Hi Gaia folk, In the early days of Firefox OS, we built all of Gaia as single-page apps. I wasn't around then but I imagine we did this for a number of reasons, with performance and responsiveness at the top of the list. As part of this, we encouraged app developers to implement navigation controls in their own apps and not rely on browser chrome functionality like "back" and "refresh". This totally made sense in the context of a single-page app, especially when you take into account that native apps on iOS and Android (albeit to a lesser extent) have to implement their own navigation as well.
But with more recent technologies like Service Workers, better caching APIs, pre-rendering, etc. (basically all the stuff that NGA takes advantage of), I think the web is shifting away from single-page apps as a performance workaround. And let's not forget that single-page apps often negate one of the webs biggest strengths: deep linking. So I write this email today as sort of an opinion poll. Personally, I think it's time we bring back the browser chrome into Firefox OS apps. I think we should encourage developers to write URL-based apps, to not be afraid of browser chrome navigation, and therefore to build their Firefox OS app as a standard website + some experimental (or proprietary :/) APIs. There has been some discussion around this with the work we are doing on Pinning the Web and Alopex. But I want to hear from the greater FxOS community too, especially those with app development experience. What do you think, should we bring the "back" button back? -Michael
_______________________________________________ dev-fxos mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-fxos
