Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

What I don't like is WebView distributed as a "native app". It's not native app and it's not something I want to install, don't cheat me. Webpages should stay in browser.

I expect native app to be written with Objective C (OS X/iOS user here), having very low memory usage, fast startup and offline usage. Also I expect as much integration with the system, as possible, native controls (not that buggy emulation without my favorite emacs-like keybindings) and native behavior.

Probably we miss an important piece of technology: installable web-apps. Website opened in the frameless browser window, identifiable as a different application which could be easily pinned to Launchpad. With all advantages that "separate webview" has, but with some important difference: sandboxing. So I can feel safe when I launch this application, because I don't need to trust all my files, passwords and system to another application. I've seen that kind of technology in the iOS: website bookmark could be pinned as a desktop icon, but it's just a bookmark.

You can launch chrome with

  google-chrome --app="http://app.com"

And get a frameless window.

Firefox used to have something like this, but it doesn't appear to work anymore. You can do

  firefox -chrome "file:///some/local/file.html"

But obviously that's not quite the same, and I believe is limited to local files.

This is what I hate about Slack. It feels like a webapp inside of a very thin wrapper.

Slack feels like it should be in the browser for me, as a pinned tab. So at my job that's how I use it.

The problem with these tabs is that closing that window, the tab is gone forever (on both chromium and firefox).

It's also easy to lose track of which window they were in quite fast. A separate app is faster to find on almost any WM/OS.

Maybe I miss your meaning but on OS X/chrome: cmd-shift-T to reopen the last window with all tabs. Works even after a chrome restart. Saves me when 40 tabs open and I Cmd-Q for too long instead of Cmd-W.

Yes, I'm aware of this, but it pretty much means the pinned tab behaves like "any other tab". If I closed those 40 tabs, the pinned tab should move elsewhere or persist. Otherwise, I'll have to manually re-pin it all the time.

The recent update is the first one that starts to feel like software to me because the download interface is much less "webby" (and faster for grabbing multiple files from someone.)

This type of app really bites us (users) in the ass when we try things real Mac apps have done literally for decades - drag and drop. Drag a file expecting it to be accepted as an upload, but oh wait no, the web view navigated to view that file. And I have no back button so I have to quit the app.

That's an issue as most webviews can ad a bit of js and support that feature. I'd email the dev a bug report.

CMD + arrow left works

That's one of a large set of things I hate about Slack.

This is not problem of slack in webview. This is problem of slack. Actually interface in OSX is slower that web view. If you compare optimized Web app and OSX Native app, you will spot difference. Slack is just not optimized.

You can to check our own messaging to it's speed at our old hacker news thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9757243 It is faster than native apps.

I have to say though, for a webapp packaged in a wrapper it's a very good one.

In chrome I can create application shortcuts... and with browser notifications it pretty much just works. I usually have pandora and slack as application shortcuts that run in their own windows... it really doesn't bug me that they run in a browser... they work as I expect them to (though not in osx iirc). I agree that the thin wrappers are a little annoying...

On the flip side, though I really appreciate that I can create more feature rich applications with the likes of nwjs or electron. There's a lot of things you can do that go a fair bit beyond just web applications in a thin shell... though most of the better ones are app centric first, and web instance second.

I do wish someone would build a nice mail client for Chrome/ChromeOS though... That part really sucks imho. I mean there's a browser based SSH client for chrome, so it's entirely possible to do.

If user X uses Chrome. If not, there's extra 1GB+ bloat for one "browser app". No thanks.

So, you don't use any browser apps?

That must be pretty hard to do. I think going without a browser+javascript would be pretty primative... I mean, I pay my bills, send emails, hell view the site I'm on as browser applications. I remember being online in 1993 (vga, bbsing, dialup ftw), it wasn't nearly as diverse or capable as today.

> So, you don't use any browser apps?

That's not at all what they said. Some of us use browsers that are not chrome. That would mean having to run 2 browser runtimes to get a thin wrapper with chrome.

I believe Firefox has, or used to have the ability to launch a standalone browser without extra chrome for a specific site (maybe not via the UI)... IIRC IE on Windows 7+ offers the same functionality.

If you're using Opera or Safari, I have no idea.

I use the Fluid SSB [1] for the latter. It sandboxes websites that I need to use but are not willing to allow access to my primary browser history/cookie store. It's a little clunky, but it gets the job mostly done.

[1] http://fluidapp.com

I love fluid because of the thing the article mentions about Alt/Cmd + Tab... it's hard-wired into my brain to mean "task switch", so I have several web apps that I use all the time (GCal, Pivotal Tracker, Asana to name a few) with Fluid apps so I can quickly change to them.

Yeah, that too. Not having to hunt around for a browser tab is really nice.

Like "Create application shortcuts" in Chrome?

Or app manifests in Firefox?

Windows 10 will allow for installable web apps that behave like native (admittedly not much use to an audience that tends heavily toward OS X)

vbehezar what if only the view layer was in HTML/CSS/JS?

How is that different from using gtk or some other gui toolkit?

Chrome packaged apps do what your last paragraph is calling for

Thanks, that's an interesting technology. Too bad that it's specific to Chrome and I can't expect any user to run Chrome or install Chrome. But that's a good direction, I only hope that major browser vendors will consider to adapt it or similar standard in the future. It shouldn't take too much resources to implement it, I suppose.

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