Progressive Web Apps in evolution, Twitter makes its mobile site the main



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Twitter shows some users of its desktop website new user interface which is designed to be faster and to support the newly added bookmarks feature (supported on iOS and Android clients, but not currently the main website), sleep mode, and night mode. These users were randomly selected and switched to the new interface to test the interface and provide feedback.

The new interface is not so different from the old: it is organized a little differently, with a two-column layout instead of the three columns currently used, but overall it will be familiar to anyone who has already used the microblogging platform. What makes this movement interesting is not the specifics of the interface itself, but the technology on which it is based.

The new interface is not new at all. It's been available for quite some time now mobile.twitter.com, The user-friendly web interface for Twitter's Twitter. In turn, this same web interface is used to drive the Windows 10 application, the KaiOS platform for smartphones and the recently launched Twitter Lite for Android application. That's why it has the data saver mode; it is designed for users who have low or expensive bandwidth or underpowered devices.

This mobile site is perhaps one of the most important examples of what could be a new generation of Web applications: the Progressive Web Application (PWA). PWAs are web applications that rely on some modern browser features to offer a much closer experience than a traditional application. For example, PWAs can support offline operations using service employees (a way to run JavaScript in the background, able to respond to events, and make network requests degrading if the network does not work. is not available). they integrate platform features such as notifications; They are also designed to be pinned to application launchers and home screens and treated as if they were "real" applications rather than just web pages.

A brief history of PWA

The PWA concept – the particular range of features and behaviors that made these apps work and feel a bit different from their traditional web predecessors – was designed by Google in 2015. Since then, Google and Microsoft have been promoting this concept. bridge the gap between the web application and the native application. Well-designed, the PWAs offer the best components of native applications – such as push notifications, offline operations and icons on the home screen – with the best elements of the Web, such as a code always to day, a responsive design a range of form factors and the ability to share content with hyperlinks.

Twitter has been quietly developing its PWA for months. The shift to some desktop users is without doubt the most important and most visible use of a PWA so far.

In the longer term, wider adoption of PWA techniques means that someday Steve Jobs' vision for smartphone applications could truly be realized: no need for SDK or new development tools and languages, but a world in which web technology can be used. create applications that are equal to their native counterparts.

Picture of the list by Marie Slim / Flickr

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