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Should one prefer Firefox PWAs (via plugin) and Firefox Web-Apps over Electron apps? (lemm.ee)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Not really that worried but rather curious about your opinions. Use what suits your demands best.

But for starters:

Electron is a framework based on Chromium used to develop desktop apps. Examples of apps that are built on Electron are Discord, Element Desktop, MS Teams, Slack, GitHub Desktop, Atom, VS Code and counting

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

If there's a PWA or Electron version of an app, I go with the PWA 100% of the time.

What plugin do you use in Firefox to add PWA support? That's the ONE thing keeping me from ditching Chromium on desktop. Firefox on Android has PWA support (yay), but desktop still does not (boo).

I tried one or two add-ons in the relatively recent past, and neither worked to my satisfaction. Curious if you've found a better one that will bridge the feature gap and let me ditch Chromium.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I'm using PWAs for Firefox but I have barely used it yet to be honest. And one needs to download an app for that besides the plugin to get it working.

Besides that I do recall that Linux Mint shipped (and maybe still ships) a tool to create Firefox PWAs with. I never really tried it tho and I'm not sure if it is available for other operating systems beside Mint.

But similar to you, I'm in somewhat of an experimental phase concerning Firefox PWAs

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Cool, thanks.

Yep, PWAs for Firefox is one I've tried and it did not work for me (forget the exact issues, but they were insurmountable). Even with the helper app , which I think was required to add/manage the launchers to the application menu, it just didn't work out.

I'll dig around when I have some more time to see what Linux Mint ships. Chances are it can be installed on other distros or at least compiled.

Edit: https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/01/install-linux-mints-web-app-manager-ubuntu-20-04/amp/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

If it was because it kept opening random websites from your history, I helped diagnose that bug not long ago. And the dev got it fixed!

I'm happy with the plugin, and it has completely replaced my Edge PWAs. Even better, unlike Edge/Chrome, I'm allowed to rename the shortcut name or modify the url before creating the shortcut. And to open PWA links as tabs. Only drawback I've found so far is that the PWA runs on its own Firefox profile. Not a big issue with Firefox sync.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The PWA support on android isn't great either. At least compared to chrome or even Samsung Internet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Agreed. You can't install as an app, just a home screen shortcut, notifications don't take you to the web page when clicked

I use PWAs for some things, but I wish they worked better