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Comment by hs86 | Hacker News Reader

For Chrome users that leave the browser open all the time, is there a reason to choose an Electron based chat-app, that usually sits in the background, over just installing its PWA on the desktop?

Chrome now supports native notifications on Windows/macOS and even apps without full PWA support seem to work fine by just creating a shortcut and setting it to open as a new window without the browser's UI.

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For me the reason would be first-class status in the taskbar/dock. I like having some apps only a click away and in its own window, not lost among many open tabs.

For some time you could do that with any web page in Chrome, with "the create a shortcut" option. But now Chrome opens them in a new tab, not in a dedicated window.

After adding the new shortcut you can go to chrome://apps and right-click on any app to select "Open as window". This should bring back the desired behavior and these app shortcuts now have their own entry in my taskbar/dock.

Ho nice, thank you. The option used to be in the creation dialog.

I assume this is due to a web limitation: Discord has system-wide push to talk (I.e. system wide shortcut) only in the electron app, not in the PWA.

Yeah, there's lots of little things in the Electron API that would be good to see adopted into PWA standards. Probably also some Node native modules out there that would be good candidates for PWA standards.

With so many Electron apps in the wild these days, it seems like a great opportunity for the standards bodies to comb them for good ideas for greater platform-wide adoption. (What are people doing in Node processes in Electron that would be tough to do in {Service, Web} Workers? What APIs for deeper native integration would be of benefit?)

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