macOS Web Apps | Hacker News Reader

macOS Web Apps

markdotto.com

42 pointsinsin11 comments

To be clear, since the article doesn't mention it: this is the same progressive web app functionality you can use today with Chrome. I find it really useful, I'm excited Safari is getting the same functionality.

One difference is that Safari web apps can run independently from the browser, whereas those generated by Chrome and other Chrome-cousins have to launch the parent browser to run. As someone who uses multiple browsers Chrome’s behavior was always irritating.

Another is that they have entirely separate cookie, storage, etc pools so whatever you do in your main browser won’t impact the web apps and vice versa.

Safari/WebKit also tends to be a fair deal easier on battery life, which makes it more practical to keep these apps open in the background.

Yes, and that is a HUGE difference.

For my use cases, Chrome's implementation is worthless, and I have used tools like WebCatalog, Coherence X, Unity, and previously Epichrome, to achieve this.

The problem with these tools is they are usually 1-person operations and the maintenance is too hard (browser stuff moves fairly quickly) and they tend to get buggy and unwell after a couple years.

Having standalone web apps — with their own processes, application layers, and sandboxes to prevent cookies/sessions from leaking between them — built into the OS is the most exciting macOS feature in years, IMHO.

This is cool, but not a direction I expected from Apple. Is this fully released and generally available?

Yes. The article links to https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213583, which describes the feature.

Yep, in macOS Sonoma (14.0) and iOS/iPadOS 17.0).

Yes. Seems like it's a reaction to Electron apps being such resource hogs on macOS (because they're built around Chrome/Chromium/Blink rather than Safari/Webkit)

I don’t think it’s a reaction to anything in particular, just one of many fruits of Apple’s reinvestment in WebKit over the last few years.

Note: you don't have to keep them in the dock. That might not be obvious. They do get added to the macOS dock when they are created, but they are store in ~/Applications, so you can remove the icon from the dock and still launch them normally.

    (v_o)

Curious why the posts "denzlwashington" on this topic are flagged and dead — they just note that this is something you can use usefully use with chatGPT. Is there some kind of IP-address-correlation link to other bad behavior, or... ???

Web Apps don’t seem to have an AppleScript Dictionary either, so they’re not easy to automate.

Hopefully this is something that will get added in a later release as it would be great to be able to script things like routing certain URLs to their corresponding web app, or setting up shortcut keys.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com