Firefox: Mozilla is working on Progressive Web Apps (PWA) support
Mozilla has been diligently at work recently to introduce highly requested features to its Firefox web browser. It launched one of these features, vertical tabs, in Firefox 136 already. Other features, including tab groups, are also on a good way and will be released in a future update.
Firefox already has an advantage in some areas feature-wise. The mobile version of Firefox, for example, supports browser extensions. Microsoft just recently introduced extensions for Edge on Android, but the feature is in beta and very limited. Google has never enabled extensions in the mobile version of Chrome.
Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
While Firefox has reached feature parity already in some regards or is beating its main competitors in other areas, it is still lagging behind in some areas. One of these is support for PWA.
Chromium-based browsers have supported Progressive Web Apps for a long time.
What are Progressive Web Apps (PWA)? Simply put, they move websites or services a bit out of the browser so that they work more like native applications. Means, you get window controls and functions, including the ability to pin PWAs to the taskbar or Start menu, responsiveness, offline support, and more.
Not every Internet user needs access to PWAs, but those who do or want that access, have a hard time using Firefox. While there is an extension for Firefox, called Progressive Web Apps for Firefox, that brings support, it is far from ideal.
Good news is that Mozilla is working in bringing native PWA support to Firefox. Mozilla calls these Taskbar Tabs and the feature is in active development. While that is the case, no version of Firefox exists right now that supports this in a functional way.
While you can enable the preference browser.taskbarTabs.enabled in Firefox Nightly, even there you will notice that the feature does not work right now.
Mozilla employee David Rubino shared Mozilla's vision regarding web apps just recently on the Mozilla Connect website. According to his post, Mozilla's main focus is on bringing some of the app-like features to web apps. These include the ability to add icons of web apps to the taskbar of the operating system and to have them open links that they support.
Other features, Rubino mentions the option to uninstall PWAs from the operating system's preference, may not be introduced, however.
Closing Words
It looks as if future versions of Firefox will support a base set of PWA features. While the initial implementation may not be as complete as that of Chromium-based browsers, it at the very least adds basic support for web apps in Firefox.
With that said, it is unclear at this point when the feature is going to see the light of day.
Now You: what is your take on Progressive Web Apps? Is that a feature that you use already, or something that you do not really need? Feel free to leave a comment down below. (via Windows Report)
Mozilla Foundation spends most of the income on “social causes”, stock investments outside its business scope and bloated salaries. Not the company that is going to stay in the business for long unless somebody buys them out. Personally, I hope a few companies will do forks of Firefox code and hopefully continue updating it for a while. But I feel really gloomy about Firefox future.
lmao, took their time. I already have Ferdium now.
For my personal case, being aware it is not universal, I’ve never been interested by vertical tabs nor tab groups, nor PWAs, whatever the browser be. For the analogy and for what it’s worth I perceive PWAs like a second head on a body generally fit to have but one. Not fond of mixing things up on a browser, felt sometimes as the X (Twitter) syndrome : a central place governing more than itself. I run the browser and if I need a specific service I open its page. Yet I can imagine situations where having dynamic data updated right in the browser may come handy (weather, stock markets), though I wouldn’t be concerned. I may of course be totally wrong in my perceptions, yet being fond of browsers browsing and browsing only, free of (what I consider as) gadgets remains a guideline here : simplicity and efficiency.
Could be handy to have a dedicated “YouTube” icon in the taskbar, to launch YouTube in a new private window with uBlock Origin installed so that it won’t nag about adblocking or signing in. This for people that normally don’t block cookies or ever clear out any browser data.