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September 8, 2018 03:30 am

Progressive Web Apps Moving Mainstream As Twitter Makes Its Mobile Site the Main

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Twitter is showing some users of its desktop website a new user interface that is designed to be faster and to feature support for the recently added bookmarks feature (supported in the iOS and Android clients but not, currently, the main website), a data-saver mode, and a night mode. These users have been selected at random and moved over to the new interface so they can test the interface and provide feedback. The new interface isn't all that different from the old one: it's organized a little differently, with a two-column layout instead of the three columns currently used, but overall it will feel familiar to anyone who has used the microblogging platform before. What makes this move interesting isn't the specifics of the interface itself, but the technology it's built on. The new interface isn't actually new at all. It has been available for some time now as mobile.twitter.com, Twitter's mobile-friendly Web interface. In turn, that same Web interface is used to drive the Windows 10 app, the KaiOS platform for "smart feature phones," and the recently released Twitter Lite app for Android. This is why it has the data-saver mode; it has been designed with an eye on those users who suffer from poor or expensive bandwidth or have underpowered devices. This mobile site is perhaps one of the most prominent instances of what could be a new breed of Web application: the Progressive Web Application (PWA). PWAs are Web applications that build on certain modern browser features to provide an experience that is much more like that of a traditional application. For example, PWAs can support offline operation using service workers (a way of running JavaScript in the background that can respond to events and make network requests that degrade gracefully if the network is unavailable); they integrate with platform features such as notifications; they're also designed so that they could be pinned to app launchers and home screens and treated as if they were "real" applications rather than merely webpages.

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