Not OP, but my browser is open pretty much all the time, and pinning tabs ensures they don't get lost.
Can’t imagine them each having a desktop app. I would just get lost switching tabs.
(Nice and related is that you can do Super+<n> for window switching in at least Windows and Ubuntu.)
I make SSB apps for my most used websites, for me it's much faster than:
- switch to chrome
- switch to chrome window with pinned tab
- switch to pinned tab
Basically a very thin wrapper over the systems web view.
- CircleCI
- GitHub
- JIRA (blecch, but I have to use it...)
- AWS
- Google Docs (for work, and the rare personal use of Google stuff can just happen in one of the general browsers I am using)
...and others.
The OS does a much better job of partitioning windows and groups of windows than a browser typically does. You can easily keep switch between groups of windows, or keep them in their own workspace/desktop, etc.
Plus you can keep your cookies and saved passwords isolated between the environments... the browser handling AWS doesn't need to store or have access to the pasword for my Google account, and so on. For production type apps you can disable saved passwords entirely.
It is incredibly useful, and the only thing I worry about is that on macOS (my main workstation OS) there is only one good solution for this I know of: Epichrome, which seems to be a one-man side project:
https://github.com/dmarmor/epichrome
Other solutions that I know of don't save passwords, or don't keep password/cookie stores separated between the browser instances.
(I think Chrome can do this by itself on other platforms.)
And yes, Chrome, at least on windows, has an `--app` switch.
FluidApp can't save passwords.
MacPin looks interesting! Thanks, will check it out. However, Safari-based browsers have a horrible show-stopping flaw; they don't (yet) support pasting images into web applications. This is why I love Safari for browsing and reading, but can't bear to use it for JIRA, GitHub, etc.
In Chrome (and thus Epichrome), you just hit your screen capture shortcut (Cmd-Shift-Ctrl-4 by default on macOS), select a rect of the screen to copy, and paste. Boom! Your bug report or GitHub comment now has an image pasted into it.
In Safari, you have to hit your screen capture shortcut, open Preview or similar app, create a new image, save it as a file, then go back to the web app and upload the image.
There's something deeply, horrifically wrong with that workflow.