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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Are they PWAs tho, or just shortcuts?
They open in a window separate from the browser and don't display the browser toolbar, so not just shortcuts.
The main purpose of PWAs is not to remove the browser toolbar but rather cache most of the website to improve speed and reduce data usage if I am not wrong, there are external tools to get rid of the toolbar but Firefox dropped the PWA spec which includes a lot more than just that.
The caching is the result of service workers which Firefox definitely supports.
edit: oh just scrolled down and saw you already commented that later.
Real PWAs, though PWAs aren't that different from shortcuts tbh
As far as I know their main purpose is to cache various parts of the website properly which is a lot more than just a shortcut.
Regular websites can do that too using service workers - Lemmy's webapp uses this to show an error when an instance is unreachable
What we call a PWA is usually just a webpage with a webmanifest, and a service worker script to manage loading those cached resources you mentioned
Seems like you are right, the caching for proper offline usage and use with very limited internet connections is all done trough service workers. Their main job seems to be system integration and while Firefox Android kind of sucks at that too it doesn't seem like they ever cut that down so they just dropped it for desktop users.
On Android at least, Firefox PWA's don't seem to support registering system-level things (like 'Share To' handlers) - you need to use a Chrome PWA for that....