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.

  • jherazob@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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

  • invicticide@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Aninjanameddaryll@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • CleoTheWizard@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • ⓝⓞ🅞🅝🅔@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • jlarex@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Pechente@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Papamousse@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    As I have an account on Beehaw and Lemmy.world, I created two PWA on my screen, it works great!

  • mayooooo@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • SkepticElliptic@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Is anybody else’s top bar grey? I’m on Android: Firefox 115.0b9.

    This happened the other day after the admins fixed the icon and name back to Beehaw and the bee.

  • verdare [he/him]@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I’ve been switching between Mlem and the PWA. I’ve honestly found the PWA to be pretty laggy, with things not loading or the whole app just freezing. Given the connection issues I’m also seeing on Mlem, I suspect the issue is server-side.

  • distractedcactus@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • anlumo@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Installing it as a PWA on my iPhone causes the history buttons to disappear (since they’re part of the browser). This means that if I open a comments page, I can’t get back to the post list again. I can tap on the logo to get to the main page, but my scrolling position is lost, so I’d have to scroll down to find where I stopped scrolling last time.

    Yeah no, still have to use an app.