Loved this, thanks for resurfacing it @rands.bsky.social.

Sure, they’re used on Safari as well, and I’ve personally never used a PWA that didn’t work on Safari. My point is that Firefox and Safari having slightly less complete support for PWAs than Chrome is not why PWAs are failing.

So, for browser makers, investment in PWA support remains a bet on an unlikely future. Even so, Apple’s PWA support is quite good (pwascore.com), and based on Safari Technology Preview, is about to become even better. Anyone not rooting for that is anti-web.

The simpler and more obvious truth is that nobody likes PWAs. It’s not like they’re used on non-Apple platforms. Developers aren’t making them, sites aren’t promoting them, and consumers don’t even know they exist.

My friend, is Apple’s incomplete support for the *shorthand* representation of CSS properties which control the appearance of decorative lines on text the best you can do? Surely there are better smoking guns.

If pushing back against a Chromium monoculture and a dead web by celebrating the progress of Safari, Firefox, Ladybird, etc. is “toxic positivity”, then I’m guilty as charged.

Wow, I understand the point you’re making, but what glorious progress! Yay for web standards!

Also:

The reality is that Safari’s support for PWA features is at least as good as Firebox’s. I built this to understand how behind Apple was. Surprise!

Exactly. Software engineers almost never validate their source against the highly-optimized machine code generated by their compilers. One more level of abstraction is not the end of the world.

But if you can code, there are straightforward solutions for mitigating and/or detecting those things. Coders who don’t already do those things need to stay far, far away from AI-assisted coding, and also from 100% manual coding.

What a great response! ❤️