Chrome and Edge make it simple to ‘install’ pages, so they’re easy to pin to the task bar. PWAs for Firefox gives that capability to Firefox, but it’s a bit brittle, and breaks easily if Firefox updates. It’s broken again for me tonight and the usual ‘reinstall this reinstall that’ hasn’t fixed it.

In my opinion Firefox took a significant backwards step when they killed that feature years ago.

I appreciate I might not be the target audience for Lemmy since I’m half Windows half Unix, and a Gmail / Keep / Calendar / Facebook / Messenger user.

  • Codilingus@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    22 hours ago

    I fixed mine just yesterday on my W11. The stuff the addon tells you to install is out of date. You have to install the latest version from their github releases page. It fixed mine being blank white pages.

    firefoxpwa-2.13.2-x86_64.msi

    But also, I agree. It’s a shame this all isn’t a baked in FF feature.

    • I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      The PWAs for Firefox extension does a good job most of the time. Just frustrating when it gets broken.

      Had it set up on both Windows and Fedora / Debian without issues.

  • vzq@lemmy.world
    144·
    1 day ago

    On the one hand, I agree that it’s a step back. In the other hand, I think it’s also partly a recognition that PWAs have not lived up to the promise and are essentially impossible to get right.

    I’m sad for the slow languishing death of PWAs, but I’m not faulting FF for pulling the plug once it became clear it was a doomed endeavor.

    • Thorry84@feddit.nl
      91·
      1 day ago

      Are PWAs dying though? I don’t think they are. They are still very popular and I use several every day.

    • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      41·
      1 day ago

      What is impossible to get right about it, and why doesn’t Chrome have this issue? I’ve been out of the loop for the removal of PWAs from Firefox, but I didn’t see an issue beforehand, and do miss not being able to have a web app look like a normal app on my desktop.

    • I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      51·
      1 day ago

      I guess really all I want is the option to have a task bar icon for each ‘website’ - I’ve doubled them up in the screenshot as half are broken at the moment. Each Gmail session is tied to a separate address, so could technically just be a ‘bookmark’ but it’s nice that they act as their own window, analagous to being an app. That doesn’t really have to be a PWA I guess, but a separate window.