[WorldMaker]

The only well supported and consistent argument I see in those links is that Safari is bad at PWAs. I agree with that. But (timely rant incoming) I also think everyone is currently bad at PWAs. The current ServiceWorker-based approach is brittle and hard to use because it is too low level and too tightly coupled to what seem to be Chrome-specific concerns. The previous manifest.json approach should have never been disabled in Chrome, it should have at least lived side-by-side and let developers vote by their feet, at least until a reasonably equivalent high-level manifest replacement was built.

I was just thinking about this this week because I have a webpage I built with offline capabilities and an excuse coming up where many of the webpage's users will be offline for a week but might have use for the webpage, but I can't easily turn it into a PWA because it was built as an MPA and there's no great high level tools for writing an MPA's ServiceWorker because most of the high level libraries are so (overly) focused on SPAs. I wish I could just put a manifest.json or some sort of zip archive users could download and have it share Local Storage.

I do pin a lot of this on Google engineers. The side effect is Safari is having a hard time implementing these "standards", but the real cause is the "standards" are over-complicated trash that are also hard to develop for. Everyone including the links you sent can see how Apple's App Store moat gives them an incentive to drag their feet on implementing these "standards" and yet no one is giving Google enough gruff for the conflict of interest with Google Play's moats and making over-complicated standards that are hard for anyone to use and harder for anyone else to implement is just another way to drag your feet and keep the whole web platform behind, without looking like you are dragging your feet.

It would feel different, too, if the fully declarative manifest.json approach hadn't briefly worked (well) in Edge (Spartan) and Firefox before Google derailed that standards train with "Chrome-first" ServiceWorker complications. Always seemed like one of the reasons that Microsoft just gave up on the web platform because they couldn't keep up with Google's machinations (and conflicts of interest) in Chrome.

[nchmy]

It is bizarre that you're "pinning" this on the Chromium engineers - who are essentially the only ones moving the web forward.

The safari feet dragging/obstruction goes far beyond PWAs. The chart on this page is one of many examples showing how consistently far behind Safari is - they've been enormously behind chrome and firefox in coverage of tests for 7+ years. https://wpt.fyi/. And here's an extremely comprehensive article on the topic https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...

As for standards, here's another detailed series to learn from https://infrequently.org/series/effective-standards-work/. Once again, you have it all backwards. Saying "no one is giving Google enough gruff for the conflict of interest with Google Play's moats and making over-complicated standards" is not only laughable, but just dumb - Google doesn't and, in fact, can't "make standards". Standards are something that comes about through the painful diplomatic process described in those links.

Moreover, it is quite clearly an institutional decision to hold back the web, or else they would allow for other browser engines to run on iOS rather than focing them all to be skins on webkit. Again, this is all documented in extreme detail in the articles on that site. If you find it to be still somehow lacking, the author is very open to discussion on bluesky or mastodon (I'd prepare far better though, because what you've said thus far would get eviscerated).

Also bizarre that you are saying that Google Play is somehow at the root of this supposed scheme to make web standards impossible for others to implement. Android is similarly against the web flourishing, but evidently not nearly as powerful in the greater Google enterprise as iphone/app store is in Apple.

As for MPA PWAs, there's nothing at all stopping you from serving pages from a service worker. There's plenty of valid and accessible ways to precache all the pages that a user might need while offline. Workbox (from Google!) makes it easy, but its also easy to hand-roll.

And, Microsoft most definitely has not given up on the web platform - they literally adopted and make contributions to chromium. The author of that site literally works at Microsoft now, coaching both internal and external teams on improving their use of the web, as well as contributing to standards.

I dont see any point in continuing this discussion, as you haven't shown even the slightest interest in considering how you're living in some bizarro world.

If you are actually attempting to communicate in good faith, i can't recommend strongly enough that you read that entire site. And, likewise, read and support the work of Open Web Advocacy. https://open-web-advocacy.org/

[WorldMaker]

> It is bizarre that you're "pinning" this on the Chromium engineers - who are essentially the only ones moving the web forward.

I'm saying this is exactly the problem. If the perception is that only one browser is "moving forward" and the rest are just chasing that moving target, that's not healthy and it is not a standards process. WHATWG has always been at risk of "regulatory capture" by Google or at least Chromium interests. More so than ever there are standards that seems like WHATWG rubber stamped whatever Chrome decided to do without larger consensus work with Safari and Firefox. That's really dangerous for the web platform. (And W3C lost to WHATWG and seems increasingly irrelevant as a standards body for HTML.)

I think we are all very lucky that ECMA hasn't so far shown the same risk and TC-39 (JS) continues to look overall diverse and healthy.

> Google doesn't and, in fact, can't "make standards". Standards are something that comes about through the painful diplomatic process described in those links.

This is why I put standards in quotes in most of that comment. I do think WHATWG has already signed off on Chrome-first things as "standards" that aren't in the sense of multiple robust implementations and a diverse enough number of stakeholders that aren't just using Chromium-derived codebases. I worry WHATWG is at risk of getting worse in this.

> As for MPA PWAs, there's nothing at all stopping you from serving pages from a service worker. There's plenty of valid and accessible ways to precache all the pages that a user might need while offline. Workbox (from Google!) makes it easy, but its also easy to hand-roll.

As very personal experience from building PWAs (and failing to build many more of them): Workbox is bloated and awful to work with and is bad enough at SPAs that trying to feed it an MPA makes me want to scream just thinking about it. Hand-rolling a Service Worker remains a nightmare because the API is awful to work with by hand, which is the whole reason Workbox exists. There's something very wrong with the APIs that right now the only answer seems to be "just use Workbox". That's not healthy for the web platform to be so dependent on a single vendor's tool to get over the hump of using a web API. (Even if that tool is open source. CVEs affect open source like everything else.)

The last time I was serious about PWA development I broke down in tears and switched to Ionic's Capacitor and Electron because browser wrappers are still too much easier than writing a PWA.

I know that isn't just me also anecdotally by the number of Electron apps running on my machine even right now (a bunch) and the number of PWA apps running on my machine (none).

Statistically Service Workers and Workbox are massive failures, and it isn't Apple's fault and it is weird to me claiming that it is entirely Apple's fault. If you don't want to blame Google or at least Chromium engineers, that's fine, we don't have to agree on that. But show me the app with a working PWA ServiceWorker that has a good reliable caching strategy, good offline-first support, and people use that offline-first capability regularly and I'll show you a unicorn. The APIs are terrible, the standards should be better. If we don't want to point fingers at why the current APIs and standards are so awful, can we at least find someone to point a finger at who is actively working to make them better? It doesn't seem to be "Just Use Workbox" Chromium. Who is actually trying to move the offline-first web forward towards pragmatic reality and not just "we support it in theory, with this one JS library, but very few are using it in practice and almost none successfully"?

> And, Microsoft most definitely has not given up on the web platform - they literally adopted and make contributions to chromium. The author of that site literally works at Microsoft now, coaching both internal and external teams on improving their use of the web, as well as contributing to standards.

When Microsoft switched to Chromium they soft laid off a lot of their web platform staff. Chromium Edge's outward development focus seems to be AI and First-Party Coupon Cutting Extensions.

Spartan Edge had ideals and seemed to really believe in the PWA as a first class application platform. For a time, I had a bunch of PWAs as daily use applications in Windows 8 and early 10 (not all of which I built myself, either). That era is certainly gone now. WebView2 is making some inroads in reduce the reliance on Electron by certain types of apps, but WebView2 isn't a PWA platform, it is another end run around it/away from it.

> I dont see any point in continuing this discussion, as you haven't shown even the slightest interest in considering how you're living in some bizarro world.

> If you are actually attempting to communicate in good faith

You've strayed close enough to the realm of ad hominem attacks that I'm going to stop here. It doesn't sound like we are going to ever agree, but certainly not because I'm not debating in "good faith" or living in some "bizarro world". It seems rude to me to imply such accusations. Just because I have a different perspective doesn't make me a bad actor nor prove I have some sort of mental health issues. I may have experienced a different world than you have in my career, but there was nothing "bizarro" or worse about it. Different perspectives should be a joy to engage with, not an affront to ridicule. I'm sorry I couldn't find help you find common ground.

[nchmy]

it would, indeed, be great if there were others contributing to the web. Mozilla should be, but they seem to be run by incompetent grifters. Apple could be, but that would be completely against their interests. So we're left with chromium moving the web forward - that's not their fault and its ludicrous that you keep saying it is.

as for service worker, I literally said you dont need workbox. I have done lots of hand-rolled MPA caching. Its dead-simple, so i dont know what complexity you're referring to.

As for the fact that there arent many good pwas out there - people dont bother because iphone is a mess. Your arguments would hold water if apple allowed other browser engines and then pwas still languished.

Even still, there's all sorts of efforts towards offline/local-first. Its a hard problem to solve. But, again, simple MPA caching is not hard. If its a dynamic backend, then that would be much more difficult