Re: Installing web apps

Le 1 févr. 2012 à 20:03, Ian Hickson a écrit :
>> 	- a calendar client
> 
> There are lots of calendar clients written on the Web today.
>> 	- an IMAP client
> There are lots of mail clients written on the Web today.

These are not web-apps that can work offline longer than 2 minutes.
Android's GMail app is getting to be as bad.

But otherwise, many imap clients exist as desktop or in-device applications.
I think Tim is asking for something in the middle and the distance is pretty big.


>> As a user when I install an app, I want to be able to give it access to 
>> a selection of:
> 
> Providing access to these things when the app is installed is IMHO a net 
> worse security model than granting access to these things implicitly when 
> the feature is needed.

And this is the reason the normal model has been: no security model at all.
Desktop applications have been living well with some web interfacing... installing a web-app could start where desktop applications are then gradually go less demanding?

Android goes somewhat in this direction with its app-security model...

> Of the things you list, the following are already possible without an 
> up-front permission grant, in a manner more secure than an up-front grant:
> 
>> - Program storage, to a limit
>> - Whether it is permanently available or downloaded or cached for a while
>> - Access to RAM at runtime, to a limit

I don't know how well such limits are handled by browsers, I've seen a lot of browser crashes for these reasons. Pointer?

>> - CPU time when in background, to a limit

Same thing, the user-warning on slow script is not that limit!

>> - Access to the net, maybe to a bandwidth limit

really?

>> - Ability to access anything on the web
> 
> What's the use case for this?

An editor importing a web-page?

>> (I'll want to sync its local and shared data storage between all my 
>> devices too)
> 
> That's possible without the site knowing anything about it. Chrome already 
> does it to some extent.

Typical state of a young feature: Chrome does it without asking me, Firefox asks me if I want to use my own server ;-).

>> If I can't give power to apps, then the web app platform cannot compete 
>> with native apps.
> 
> There's plenty of things we can do to make the Web platform more 
> compelling and a better competitor to native apps, but adding "installing" 
> isn't one of them. That would in fact take one of the Web's current 
> significant advantages over native apps and kill it.


when you consider the success of app-stores, I think that I do not share this view.

paul