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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

My theory is that many Electron apps don't really need Electron - they just need secure, constrained local file system access.

Electron has massive potential security issues. Chrome with native file system access could make it possible for many of those Electron apps to simply be browser apps, making them vastly more secure and bringing them back into the domain of the ordinary web app.

It's a hugely important new feature.

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A lot of them just need to be on the taskbar/notification area and not in a browser tab, honestly.

If would be interesting if you could allow a site to "open as application" (instead of open in new tab) - or this could even be called "install". The site would then appear in your OS like any other app, and may or may not have some of the browser chrome (URL bar, tabs, navigation buttons) depending on the site.

I currently have many pinned tabs - email, music - where I'd happily promote them to "apps". Even some of the real applications I use I only really use to get this behaviour (Slack comes to mind).

I'm a way, this is sort of similar to how Chrome OS works - just I want it on a real OS, I'm not at the point of being 100% web (or Electron-based) apps, and as a developer, probably never will be.

Chrome has/had this. It's called Chrome Apps[1]. But they deprecated them[2]

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/apps/about_apps

[2] https://blog.chromium.org/2016/08/from-chrome-apps-to-web.ht...

Sounds like you’re describing the Progressive Web App (PWA) install that Chrome recently added. Coming to Firefox (if not there already), and Edge. Not holding my breath for Safari though.

Mobile Safari supports PWAs and quite a bit of infra like service workers. Last time I looked it didn't work well in the background (reloads page on resume) but seems like they have most of the building blocks.

EDIT: This post [1] says background switching should be working in iOS 13.

[1] https://medium.com/@firt/iphone-11-ipados-and-ios-13-for-pwa...

You can do something similar in chromium/chrome by using the `app` flag. I set jupyterlab to launch with

  chromium --disable-extensions --app=%s

which hides the URL bar and tabs, as well as disables any extensions. I'm sure it's possible to create a shortcut on Windows that does the same thing and place it on the desktop or what have you.

You literally can do that and not just for PWAs.

You can do this yourself in Chrome right now!

Open the page you want to be an "app", and on the Chrome three-dot menu, select More Tools / Create Shortcut...

Edit the name as you wish and check the "Open as window" checkbox, then click OK.

Now you have a shortcut on your Start menu that works like any other app shortcut. You can pin it to the taskbar, save it to the desktop, any of the usual things. And when you open the app it will have its own window and its own icon on the taskbar.

This works on Windows and Linux at least - have not tried it on macOS.

I use this on Mac OS too. I use it for Gmail, gcalendar, slack, etc which I always have open on my work macbook.

This has been done recently. https://youtu.be/EiXtKTjcLRE

Offline mode is important too, but of course you can do this on the web just fine nowadays.

Your version only works as long as there is only one browser.

How many die-hard Firefoxers run at least one Electron app?

Not sure what's your point but I would prefer my Electron apps to run with Firefox's engine if possible since it's the browser I mainly use, it would use much less memory.

It would be slower and that's all that matter. Ram is dynamically allocated and chrome has arguably better caching. Ram usage has only one user facing drawback, it's when it affect negatively performance. Chrome then outweight Firefox on your own criterion, by one indirection. Anyway Firefox lack many features useful for "electron apps" and this new file system acesss will add to the list

> It would be slower and that's all that matter. Ram is dynamically allocated and chrome has arguably better caching

I don't want to use chrome, so it's never going to be an option. The best option in a ideal world is the browser the user is using since there's not that much resource needed to open one more tab. Some APIs around that would be ideal.

Why? Why couldn't they work the same way in any browser, like websites do?

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