this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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@bloodfart
I've read through your comments and it seems like your primary concerns are:
you believe users "trust" apps and "distrust" websites, and PWAs trick a user into a false sense of trust, and the user's personal feelings are somehow relevant to the security of the software
you believe that it is possible to bundle a browser engine, customized by the PWA developer, that will be installed with the PWA and the PWA will run inside of
I'm going to need a source on 2
If you don’t think users are part of the security equation I don’t know what to tell you.
I’ll try to dig up a source for the second thing tomorrow morning when I’m in front of a computer. Four years or so when I dipped my toes into what was then a new technology to see what it’s all about that was the example in the site I looked at to learn how it worked and how to translate an interactive website into an offline pwa.
As you can imagine I found that repulsive and dropped it like a bad habit. Seeing a multitude of pwas on every android device all doing out of band alerts and notifications just made me more opposed to them in general.
Looking into the state of pwas today it really seems like the best support is through chromium/blink. Do you think once apple gets ahold of allowing other rendering engines they’ll allow them back on or what?
@bloodfart
I could be wrong, but I think you are simply mistaken because there should be absolutely no possible way for the PWA to install a browser engine onto your device? The user can first install the browsers of their choice, separately, and then install PWAs using that browser.
That would be a huge concern and really contradict the entire point and purpose behind PWAs as I understand them... I've been searching but can't find anything like what you say. I'd love to see your source
I dug up my old development backups from that time and I had it backwards, the advice was to read user agent strings and link directly to the version of the browser your pwa was designed for if you saw they weren’t running the “right” one and were worried about it breaking.
So I was mistaken but the reality was weirdly still bad.
I don’t know if that’s still commonplace. Right now it seems like a lot of pwas target chrome because it’s the most popular browser.