"Chrome-style" Desktop Apps that work today in Firefox | Hacker News Reader

"Chrome-style" Desktop Apps that work today in Firefox

marketplace.firefox.com

107 pointspotch47 comments

Apparently uninstalling apps is only easily available currently for Windows and Mac. You have to go through a somewhat manual kludge currently for Linux varieties.

edit: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Marketplace/Mozillian_Preview#Unins...

Is this just a link to the Firefox OS marketplace? I had no idea these could be installed to the desktop, too.

Sure is. The runtime for desktop apps is in desktop Firefox, but Mozilla has been focusing on mobile and hasn't really given enough PR to the desktop story. Expect to see more about desktop apps in the next year.

Yessir! Developers can submit apps with the notion that they can run on Firefox Desktop, and it will work.

Anyone knows how to bypass OS X 's Gatekeeper to launch the app? Normal app is Ctrl-click to overwrite Gatekeeper blocking. But can't Ctrl -click on the "Launch" button on the page as it pop up context menu.

The app is also in your Applications directory, and you can Ctrl-click the icon in there.

They can be installed in Firefox for Android too. For a while I ran an AOSP version of Android without the Google apps but with Firefox installed and using twitter, facebook, etc installed as 'Apps' from the Mozilla Marketplace. It's not quite a Firefox OS experience but not too bad.

The first I see is the irony vis-a-vis pre-firefox Mozilla. They had a similar system (I'm looking for the old book I had on it) using a widget set called XUL. I tried using it. It hurt.

I guess the lesson is one of:

  (1) don't make complicated XML-based APIs
  (2) stick to standards (e.g., using HTML now instead of XUL)
  (3) if your system isn't getting traction, retry in 10 years?

I suspect that HTML was not mature enough back then which is why XUL was created and used instead.

In my opinion, HTML+CSS still remain quite inappropriate languages for describing desktop UIs. They can be used for such purposes, but, as compared with specialized languages (Glade XML, XAML, XUL), HTML+CSS is overly verbose for any non-trivial UIs, The worst thing is not code bloat and need for a Turing-complete language (JS) just to describe the looks, but the fact that you just can't have consistent system-wide look-and-feel. I believe, there's still completely no way to, say, bring proper system tabs or tree views to HTML+CSS+JS application.

Legit question: what about a tree view do you not think is possible with HTML/CSS/JS?

Native look and feel.

It's interesting how the traditional definition of 'native look and feel' is starting to seem passé. Most of the computers I have sitting around the house today do not utilize a tree view in any default 'app'. There are no interface components on my tablet (that I can think of) that can't be recreated with some combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript in a modern browser.

That's fair, but other than that, I'm curious what there is. CSS is still bad at grids without pretending they're tables, but Flexbox has solved most of the other limitations.

Keyboard acceleration. I have never seen an HTML control kit that handles the Tab or Arrow keys correctly or even very well.

No standards. For example - Drag and Drop. There is no standard system for Drag and Drop between components in the browser because it doesn't know about these controls, it only knows div div div div div. So, in general - it's just harder to write good code that targets HTML components because there are no standards for complex components.

(Some more patterns with no standards for complex components: Data Binding, Encapsulation (grouping one or more component into a parent component and walking parent/child components), Inheritance.)

And then, there's performance. Native trumps HTML here, no contest.

When you say:

"(2) stick to standards (e.g., using HTML now instead of XUL)"

and

"(3) if your system isn't getting traction, retry in 10 years?"

It sounds like you are claiming Mozilla is promoting the use of XUL as a mark-up language for web apps, which is completely, unequivocally, 100% false. Hopefully this is not what you intended, because it would be an unfortunate case of FUD-spreading.

It's not. AFAICT, they were promoting XUL as a way to build desktop apps. I even have a copy of the O'Reilly book about XUL... somewhere.

(3) was talking about making apps with mozilla. Not specifically xul.

XUL is/was the language for the entire Mozilla app UI. So it's not like they invented it specifically for third parties to use- or even with them in mind.

XUL is only used for the external chrome interface of the Firefox desktop browser, let's be clear not to commingle the technology used to build the UI of Firefox with the standards-based technologies that power web apps/pages ;)

No, but it is entirely possible to build desktop-installable apps using the Firefox internals, with XUL as the primary interface technology. This was the idea behind XULRunner, a Firefox runtime package for you to build your apps with.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XULRunner

The XML-based XUL isn't terrible, either, considering the respectable set of widgets and the ability to control all the styles with CSS. The nasty part, in my experience, was trying to get through the messy FFI that was XPCOM.

Check out Pencil (mockup app) http://pencil.evolus.vn/ for an example of multi-platform desktop app based on XULRunner.

I think XUL was/is vastly better then than HTML5 is today for what everyone seems to want: Actual applications (instead of web sites) that run in the browser.

XUL had/has a proper GUI toolkit with proper bindings to an event framework for user interaction. It was similar to HTML/CSS/JS but much, much better. The problem was people wanted "real" apps without having to do real work, and we're stuck with HTML which is a document language and will never be what we really want.

Oh, and it wasn't that complicated, it was rather easy.

Is it possible to create a desktop app like this, for web sites of my choice, without using the Marketplace? It occurs to me that Firefox is very nearly able to provide a site-specific browser experience, like Fluid[1], but I'm not sure how to do it.

[1] http://fluidapp.com/

There is, but only if you can place a manifest file[1] on the domain where the app resides. Any website can trigger installation of an app via an API[2].

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Apps/Manifest

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Apps.instal...

Actually the whole point of Firefox OS is that you don't target the desktop anymore. So the answer is that you can't do that in Firefox without actually releasing an app packaged to run standalone. Some other service that don't contain the full packaged app create a glorified bookmark which redirects you to the website's service like SoundCloud does.

It's a little embarrassing that the Soundcloud screenshot is of Chrome.

I noticed that as well. There's actually quite a few apps in there that have screenshots of a Chrome tab. I think whoever submitted them just re-used an existing screenshot they had sitting around.

Take once, use everywhere. We have achieved zen WORA

In reality Firefox/Firefox OS apps can run in other browsers as well and equally so in Chrome since it regular HTML/CSS/JavaScript. This has been one of the points Mozilla has been highlighting and sometimes they blog about it too.

It's not the best experience. When you install an app, you don't really know where to go to use it. Atleast in Chrome, you see it pop into the apps screen.

So where do you go? I've installed one and clicked through all of my menus and can't find it anywhere. It's not in my OS launcher either.

http://f.cl.ly/items/3Y203B2A3f0r3Y221T3j/appz.png

If you install the app from its detail page, there is a message telling you where the app now lives. The "Free" install button becomes a "Launch" button that opens the actual executable.

On the search results pages, we don't add any messaging. I've filed an enhancement bug to consider exposing this to users: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=913728

Thank you. I think it doesn't work on Fedora 19, my "Free" button never changes to "Launch".

edit: filed a bug

Thanks for filing!

It is in your Applications folder.

First time i've seen this. Must have missed the announcement?

It wasn't announced, sadly. I consider it a 'best kept secret'.

marketing/PR has been focused on mobile so that we can shift as much focus there as possible. The dilemma is that most devs are not spending time to make their apps work on mobile devices. However, a miniscule amount of people use Firefox OS on their phone so it would have been nice to use desktop apps to bootstrap the ecosystem.

Thanks for the reminder. I actually used some apps early on but there weren't many and somehow forgot about them. I'll use some of these desktop apps more especially Wikipedia and SoundCloud.

I have been wishing for this ever since the company I work for standardized communication on Google Plus/Hangouts (which I don't normally use) with the company Gmail account (which I only use for this, so I'm not usually logged into it). :-/

I can use Adium's XMPP support for the plaintext IM stuff, but for Hangouts I have to keep the damn window open all the time, logged into the company account, or people won't be able to call me. Every time someone calls, or I have to call someone, I have to hunt down the window/tab where Plus lives.

Wrapping Plus/Hangouts in an app would solve this for me. Anyone know if someone has done that with Firefox or Chrome (on a Mac)?

Sad that this PSA even needs to be written, but alas:

* NO, open web apps that run on Firefox and Chrome are in no way linked to non-standard markup languages like XUL. *

Please disregard any users who have made this fallacious assertion.

Before Chrome and Firefox there is Pokki, which has been doing this for over 2 years. HTML, JavaScript, and CSS desktop apps, with App Store.

http://developers.pokki.com

The weakness with such an approach is that it is not the browser itself pushing the apps through user discoverable means. You have to know about Pokki before hand in order to find it. I myself never knew such a service existed until now. In some ways Pokki is more powerful than Firefox on Windows but it nearly providing the same kind of functionality.

Wow just tried it out in Ubuntu, installed the free calculator and guess where you find the installed app? In the Dash. I did not imagine the integration is so great.

I definitely will look into Firefox apps now more closely.

I'm using 12.04 still and was stuck with Gwibber, hoping to see something like this. I just installed TweetDeck (and an open-sourced Google Authenticator app) and what a pleasant surprise!

I'll have to test these more thoroughly but both installed no problem and appear to be working perfectly.

This is especially good timing because I'd like to move off Android to a Firefox OS mobile handset soon. Once I see something performance/spec comparable to a Nexus 4 I'm on board.

I did the same. How do you uninstall it?

Pulse app is really good and works like a native app. Never knew this worked for Desktop as well.

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