Yeah, that's the biggest issue. And it all originally stemed from phone carriers wanting to lock customers into their services.
We need some pro-consumer regulations on hardware which mandate open platforms. Fat chance of that happening, though, as the likes of both the EU and US want these locked down systems so they put in mandatory backdoors.
Google's own phones do not have a locked booloader. You can buy a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it in like 10 minutes. But basically no one does this, because no matter what people say in online forums they actually value ease of use and shiny features over privacy and software freedom.
Even if locked bootloaders weren't a thing, not being able to just buy a phone with an open Android pre-installed means it would get relegated to the Linux Zone, with a whole lot of "security alert" and "device not supported". Also, low popularity leads to fewer development resources, so it would probably suffer from lack of polish.
People will keep using the OS their phone comes with and that would be Google's Android. It's worse than with Windows PCs and Windows to be honest because phones have a locked bootloader.
The Italian digital ID wallet is already in fact banning GrapheneOS and other ROMs [1], the EU doesn't mandate that member states have to allow non-Android/iOS apps [2]
But it makes me question why "the browser" is apparently still the inevitable platform of the future.
In order for a PWA to be normal and usable, it must be available offline, open in a window without browser chrome, have similar performance to a native application, be launchable via a shortcut on the host OS, and respond to the mouse and keybaord shortcuts the way you'd expect. I think I've just described... an Electron app?
It's cool that this kind of thing can run in a web browser. With no install hurdle, it's much easier to convince people to try it out, and it's cross platform. Beyond that I can't really think of any advantages to having it run in the browser.
If what's lacking is an easy way to try software, I can't help but imagine lots of ways this could be addressed that would be much more pleasant to use than loading PWAs. Right now I can't seriously see myself enjoying using a PWA for work.
I say this having recently finished several large design projects in Figma, which is apparently a gold standard success story for browser based apps. Despite the years of development and herculean engineering efforts, I can still feel the browser jank. I begrudgingly open the thing in chrome, as it completely chokes in Firefox. It still chokes on moderately sized canvases, moving things is slow and laggy compared to native apps, keyboard shortcuts sometimes don't work or keys get stuck in a weird pressed or unpressed state, loading is slow, elements pop-in over tens of seconds.
I know I'm an old man yelling at clouds at this point, I'm just disappointed that we seem to be going backwards in performance and usability of software.
> In order for a PWA to be normal and usable, it must be available offline, open in a window without browser chrome, have similar performance to a native application, be launchable via a shortcut on the host OS, and respond to the mouse and keybaord shortcuts the way you'd expect. I think I've just described... an Electron app?
You've just described a PWA. You can install them as a host OS shortcut, they run without browser chrome, should have performance equal to Electron.
Also if you really want extra bloat and faff, any PWA is trivial to turn into an Electron app.
Most of PWA criticism is based on misunderstanding PWA capabilities.
I'm reassured that my comparison to Electron was not far off. My point was, if a PWA is usable when all the above is implemented, what you end up with is very similar to a self-updating Electron app, just one that may or may not rely much more heavily on the network at runtime and might work offline (or not).
I admit I didn't realize creating a shortcut to a PWA was already supported as it's not pushed very hard. In Chromium it's buried under dots, "Cast, Save and Share" (which is a bizarre mashup of disparate functions), and finally "Install page as app".
The window that loads still has browser chrome, in the form of a back, refresh, and three dots button. As soon as you navigate somewhere, even within the same app, the url bar appears again, but you can't edit it. It seems that to be able to always hide this bar, you'd need a way to differentiate between "internal" links that should navigate within the page, and external links that should open in a browser.
I tried turning off my internet, and neither figma nor openDAW showed anything more than a blank page, which confirms my feeling of uncertainty around PWAs, namely, how do you know what will actually work offline. It feels fragile, like if I reset my browser or my clear my cache, my installed applications will disappear. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the blurring of the lines between bookmarks and installed applications.
All this is of course addressable with a lot more infrastructure and work from browser and OS makers. To me it seems like a lot of development to end up with something that behaves a lot like Electron, with the added easteregg of being able to access applications in a browser, without intending that anybody actually do so.
> I tried turning off my internet, and neither figma nor openDAW showed anything more than a blank page, which confirms my feeling of uncertainty around PWAs, namely, how do you know what will actually work offline.
Figma nor OpenDAW don't seem to be configured as offline PWAs.
> All this is of course addressable with a lot more infrastructure and work from browser and OS makers.
The problems you encountered are mostly solved in PWA APIs already, at least for Chromium based browsers. There is some variation in some features between browsers and OSs (Safari and iOS are particularly bad).
> To me it seems like a lot of development to end up with something that behaves a lot like Electron, with the added easteregg of being able to access applications in a browser, without intending that anybody actually do so.
PWAs are e.g. easier to install, have smaller footprint, are more portable and are a lot more secure. Not sure what you mean by "accessing applications in a browser". PWAs can't access anything a normal website can't.
> why "the browser" is apparently still the inevitable platform of the future.
Because it doesn't require trust. The browser actually got the permission model (almost - but there are extensions) right. I can safely open this and not worry about security.
It is not defense of TikTok to point out that all platforms are practically identical: centralized, closed source networks that collect ridiculously detailed data about millions of people, and are in a position to process that data for all kinds of fun stuff like surveilling people's physical movement, creating recommendation algorithms, performing sentiment analysis, and using those tools to try to manipulate populations, influence public thought, and sway elections.
There is no behavior that TikTok exhibits that isn't equally applicable to every major social media.
I don't particularly care whether right now, the CCP happens to use that manipulative potential for its own ends more than the US does. It shouldn't be hard to take a principled stand against dystopian surveillance.
I don't understand people who correctly point out that TikTok is a "vector for influence of public opinion", but somehow think that's only a bad thing if it's controlled by a "geopolitical adversary".
Baby steps! Let's do both. Let's rid ourselves of a foreign adversaries influence, then let's ALSO get more competition and reduce big techs influence. Why not both?
> I don't understand people who correctly point out that TikTok is a "vector for influence of public opinion", but somehow think that's only a bad thing if it's controlled by a "geopolitical adversary".
By your implied logic, the US should allow Chinese police to function on US soil as the US already had US police on US soil.
As I read more and more comments like GP’s
In this thread, I keep getting this vision of a man in France in 1940 welcoming nazi tanks to his town because “well, we have a military too, how is this any different, they’re just a geopolitical adversary” and “well, we had a corrupt politician once last year so our government is just as bad”.
Can't remember the name (if it has one), but there's a linguistic phenomenon where words take on opposite meanings from the original. The "Peacemaker" was a missile, "literally" now means "figuratively", "awful" used to mean "awe-inspiring". And apparently "bare metal" now means "runs on an operating system".
OTOH, technical fields develop jargon specifically as a solution to the problems created by semantic drift in vernacular vocabulary.
Sure, languages evolve, but that doesn't mean "anything goes" -- to the contrary, novel mutations have to survive intense selection pressures in order to eventually become part of the standard language.
Where new ways of using existing terms create ambiguity and conflict with existing meanings, their survival chances aren't always great.
Although, there are multiple people in the talk section[0] arguing for the "'physical' machine" definition. Might have to get used to it, along with "crypto" and "algorithm".
The trendy uses are "algorithim" and "crypto" are specific cases of the general meanings of these terms -- there's no contradiction or ambiguity introduced here, so these uses are OK, although people presuming the narrower trendy meanings in broader contexts are wrong.
This use of "bare metal" does contradict the pre-existing meaning, so is not quite appropriate. What is valid is describing the OS itself as running on bare metal in contrast to running within a VM/container -- but an application running on top of that OS is not running on bare metal.
This isn't particularly egregious, though, since there are negligible cases of actually running applications on bare metal today: if you are talking about applications, the context can usually explain the intended meaning. But that wasn't always the case in the past (PC "booter" software used to be common), so this doesn't necessarily apply retrospectively, and may not be the case in the future, especially considering some of the interesting things companies like Oxide are working on.
I have no opinion on the sit-in, but it is always hilarious to see ex-Twitterites breathlessly bemoaning the sale, as if massive centralized ad-based networks feeding algorithmically presented "content" to the masses are somehow a boon to society as long as they are owned by a "good guy".
Any normal sidewalk would be wide enough that a single person could not conceivably block it, and wearing headphones while walking, especially noise canceling ones, is popular because US cities are largely unpleasant, deafeningly loud places full of fast-moving cars.
I used to agree with you, but a pure text web looks like Gemini, which I abandoned after a few days of getting lost in endless identical looking blogs.
There is no reason that websites shouldn't have room for some creative expression. For as long as writing has existed, images, fonts, spacing, embellishment, borders, and generally every imaginable axis has been used as additional expression, beyond the literal meaning of the text.
The body width is necessary because web browsers have long since abandoned any pretense of developing html for the average joe. It is normal to use web browsers maximized, so without limiting the body width the text is ridiculously long and uncomfortable to read.
