Comment by zamadatix
6 months ago
I feel like the web would be a better place if "allow notifications" popups were only allowed for PWAs the user already installed. I.e. they have to manually interact with the page and then click the prompt acknowledging they want to install the site as an application on their computer before the site can start popping up windows from the browser asking for notification permissions.
It's not that there are 0 use cases where it could possibly be convenient to get notifications from a plain site but, like you said with the email example, 95% of the legitimate use cases are probably better modeled as an app anyways.
What's "progressive" about installing software?
It's always saddened me that people failed to understand the web platform, and never more so than today when that platform could be on the verge of extinction.
Young people don't remember this: in the 1990s if a big corporation wanted to make a 1-line change to an application deployed to a fleet of desktops they'd have to update every single machine and to do so they'd probably have to hire at least 1 FTE and probably more for installer engineering and other makework.
With the web it is often
on the server and you're done!
As it is I can find web sites with search, links from other sites, bookmarks and history. If you "install" applications you just clutter up your desktop with 300 icons for applications you don't really use which makes it hard to find the 2-3 that you really use.
It's progressive because you're progressing the permissions and features the website can access beyond those of a normal page. It has nothing to do with progressing the web to 90s style app installation and the update mechanism is nothing like that either, it functions as a locally cached webpage not as something you need an SCCM push to load a new binary or something. PWAs do not have to be accessed through desktop icons either - just launch them through the browser's interface as you seem to prefer. If you've ever seen a machine with a default Chrome install then it had about a half dozen PWAs installed without any such desktop shortcuts.
The best uses I've gotten out of PWAs are on my Linux machine where there either isn't a native app or I wouldn't trust installing one from the manufacturer if there was. At the same time I don't want random websites to have access to the permissions these apps would need so I load the PWA version of the website and now I've got the ideal island of something served as a website but with the elevated permissions it needs.