Adventures in Jeffland

I haven't really thought this through


actual content ↓↓

I Heart PWAs

Two ideas exist in opposition, on my laptop.

  1. I like the web, and it's open standards (HTML, CSS, JS, etc)
  2. I prefer tools I use a lot to be native. This means I would rather have an email application that I open, rather than have my email as a tab in my browser.

Luckily there is a loophole. Enter Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). If you couldn't gather from the link, PWA's allow you to "install" a webpage on your device the way you would an app. Looking at my desktop now, I currently have four PWAs running (Outlook, Gmail, Planner, and SeeSaw (an app communicate with teachers/schools)). For reasons I also often use Slack and Twitter as PWAs as well. For tools that I need to use often, I prefer to cmd-tab to the app, rather then find them in the roughly 1400 open tabs in my browser. This allows me to use the web versions of these tools, and have dedicated instances for each .

Currently, I use Brave a privacy-focused fork of Chrome. When combined with uBlock Origin, the ad blocker, I have a lot of control over what gross corporations track me about the web. You should be able to make your PWAs with any version of chrome. I don't believe Firefox or Safari allow PWAs, which is a shame, as I use Firefox heavily as well.

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