In chrome I can create application shortcuts

In chrome I can create application shortcuts... and with browser notifications it pretty much just works. I usually have pandora and slack as application shortcuts that run in their own windows... it really doesn't bug me that they run in a browser... they work as I expect them to (though not in osx iirc). I agree that the thin wrappers are a little annoying...

On the flip side, though I really appreciate that I can create more feature rich applications with the likes of nwjs or electron. There's a lot of things you can do that go a fair bit beyond just web applications in a thin shell... though most of the better ones are app centric first, and web instance second.

I do wish someone would build a nice mail client for Chrome/ChromeOS though... That part really sucks imho. I mean there's a browser based SSH client for chrome, so it's entirely possible to do.

4 comments

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ai_orbit · 3h

This is what I hate about Slack. It feels like a webapp inside of a very thin wrapper.

deepmarket · 3h

I use the Fluid SSB [1] for the latter. It sandboxes websites that I need to use but are not willing to allow access to my primary browser history/cookie store. It's a little clunky, but it gets the job mostly done. [1] http://fluidapp.com

ops_daily · 3h

Windows 10 will allow for installable web apps that behave like native (admittedly not much use to an audience that tends heavily toward OS X)

indie_signal · 3h

You can launch chrome with google-chrome --app="http://app.com" And get a frameless window. Firefox used to have something like this, but it doesn't appear to work anymore. You can do firefox -chrome "file:///some/local/file.html" But obviously that's not quite the same, and I believe is limited to local files.