How can Firefox create the best support for web apps on the desktop?

I would like browsers to offer a true "local app mode": Locally installed code (HTML/JS) that would be run using the browser runtime, but with enhanced privileges behind a permission model (e.g. the possibility to grant filesystem access etc.).

Currently, developers that need a single thing they can't get from within a browser are generally forced to create an Electron app, which means they essentially bundle an outdated (and often never updated) version of a browser with their app. It would be much better if you could just use the already installed, always updated browser as the runtime for your "local" app.

That would also create an incentive to develop in the browser ecosystem, and possibly move to a PWA - or at least it would show why devs prefer "real" applications to PWAs.

Many people already said this, but isolation is core. From the moment I press "install pwa": separate desktop icon, separate storage. I should be able to choose for which profile the app is installed (to support multiple profiles) and the window should be managed separately.

Since I use kwin, possibly a separate window class too, so I can easily make rules specifically for the installed app. file system access would be great, with long term storage, so i can stay authenticated for long time.

I should be able to tell file extensions to be opened by the pwa on my desktop. Notifications should be available too. A permission management window for installed pwa would be great.

Something that would be cool is some sort of storage within Firefox sync, so that installing the pwa somewhere else restores my status and settings

I would be happy to just get the old PWA mode back. Turn a webapp into a window.

I think one big problem with web apps is that browser storage is generally seen as ephemeral, causing data that the user would want to keep to be deleted together with relatively meaningless, truly ephemeral data.

For example, I have my browser set to delete cookies on exit. Others use "delete recent history". I don't know if these things also wipe PWA data, but if they do, that can be a nasty surprise.

The thing I want most is the thing specifically ruled out .. > "it’s not a goal to make it feel like you’re not in Firefox."

I'm perfectly happy to have my app in a pinned tab or bookmark. Do we really need a third kind of bookmark. Why do we need yet another method for installing apps on our desktop.

On a phone I can understand the convenience of saving a bookmark on your home screen, and removing the space consuming address bar, but desktops don't have the same constraints.

I wish they would just make an Electron alternative, but try and do it better. Make it easy to carve out features you don't need to make the process smaller and lighter. Don't need WebGL or Canvas? Don't need audio or video? How small can you make a browser by cutting features?

How cool would it be to visit a website with a bunch of check boxes that allow you to select the features you want for your app runtime, then it compiles an executable for you on demand.

Per app/site theming - Built in 'Dark Reader' for PWA/web pages Make development/programming apps intuitive/fun to tinker with things for new people coming in to development. (For local development)

Make memory management more controllable for firefox, multiple tabs with bloated JS pages using 7GB of 8GB total system RAM gets.. fun (manjaro+xfce, does it on different installs, has for years)

A service level worker for push notifications with the ability to run a local push server easily for testing webapp creation. (Won't work if firefox isn't running, but not that big of a deal, but is, if firefox is using all the RAM.)

Per tab/app containers with bandwidth/resource limitations. Ability to save window sizes, volumes, etc. 'Save States'

By default, nothing outside of the browser address bar hitting 10.* 192.* 0.0.0.0 127.0.* addresses in scripts/apps without user permission/knowing.

Apps accessible only through DoH/DoT only.

Bookmarks manager shouldn't close/minimize when you click a bookmarks link.

Incentive to create FREE web applications and keep them free without micro transactions/some other hidden/rabbit hole fees.

> Recently, other browsers have implemented or enhanced their approach to PWAs, for example by making it easy to install any website as a web app (even if no PWA manifest is provided)

Chrome has had this for at least 5 years, probably longer.

Firefox has had "Site Specific Browser" functionality a long, long time ago.

Never could see the difference between a so called web app and a shortcut to the site in question on the desktop. It is not a standalone application when it depends on the browser runtime. Much rather prefer Mozilla's sadly vanished application platform, where you could create powerful standalone cross platform desktop applications with knowledge of just XML(XUL being a subset) and Javascript. Firefox and Thunderbird themselves were great examples of such apps and it would have been any day a better alternative to Electron, these applications actually respected the look and feel conventions of each OS they ran on.

Mozilla had a separate XULRunner runtime to bundle with your app for it to be fully standalone, or you could invoke it with the locally installed Firefox instance. There were several, like Songbird (media player), FireFTP/FireSSH (originally began as extensions and now available as standalone software)

Easy privacy/identity management per app.

Easy payment processing builtin to browser.

Easy social that spans apps that we fully control. I should be able to see who my hackernews friends are and if we have both chosen what other apps we have in common.

I still can't believe we have to sign up for every single app. Enter all kinds of different payment methods across a variety of payment processors. And are trapped using big tech platforms.

The browser is the killer app but none of these browser makers take it to the next level. Its still same as it was since mid 2000's.

Lack of PWA support is the only reason why I keep other browsers handy, so I'm glad to see some movement on this long-outstanding issue. But I do have some concerns with the tone of this post and I hope they don't try too hard to re-imagine what "web apps" should be and end up with either a half-baked solution or a proprietary one.

I want it to be easier to develop local-only offline apps and I want to verify that they are offline by being able to see if they are sending network traffic in the same way I can currently use browser tools to see what data is coming from this web page. Dealing with service workers for local apps feels like a hack at best.

Every day we stray further from using the web to deliver documents.

back then I chose prism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Prism because the user wanted a local app and I only wanted to work with the most ubiquitous UI. was lightweight and wish it was still available

Maybe it's about time to state that widgets-based GUIs are dead, time to switch to DocUIs, because that's essentially the point and the point is that WebApp today do much but are heavy monsters with very limited flexibility.

The current trend could be just ditch desktop environments just substituting them with a WebVM (the name "browsers" should have nowadays) instance. After a bit of time this model will explode, like the widget-based GUIs model, due to it's crappyness done only to disarm the user.

I kind of wish we’d have a popular alternative to Electron, based on the tech behind Firefox. That’d actually do a lot for the userbase.

How about no bloated webapps at all? Let's get back to developing reliable native applications.

Firefox lost that market a long time ago. Electron won because chromium is modular, the tech can be re-used for other purposes. Firefox lost because it's a monolith you can't use in your projects.

WPA's and webviews are non solutions. You can't have web sandboxing and also the privileges a desktop app needs. Wasm is a failed experiment that did not result in the performance improvements promised. You still need to compile C++ modules for all kinds of things.