That's the reason I sigh :smile: I remember asking about packaged apps in the first Chrome Dev Summit. You told me they weren't the future, but Chrome would have to circle back around. Chrome leadership and FF leadership, on the other hand, were in love with packaged apps.
Vision is not about "feel good". It's about convincing people that you have a reason to exist that justifies the pain of another thing, and convincing them you'll stick around long enough to see it through.
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In this case, big apps couldn't help but see FFOS as a crappier Windows Phone. Another platform to support with painful restrictions and nothing to justify the extra work. As a developer, I was praying for these platforms to die.
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Well they all did
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Yep. What you needed was fewer devs hoping for failure, and "we worked kind of fast to get a subset of native features working poorly on slow phones" didn't do that. I have no idea if the PWA vision would have fared better, but the pitch wouldn't have given me (a dev) the shakes
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"If you build a <FFPWA>, it'll work on mobile, and of course it'll work on FirefoxOS, because FirefoxOS is just the web. But if you target FFOS, not only will your app work on the web, but it will also have superpowers when running inside of FFOS"
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FFOS started in 2011. PWA were far from being a thing then.
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@slightlylate,@annevk and I were pitching them to anyone who would listen *at the time*. I spoke with FFOS folks at the first Chrome Dev Summit.@annevk and I commiserated *at the time*. -
I wrote this in 2013, after running for TAG in 2012 overtly to fix the app cache mess: http://yehudakatz.com/2013/05/21/extend-the-web-forward/ … I wrote the Extensible Web Manifesto in 2013 in part to push back against the widely held belief that packaged apps were the only way forward.
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FFOS engineers were aware of the PWA vision at the time, and just didn't believe it was worth prioritizing. Full stop.
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Mozilla is unable to stick around for anything but a desktop browser unfortunately.
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They made a strategic decision to go all in on desktop. Well known that it was not what I recommended, but I admire the bold counter-mainstream strategy. If the desktop ever has an unexpected big renaissance Mozilla will be in a great position.
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Desktop has a billion users, and while its market share is reducing, its absolute numbers don't seem to be. This is, in part, because working all over the world spend 8 hours a day in front of desktop (and many of them surf the web on the job).
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Abandoning desktop is silly, just as ignoring mobile is. There's still a great opportunity to differentiate on desktop, but it doesn't matter if the mobile experience sucks or is nonexistent (a great desktop browser needs to sync with a mobile one).
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“Abandoning horse carriages is silly”. Principally correct but maybe we can agree that desktop is not where the future is headed
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I don't see any evidence that workplace desktops are disappearing, even while I do see a lot of evidence that people are rapidly abandoning desktops for mobile for personal use. In the long term, who knows. Maybe something else will replace workplace desktops ultimately.
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How is this controversial?! Of course people will still browse the web from their work computers. The analogy to horse drawn carriages is absurd.
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To say nothing of the fact that plenty of web apps will be written primarily for desktop, enabling users to do their jobs from the desktop. Billing reconciliation, payroll, etc. Myopic to imagine people shifting *all* their web usage to the 5" screens they carry in their pocket
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