What does this app provide that a browser tab doesn't, other than a prominent spot in the Dock?
I don’t want to use Twitter in a tab.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Websites, wrapped web views, react native, et al solve a developer’s problem. They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse, the only question is how much worse. How much better are you forcing me to pay? How much cognitive tax am I paying?
I mean, webapps obviously have a positive value for you over the alternative of not using the service—otherwise you would be doing exactly that (and maybe using a competitor's service.)
At least personally, I appreciate first-class web-app versions of apps (with or without wrappers), since I use a not-very-popular OS and web-apps are basically the only way any company is ever going to give me a version of their software I can use.
That's a pretty broad statement. As a user, I hate installing apps. They take up disk space, and then I need to remember to remove them if I am not using it.
Also as a user, I am not sure how much additional security holes are created by installing a third-party binary. With a webapp, there is only a single source of security issues (browser).
Also the dock spot is important for my method of using windowing. The browser is for websites. I wouldn't want to mix it. I could banish twitter.com to a wrapper window with Fluid, but it's still just a crappy web app. I use Tweetbot instead. And before that Tweetie for Mac. Which was killed today. Fingers crossed that the API survives.
Before Twitter killed native clients by restricting their acccess tokens, they were an amazing place for people to try out new UI ideas - a really simple concept (one text area and a scrolling list) but a huge explosion of ways of presenting and interacting with it. Then twitter bought Tweetie and Twetdeck and restricted what the 3rd party clients could do and it all just died.
And I don't think it had a prominent spot in the dock... IIRC its icon was mainly in the menu bar.
It's been a while since I used tweetie or twitter, though, for very much at all. I'm really sorry to see it go away more because it used to be a nice UI playground for a talented developer than because of any recent experience with it.
Fortunately Tweetbot has that same feature now, so I've switched to it.
A lot of programmers these days have been brought up on JS and web technologies so they literally do not see any other solutions, regardless of how much better they may be.
• Windows: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-create-desktop-sho...
• Mac: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/3A5ZTe...
What this feature doesn't do, is to track the tabs spawned by launching the application shortcut using that taskbar item/dock icon/etc. Instead, you just get a new window spawned in the Chrome application's window-group.
This is really a failing of our desktop window managers, not of web browsers: we need to separate the semantic concepts of "process" and "application", such that one process can be responsible for driving several applications, and choosing to "quit" an application can just result in an IPC message being sent to the process telling it that the user wants that window-group-context gone, rather than telling the window manager to go terminate the entire process.
(Such a feature would also greatly help with things like managing "non-rooted" Remote Desktop or X11 or virtual-machine windows. Right now, some of these use a workaround of generating a stub binary to register each foreign application for the local DWM's sake. But it's a leaky abstraction: Alt+Tab/Cmd+Tab to the proxy "application", and the RDP client/X server/VM "app" gets focus instead. If window-groups—with metadata for the name and icon of the "application" they represent—were something a process could publish to a DWM, rather than something the DWM tried to determine heuristically about an application process, all of these problems would go away. And, even without offering this up for webapps to use, browsers would benefit from this change: Chrome's "profiles" are exactly separate "application" window-groups in the same sense as apps under an X server or VM process.)
Works perfectly on windows. Let's say I pin Gmail as an app on the taskbar. When I open Gmail using that button, it remains attached to that taskbar button, which is an icon of Gmail for convenience. In fact it's not obvious to figure out that it's running on Chrome.
I'd rather not, thanks.
And then we'd all have lowest-common denominator crap. Imagine if Final Cut Pro were a web app. I much, much prefer Apple Mail to some Gmail webpage for instance. I also like apps to be able to actually take advantage of my hardware. Web browsers ought not be treated like de facto operating systems.
Web apps aren't the panacea they're being promoted as.