Show HN: Web apps on Linux

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25 points·ckrnews··7 comments

Is this feature not built into current version of chrome on linux?

On windows, you can go to any URL and in the "Customize and Control Chrome (the 3 vertical dots) and select "Add to desktop" select "open in new window" option. Chrome will then select the icon from the URL's favorite icon, and open the URL in menuless window.

This has been a feature I believe since 2012.

I use the --app flag in chrome, to create shortcuts for homerolled webinterfaces for this and that. (on Ubuntu 16.04)

Very nice and simple. Just what I was looking for, since firefox does not have a "make this url into a webapp" feature anymore.

Unfortunately, one of my use-case apps would not work correctly: https://chat.cloudron.io

Is there any way one can get to the web inspector, or at least dump the web console output to the terminal?

I've added web console dump and caching. If you git checkout and run with qt5webview.py -u https://chat.cloudron.io/home -c the login screen pops up. The -c flag enables caching

Thanks a lot for the quick fix, works great now.

But why?

Even having a shortcut on the desktop would be a reson.

Electron and similar technologies (not sure about this one) have APIs to integrate into the OS, and have access to notifications, filesystem, and lots of other components that are normalltly reserved yo native apps.

This allows devs to build a web app and port it to every platform without much effort (if any).

I was able to use a modern version of Skype this way, instead of the crappy native client that they haven't updated in years.

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