I like Slack and similar having their own icon and entry in the alt-tab switcher. Absent ubiquitous PWA support, electron is sort of the least bad alternative.
Sounds like there is an opportunity for someone to provide a way to display an icon in the window manager that saves a gigabyte of RAM. :D
Chrome apps?
.lnk files. Or on Linux, .desktop files. Can contain an URL. You click it, a browser opens. The tech is decades old at this point.
I believe he meant an icon for the running window, not one on the desktop or menu.
ironically, windows just included this for Edge, you can alt tab between browser windows and you can put websites as taskbar apps ( and will also jump to all windows of the app easily as well)
You can kind of do this with Chrome for any website. More tools->create shortcut in the menu.
We’ve used this for years as our answer to users who request a desktop app. They’re generally pleasantly surprised and satisfied with the result.
Yeah, my experience is that these behave in unusual ways: it’s ok, but they always feel a bit off, even compared to Electron
You have to design your site for this, back in the IE days we did this for some corporate tools and went full kiosk mode. The user didn't even know that it was a website.
Ah, fair point. Electron is a good fit for web apps that would otherwise live in a browser, I agree.