“The Ideal Web Experience” @dalmaer https://medium.com/ben-and-dion/the-ideal-web-experience-d3df0178a25d
But there is now another way.
An evolution has taken place in browsers.
Over dinner last night, Frances and I enumerated the attributes of this new class of applications:
- Responsive: to fit any form factor
- Connectivity independent: Progressively-enhanced with Service Workers to let them work offline
- App-like-interactions: Adopt a Shell + Content application model to create appy navigations & interactions
- Fresh: Transparently always up-to-date thanks to the Service Worker update process
- Safe: Served via TLS (a Service Worker requirement) to prevent snooping
- Discoverable: Are identifiable as “applications” thanks to W3C Manifests and Service Worker registration scope allowing search engines to find them
- Re-engageable: Can access the re-engagement UIs of the OS; e.g. Push Notifications
- Installable: to the home screen through browser-provided prompts, allowing users to “keep” apps they find most useful without the hassle of an app store
- Linkable: meaning they’re zero-friction, zero-install, and easy to share. The social power of URLs matters.
These apps aren’t packaged and deployed through stores, they’re just websites that took all the right vitamins. They keep the web’s ask-when-you-need-it permission model and add in new capabilities like being top-level in your task switcher, on your home screen, and in your notification tray. Users don’t have to make a heavyweight choice up-front and don’t implicitly sign up for something dangerous just by clicking on a link. Sites that want to send you notifications or be on your home screen have to earn that right over time as you use them more and more. They progressively become “apps”.