduce data usage if I am not wrong, there are external tools to get rid of the toolbar but Firefox dropped the PWA spec which includes a lot more than just that.
The caching is the result of service workers which Firefox definitely supports.
edit: oh just scrolled down and saw you already commented that later.
Real PWAs, though PWAs aren't that different from shortcuts tbh
As far as I know their main purpose is to cache various parts of the website properly which is a lot more than just a shortcut.
Regular websites can do that too using service workers - Lemmy's webapp uses this to show an error when an instance is unreachable
What we call a PWA is usually just a webpage with a webmanifest, and a service worker script to manage loading those cached resources you mentioned
Seems like you are right, the caching for proper offline usage and use with very limited internet connections is all done trough service workers. Their main job seems to be system integration and while Firefox Android kind of sucks at that too it doesn't seem like they ever cut that down so they just dropped it for desktop users.
On Android at least, Firefox PWA's don't seem to support registering system-level things (like 'Share To' handlers) - you need to use a Chrome PWA for that....
You can use them on Mint through their webapp application.
it does? How
Did my image not load?
Anyway, there's a webapp application that came with Mint and I can use it to setup PWAs through Firefox. I use it for my two router's setup pages.
Here's a link to the git for the that application: https://github.com/linuxmint/webapp-manager
Doesnt seem like it. But thanks
It's not firefox that supports it, it's an app called webapp manager. you can make webapps using any browser you have installed.
You can use it on any distro.
Well, yes. I guess I was saying more that it can be done.
Poor wording on my part.
It's not a problem. I just wanted to clarify that it's distro and browser agnostic.
Oh, my bad. I see you're on world. I don't think the uploaded images in kbin's comments show up on there very well.
See if you can see it from this link.
Ah i see thanks. I used to use this one which is an extension + a backend app iirc
Nice, I was trying to figure out how to get that working with Firefox. But, to be fair, it's not Firefox that's supporting PWA, it's the mint webapp-manager which is only included with Mint and requires extra steps to install on other OSes. Not as straight forward as PWA being directly supported by Firefox.