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PWAs Without the Browser?
Quoting: PWAs Without the Browser? › Ken Vermette —
It’s been, what, 4? 5 years since I’ve had anything meaningful to talk about in the world of Open Source? Maybe it’s time to post about some nonsense I’ve been working on.
I have a love/hate relationship with progressive web apps. My job these days is in a corporate environment, and there are some things you can’t escape. Outlook. Teams. Other web-based applications. Be it Chrome or Firefox, there’s just so many things PWAs don’t do well. No persistent system tray icons. No break-away from the browser. Odd menu entries. What’s worse is that the PWA standard itself is limited in a lot of ways, and it really does feel like an afterthought by every browser vendor. Also, you can’t exactly get PWAs easily listed in app stores.
There’s Linux-y solutions. Electron-based apps. But those are an incredible time investment to maintain, and there’s about a dozen apps they don’t cover.
My C++ fu has atrophied, having been replaced with Java as my daily working language, and I haven’t kept up with KDE frameworks and Qt… But this itch was driving me crazy, and I just wanted to see some proof-of-concept that the entire situation could be just a little bit better!
Here’s the moronic idea: We split the difference between browser-based PWAs and hyper-tailored Electron apps. We just have… A pure “PWA Browser.”