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Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I wish PWAs were generally better supported so I could skip the Electron bit and could install the same app on my phone. Being a part of the main browser gives better resource handling, better sandboxing that Electron allows but I would prefer most apps didn't have, and access to the extensions I want. Too bad Firefox killed off SSB (site-specific browser) before it even launched.

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PWA's only work when you are connected to the intenet for most of the time. Which is not guranteed on mobile. It is fine for some apps which need a connection to be usable like a messaging or a banking app. But others like productivity apps are useless. Sometimes the browser crashes on mobile as well.

At that point might as well make an app.

I'd say my non-browser apps crash more than the browser.

Offline is one of the biggest reasons to ship a full PWA. This is what service workers are for. The biggest reason to not ship a PWA is Apple barely supports them and you can't siphon as much user data if sandboxed in the browser.

I would LOVE if I could get a basic PWA from my bank that didn't have all of these permissions like trying to read if I'm rooted or not, location access, storage -- none of their business what I do with my device or where I am -- and I could still scan QR codes, check balance, do transfers.

That would work for Slack and Spotify, but not for VSCode. PWAs can't get file system access as far as I know.

PWAs have limitations, yes. But you just mentioned how 2 of the biggest Electron users could not use Electron without sacrificing much if anything.

I think once you're in this other territory then you should consider full native instead of Electron. Why you choose to use an editor housed in a browser engine with tracking baked into the application is your decision. There are plenty of other native editors, both GUI and TUI, a user can choose.

Nobody chooses VSCode specifically because it's in Electron, we choose it because it's a good editor.

Any app can send network requests, so any app can incorporate tracking. This has nothing to do with Electron either.

But to your original point: yes, the more Electron apps that are really just web apps and can be gotten as PWAs, the better.

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