So Jerboa broke on my phone just now and I didn’t want to stop browsing Lemmy. Unfortunately no suitable alternative was found so I just decided to check if I could open it in my browser and install it.
To my surprise, it worked. And it works really well quite frankly. Sure, the UI is different, but I’m not at all missing any features.
Did any of you guys try it as well? What’s your opinion?
If not, did you even know that was a possibility? It quite frankly never crossed my mind, because Reddit and other platforms always force you to use an app when you open them in a browser.
PWA = progressive web app = a webpage-based app, as opposed to a native app for whatever OS you’re using.
for those like me who didn’t know what it meant
Thank you!!
You’re a hero
Short and sweet, thanks for explaining.
I felt like it was too late for me to ask, absolute legend!
whats the actual difference, does it improve the performance/caching/first-time loading speed?
It just looks like an actual app and not like a tab in your browser(no adress bar for example), plus you can access it quickly that way without having to navigate your browser tabs
no address bar is a deal breaker to me. Its more flexible with the browser framework.
Ive been exclusively browsing on mobile web, same as I did reddit. This layout is much more user friendly forsure.
Same. Been using the mobile browser since day one and it has everything the desktop version has just in different spots. I don’t see the need for a dedicated app tbh, unless they muck up the mobile version which I don’t see happening… hopefully.
When you think about it it’s so weird that it feels like a novelty when a website works well as a website without needing dedicated software, but that’s enshittification for ya, has us so used to that artificial barrier that we accept it as normal when it isn’t
I’m also finding it really effective. I only hate that backing out from a post is a crapshoot on whether it preserves my scroll position, resets to the top, or reloads the entire feed.
The Web app is really good! The only issue I have with it since it got updated to 0.18 is that when you click a post link and press back to go to your community, it reloads the entire community and takes your scroll position all the way to the top. It’s really killed the experience on mobile for me and it didn’t do that prior to 0.18 I found.
Anyone else having the same issue?
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I’m primarily using Mlem on iOS cause the PWA was always kinda janky for me
I started on PWA, got frustrated with it, moved to Mlem, got frustrated with it, moved to Memmy, and then found not all features were implemented yet — so checked out PWA again and found it had somehow massively improved since the last time I used it.
So now I use both PWA and Memmy, with Memmy getting more use every day (inbox support got added today).
Yup. Memmy is improving quite rapidly though, so I’m sticking here for now.
Oh yeah I tried it. And it even worked better than jerboa in some ways until jerboa had some updates. It still has some features that jerboa doesn’t have, like opening links to other instances within your own instance (that’s a huge problem right now for me). So yeah the webpage version is still competitive with this app but probably not for too long.
Did any of you guys try it as well? What’s your opinion?
In respect to Lemmy as a whole, I’m trying to exercise a lot patience.
One of the first things I did was install it as a PWA. It has a sleek UI, but some bugs makes it incredibly hard for me to use. One of the worst is an issue with several of the combo boxes which repeatedly flashing on use. I have to try hitting the appropriate selection multiple times in hopes of it eventually taking.
I use Jerboa most of the time inspite of the many bugs, but I usually end up having to open the PWA for missing functionality.
Like I said…
Lots… And lots…
And lots… of patience.
Yup, and via hermit as well.
It has benefits over jerboa in that everything works right.
But jerboa is a better overall experience because of the way it uses the screen in a balanced way. Coming from reddit 3rd party apps, browsers and PWAs are so clunky. Even old reddit suffers from that, though. New reddit at least is visually closer to app layouts.
Which is tangential. But until jerboa catches up, it’s going to be glitchy, which is annoying in its own right, like some community links just crashing the app.
I’m really not a fan of the lemmy / kbin web UIs but I recently installed wefwef.app as a PWA and I really like it.
I’m trying out Jerboa but also definitely prefer the current web interface as a PWA on Android. I’d rather have just a great responsive mobile and desktop web interface as my main way to use Lemmy.
I think that we get too used to relying on mobile apps because the corpo sites don’t care about doing anything beyond the bare minimum cookie-cutter UI to get users, and so we rely on this party apps to actually provide useful features.
I’m hoping that the fediverse can bring out a lot of interesting and useful web design options, for Lemmy and Mastodon and the other federated tools. Having something that is open and beautiful (and functional) should be a part of the plans for increasing adoption and drawing in more people to the community.
How do you deal with losing your scrolling position every time you go back from viewing a comments page?
I have noticed that when I go back to the main feed that the specific position on the page might be a post or two above or below the one that I was viewing, but I haven’t experienced anything like the page not showing the post I was reading at all, or the entire feed resetting.
What behavior are you seeing?
I’m running Android 13, so it might be an issue with other Android versions or iOS.
The entire feed is indeed resetting as if I refreshed it. I’m also on Android 13.
EDIT: Just browsing using chrome or firefox has the same result…
It’s the only pwa ever to work for me. I use firefox and I’d say this is as fast as when I use jerboa. And I like the way it looks too.
I’ve been using the PWA on my tablet and I switch between the PWA and jerboa on my phone. The PWA seems more stable but the upvote and collapse comment buttons are a little too small for my taste.
I’ve never understood the appeal to make a standalone app when a good PWA can be just as good.
PWA, like most web stuff, has a low barrier to entry but is extremely hard to make look and feel right. Check out the other comment about controls flashing. Native apps do not just have better development tools, they save you from having to reinvent whole kinds of wheels.
