PWA Coming to Chrome for Desktop
browsernative.com
browsernative.com
We had a PWA that was having some really strange issues recently, only to find that some users were on really old versions of what looked like chrome (like versions 49, 51 and 56 as of last week).
We eventually found out that this was actually the "samsung browser" which is the default browser on many samsung phones, which is pinned to an older chromium version, and our PWA when installed was using that rendering engine, which was causing compatibility issues that the user has no ability to fix themselves.
I love the web platform, but this is a big problem. We are going the "wrap our app in a compiled chromium browser" route now, as much as it pains me to do it, because there just isn't any other option here.
Imagine if lenovo were to randomly decide that any software run on windows on their PCs will be run in a windows XP vm, and that there wasn't any easy way to change it... All because the company wants to add their branding and "optimize for their hardware"...
Yes, we could try to support these older versions, but seeing as these phones will most likely never get updates from samsung again, it would just prevent us from using any new features or new performance increases until these users leave us. So our options are to wrap the app in a fat wrapper that allows us to continue writing the best app we can for the most number of people, or intentionally hamstring the app for everyone to support a minority of users that are using phones abandoned by their manufacturer. (FFS Samsung's latest release as of late october 2017 was 6 months out of date the day they released it!)
Edit: Just saw another issue come through, user agent comes from a nvidia shield tablet, based on chrome 44, released 2015-07-21... That will never get another update. The oldest chrome version i've seen in our logs looks like 41 which was 2 weeks ago!
I like that we're moving forward, but on the desktop this just feels like, "Hey, look what you can do again!"
They may even retain some use - on OS X, for example, you used to get issues with PWAs being considered part of the main browser process for cmd+tab and cmd+`. I've had to use SSBs to overcome this in the past.
>Work for every user, regardless of browser choice because they’re built with progressive enhancement[2] as a core tenet.
But from my experience I'd say they have little to do with actual progressive enhancement, i.e. content first development.
One thing that certainly is progressive for PWAs is how deeply the user decides to integrate the web app into their browser/OS. You can choose to allow push notifications and "install" the PWA into your home screen for example.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app#Characteri...
As an earnest question, is Progressive Enhancement (i.e. graceful degradation, "unobtrusive javascript", etc) simply dead now? None of the frameworks out there seem to encourage it, I'm not sure if many even support those paradigms.