Applications implement their own 'back' navigation because we support devices with only one global input key (home button), while we also have the z3c where we can put a back button on easily, the single input is the lowest common denominator.
I have always been very much in favour of having a standardized chrome navigation provided to both apps and web content, unintrusive by default but with the url and the navigation controls always readily available. Its worth mentioning that (what should be) our main focus in terms of target developers, people building with cordova etc to provide cross platform web apps will already have to deal with a platform that does not provide a global back button, so while I think the chrome should be available, it shouldnt take anything away from the developers existing real estate. As a note, single page applications vs real urls arent mutually exclusive, some apps we have are single page apps that provide real urls and really all of them (within reason) should do so, pushstate has existed for as long as firefox os. On 21 October 2015 at 14:30, Michael Henretty <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > >
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