On 16 July 2015 at 14:36, Ehsan Akhgari <[email protected]> wrote:
> As far as I can tell, neither of the above are things that another UA can > hook into. Am I correct in my understanding here? > I asked about that for Chrome Custom Tabs, a Googler told me there's an API so that other browsers can create the equivalent if they want to. I'm not sure if that's something we'd want to do with Fennec. But the important point is that it will keep users in the context of native apps and has the potential to reduce mindshare of the concept of the "browser" altogether. App Links and App Indexing bypass browsers altogether, install banners are something we could implement. > If the above assertion is true, then you need to replace "the web" with > Chrome and Safari on their respective OSes. > Given the market share of those browsers on their respective operating systems I'd argue that amounts to the same thing. But yes, Firefox is its own island. With the new Android and iOS features I described that island is increasingly cut off from users. > How does supporting W3C manifest or lack thereof help or hurt this? > Couldn't we detect these "web apps" by looking at the meta tags inside > pages? It seems like manifests are not technically needed for this. > Sure. Web apps are just web sites with extra metadata. A manifest linked from a web page using a manifest link relation is a way for a page to associate itself with that metadata, for the purpose of discovery. The fact that it's JSON rather than HTML is largely a practical implementation detail, because adding 12+ meta tags to the <head> of every web page doesn't scale very well. As I said, for the simple use case of defining an application-name and icon meta tags work fine, and we will support that. > How are we planning to hook into the OS through Firefox? It seems like a > lot of the "web" integration coming to Android and iOS is essentially > integration with the browser developed by the OS vendor. > I'm trying to find that out, I'd be interested to see some experimentation of how possible it is to create a standalone display mode for Firefox on various operating systems, accessible by launchers added from the browser, treated as a separate "app" by the OS, but using the same Gecko instance and profile as Firefox. Like Chrome does on Android. > > 3. Promoting re-engagement with web content through icons in >> launchers, >> offline and push notifications >> > > Again, how does supporting W3C manifest or lack thereof help or hurt > this? It seems like we can pick up the icons/application-name through the > meta tag as well. An icon and name is not enough metadata to describe modern web apps, as I said above using a manifest file is just a practicality, like having CSS and JavaScript in separate files to HTML. > And given that the manifest format helps people link to the native app > offerings, it seems like supporting it will slightly hurt this goal! > We don't have to implement that feature and we should argue to have it removed from the spec. I don't think this is a good enough reason to give up on the standardisation altogether. > > 4. Guiding users to the best of the web through a crowd-sourced, >> community curated guide >> > > I'm not sure how W3C manifest helps here either. > W3C manifests allow web apps to be crawled by search engines and discovered by users through their user agent without needing them to be submitted to a central app store by the developer. They provide the metadata needed to describe a web app, and provide a built-in discovery mechanism. Ben _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
