Re: WebApps functionality

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 4:25 pm, Jeremiah C. Foster 
<jeremiah foster puri sm> wrote:
> On Wed, 2020-04-15 at 14:22 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> >  Well you must have some appstream metadata, or the web app will not
> >  appear in GNOME Software. But Epiphany itself never looks at the
> >  appstream metadata. I would completely ignore that page of the spec
> >  because none of that metadata will be used  for anything.
>
> At Purism we intend to use that Appstream metadata for a variety of
> things, like determining if the app is suitable for a small screen,
> etc.

Hm. You could use that at the GNOME Software level, sure. But at the 
Epiphany level, there's no way Epiphany could possibly look at 
appstream metadata, because Epiphany allows creating web apps for 
arbitrary websites. And, alas, arbitrary websites do not provide 
appstream metadata for us to download. :P

> >  Ideally, before putting more effort into web apps, which are semi-
> >  dead
> >  due to the lack of flatpak support, we would figure out how to make
> >  them work in flatpak.
>
> This is an interesting idea but seems to imply that a web app is going
> to need one of the flatpak'd runtimes which might be overkill for a 
> web
> app?

So there are two cases:

* Epiphany is installed as a system app. You can create and use web 
apps.
* Epiphany is installed as a flatpak. You currently cannot create or 
use web apps.

flatpak would never be required for the first case.

In the second case, yes, the web apps would absolutely require flatpak, 
because you can't start Epiphany without flatpak. And Fedora and Red 
Hat and GNOME are all betting very big that the second case is the 
future. :) WebKit itself has to be part of the OS image, but Epiphany 
wouldn't use it. When you install Epiphany, you'd get a flatpak and it 
would use WebKit from the flatpak runtime. Probably that's already 
working in Silverblue. And in this case, we currently have no web apps.

Anyway, I think there's a lot of flexibility open for Purism to drive 
the future direction of Epiphany web apps to match your vision, 
depending on how much you want to contribute. The status quo is that 
they're a niche feature with serious usability warts. (E.g. the need to 
manually whitelist URLs in the web app preferences dialog to open them 
inside the web app, which seems impossible to avoid, is extremely 
confusing to users.)

Michael