On 5/24/2012 9:31 AM, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
On 5/24/2012 12:14 PM, Anant Narayanan wrote:
Why shouldn't we giving control to the developer? They are the ones
who wrote the app, why do you think we should be deciding how and
where they are acquired?
Installing a non-paid app is technically the same thing as linking to a
website. We don't provide ways for a website author to say that you may
only follow links to their website from approved sources, and in fact we
provide ways for users to suppress the referer header. I think that it's
disingenuous to say that because we are presenting websites as an app
that we should give them more control over how the user gets to them
than we do for websites...
I disagree that it's the same thing. Well, *technically* it might be the
same, but in practice that's not how users (or developers) perceive it.
Clicking an install button is just not the same as clicking a hyperlink.
Context is very important for the former.
Would you be okay with allowing any site on the internet to distribute
Firefox? I certainly wouldn't be.
If Firefox were an online app available at firefox.com/app.manifest,
then Mozilla is providing Firefox, no matter how the user got it. An app
store isn't handing you an app: it's linking to an app.
You could say that users don't understand this, and they think that the
app store is actually handing them an app. But if that is the case,
however, then we should seriously rethink presenting websites as apps.
Users won't understand that their app could change at any time their
device is online without notice (unlike android or iOS apps, which are
explicitly updated).
Yes, it won't be clear at all that the app is provided by Mozilla,
unless they dig deep and look in the about box /after/ installing the
app. The location of the manifest is irrelevant because it is never
shown to the user. I wouldn't want an illegitimate site to link to
Firefox's manifest.
Of course, we can't prevent them from presenting an install button
anyway, but we can prevent honorable user agents (most major browsers)
to disallow such installs by baking it into the spec.
We are actively encouraging developers to not think of apps simply as
websites, as you note, that leads to a poor user experience. Some
websites are just bad apps (Bill noted his personal experience in the
previous thread on WebRTs), and vice-versa.
For an app to be successful it has to be designed from the ground-up to
behave like an app, and the best developers won't use the terms website
and app synonymously (or so we hope!).
It's all the web under the hood, the tools and technologies are
identical, but the design and interface of an app, as well as the
general user experience of finding and acquiring an app is *vastly*
different from browsing the internet and visiting web pages. I don't
think we should be pretending that they're the same, because they're not.
-Anant
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