L Gorrie that’s certainly the trend on the desktop. Already a lot of desktop apps are written in JavaScript and then packaged up using Electron. Installable progressive web apps work offline and bring a lot of capability without the need for this binary layer.
Glad to see Microsoft coming to the party. They are a little late, but better than never like Apple is at the moment. Apple are turning into what MS used to be like, not building things that are good for all consumers because it would eat into their revenue.
Google and Mozilla have spent a lot of energy getting these things through standards bodies to be adopted more widely. It’s obviously taken longer than Googler’s had expected, but as a developer I’m glad they have continued and not lost focus, as they normally do.
The things I can do with a Chrome on android really is something; talk to USB devices, talk to Bluetooth, various offline sync capabilities, push notifications, automatic home screen icons, borderless apps, it’s quite a nice list.
These things have been around before in fact everyone including Mozilla have had a crack at this. The problem is that developers won’t write web apps for specific OS platforms so this has to come the w3c not a vendor.
mathew murphy not really OS specific but browser specific. When a singular browser comes to dominate and unilaterally set the standards, people naturally follow.
We are now in an era where we are seeing the occasional Safari-only and Chrome-only websites but I think the bottleneck that IE represented is now well and truly passed. People are more inclined to watch the standards bodies and make a calculation based on relative market shares. IE still acts a great big boat anchor to the whole process but at least it’s a standards compliant one.
In practice, IE only meant “Windows IE only” and was OS-specific. But maybe the era of Windows being able to dominate anything is gone for good thanks to iOS.
John Hardy Developer 
L Gorrie that’s certainly the trend on the desktop. Already a lot of desktop apps are written in JavaScript and then packaged up using Electron. Installable progressive web apps work offline and bring a lot of capability without the need for this binary layer.
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Glad to see Microsoft coming to the party. They are a little late, but better than never like Apple is at the moment. Apple are turning into what MS used to be like, not building things that are good for all consumers because it would eat into their revenue.
Google and Mozilla have spent a lot of energy getting these things through standards bodies to be adopted more widely. It’s obviously taken longer than Googler’s had expected, but as a developer I’m glad they have continued and not lost focus, as they normally do.
The things I can do with a Chrome on android really is something; talk to USB devices, talk to Bluetooth, various offline sync capabilities, push notifications, automatic home screen icons, borderless apps, it’s quite a nice list.
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Scott Hamilton the good news is that Apple will be bringing Service Workers to WebKit so PWAs really are going to be standard on every platform.
That said I agree with you that Android is a more advanced platform in this regard and much more useful than iOS.
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Ironically Apple had desktop web apps before they were popular, back in OS X 10.4 — but disabled the feature in 10.10 because nobody was using it.
developer.apple.com – Widget Basics
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These things have been around before in fact everyone including Mozilla have had a crack at this. The problem is that developers won’t write web apps for specific OS platforms so this has to come the w3c not a vendor.
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I think the history of IE-only web pages shows that developers will, in fact, write web apps for specific OS platforms.
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mathew murphy not really OS specific but browser specific. When a singular browser comes to dominate and unilaterally set the standards, people naturally follow.
We are now in an era where we are seeing the occasional Safari-only and Chrome-only websites but I think the bottleneck that IE represented is now well and truly passed. People are more inclined to watch the standards bodies and make a calculation based on relative market shares. IE still acts a great big boat anchor to the whole process but at least it’s a standards compliant one.
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In practice, IE only meant “Windows IE only” and was OS-specific. But maybe the era of Windows being able to dominate anything is gone for good thanks to iOS.
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mathew murphy it’s true. The OS is no longer a monoculture.
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