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Search - "pwa"
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Please. Hear me out.
I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.
And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.
It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.
As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.
The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).
This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.
You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.
Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.
Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.
But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.22 -
"This page looks better in the app"
No, it f**king doesn't! I checked it, you lazy analytics-hungry monstrosity.1 -
Play Store's $25 registration fee - for getting PWA listed in their shitty catalogue? Who in the right mind would even jump in this clusterfuck of store to find a *web* app? For all you know, Google, there is such thing as QR codes - and customers can just scan the code (or type in that sweet address). Voila! Boom!!! Ching-ching!
Hello-hello, monopolistic cashgrabage! I came to inform you that your TWA bullshit is unneeded in ETHICAL space. The only ones who would benefit from this thing are permission-hungry publishers. And I'm already sick of this culture where people are put into store bubbles. You can't hide the fact that this data and features you provide, with "native" layer, may be misused in a jiffy - and by big players, no less. Of course, as a vile dumpster that you are, you don't mind it.
Don't even bring up a battery consumption that comes with PWA and browser. This doesn't matter if you use an app for some 2 minutes to tick your mental checkboxes! I'm just sick of app stores and native apps that collect the data without normal warning, and dare to take more than 1 second to fucking load the cached data. Take a lesson or two from PWAs that collect (probably useful) cache, instead of my specs, and load almost instantly.12 -
Why?! Why do companies need to build a useless application for their product every... single... time? It's not like I'm going to watch the state of my (future) pension every single day, I only want to update my personal information.
(I kinda get why, but still, you can get similar features out of a PWA as well, which is less annoying for the end user)2 -
A website that tracks modern browser/PWA features availability across platforms
https://fugu-tracker.web.app3 -
Web Push notifications for PWA finally coming to iOS 2023
API is already there at experimental features settings9 -
Recently, Apple rolled out Push Notifications for PWA websites as a beta feature on iOS 16.4 devices. And let me tell you, it's a game-changer! But, when a client asked me to implement push notifications for their iOS users via web and service worker, I knew it wouldn't be a walk in the park.
Why, you ask? Well, their backend code base was written in Plain F*cking Vanilla PHP, which felt like I had time-traveled back to the 1980s! Plus, since the ios web push feature is still in its early stages, there were hardly any resources to guide me through the process of sending push notifications to Apple WebPush API using plain php.
Despite the obstacles, I managed to successfully send notifications to Mozilla and Google Chrome users. But Safari? Not so much. The client needed the task done within 24 hours, but due to delays, it ended up taking me three days to figure out the kinks. In the end, I had to refund the client, but I'm not one to give up easily.
In fact, I've created a public GitHub repo for a Quotes App in Flutter (https://github.com/GiddyNaya/...) that can send PN to iOS users via web. I'm diving down the rabbit hole to figure out how to make it work seamlessly, and I won't stop until I've cracked the code. Wish me luck!15 -
collAnon.app v2.0.21, my long running PWA/WebApp about private discussions and confrontations, is finally out with many theme and UI improvements, better forms and a lot of bug fixing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm really happy of this release of mine that I wanted to share it here.
It's also mostly self hosted with a third party, GDPR compliant, CDN (I did learn many things integrating Blazor WASM with a CDN)8