4 ms·

What does this app provide that a browser tab doesn't, other than a prominent spot in the Dock?

nawazdhandala 9y ago
Chrome + (Windows / Mac / Ubuntu) should let users dock any "Web App". That would enable new possibilities. No one would ever write an app specifically for mac / windows.
- nielsbot 9y ago
  Unfortunately. Personally I much prefer apps that provide a native experience.
  - zanny 9y ago
    The broader ecosystem doesn't seem to think so. All kinds of software like Atom, VSCode, the desktop Slack client, Discord, etc are all just Electron or React apps wrapped in native installers and launchers.
    - lokedhs 9y ago
      I think this is a case of everything looking like a nail if all you have is a hammer. A lot of programmers these days have been brought up on JS and web technologies so they literally do not see any other solutions, regardless of how much better they may be.
- derefr 9y ago
  Native app launchers (which you can stick into the taskbar/dock/etc.) are built into Chrome. • Windows: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-create-desktop-shortcuts-for-web-pages-using-chrome https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-create-desktop-sho... • Mac: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/3A5ZTe-HrVE https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/3A5ZTe... What this feature doesn't do, is to track the tabs spawned by launching the application shortcut using that taskbar item/dock icon/etc. Instead, you just get a new window spawned in the Chrome application's window-group. This is really a failing of our desktop window managers, not of web browsers: we need to separate the semantic concepts of "process" and "application", such that one process can be responsible for driving several applications, and choosing to "quit" an application can just result in an IPC message being sent to the process telling it that the user wants that window-group-context gone, rather than telling the window manager to go terminate the entire process. (Such a feature would also greatly help with things like managing "non-rooted" Remote Desktop or X11 or virtual-machine windows. Right now, some of these use a workaround of generating a stub binary to register each foreign application for the local DWM's sake. But it's a leaky abstraction: Alt+Tab/Cmd+Tab to the proxy "application", and the RDP client/X server/VM "app" gets focus instead. If window-groups—with metadata for the name and icon of the "application" they represent—were something a process could publish to a DWM, rather than something the DWM tried to determine heuristically about an application process, all of these problems would go away. And, even without offering this up for webapps to use, browsers would benefit from this change: Chrome's "profiles" are exactly separate "application" window-groups in the same sense as apps under an X server or VM process.)
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    > What this feature doesn't do, is to track the tabs spawned by launching the application shortcut using that taskbar item/dock icon/etc. Instead, you just get a new window spawned in the Chrome application's window-group. Works perfectly on windows. Let's say I pin Gmail as an app on the taskbar. When I open Gmail using that button, it remains attached to that taskbar button, which is an icon of Gmail for convenience. In fact it's not obvious to figure out that it's running on Chrome.
- LaGrange 9y ago
  > Chrome I'd rather not, thanks.
- briandear 9y ago
  > No one would ever write an app specifically for mac / windows And then we'd all have lowest-common denominator crap. Imagine if Final Cut Pro were a web app. I much, much prefer Apple Mail to some Gmail webpage for instance. I also like apps to be able to actually take advantage of my hardware. Web browsers ought not be treated like de facto operating systems. Web apps aren't the panacea they're being promoted as.
  - sincerely 9y ago
    I do think there's a lot of things that probably /do/ make sense as web apps though, like twitter
jiqiren 9y ago
no ads is one of the many good features. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
xenadu02 9y ago
Better battery life? Lower memory usage? Integration with the platform conventions? I don’t want to use Twitter in a tab. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Websites, wrapped web views, react native, et al solve a developer’s problem. They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse, the only question is how much worse. How much better are you forcing me to pay? How much cognitive tax am I paying?
- derefr 9y ago
  > They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse I mean, webapps obviously have a positive value for you over the alternative of not using the service—otherwise you would be doing exactly that (and maybe using a competitor's service.) At least personally, I appreciate first-class web-app versions of apps (with or without wrappers), since I use a not-very-popular OS and web-apps are basically the only way any company is ever going to give me a version of their software I can use.
- msvan 9y ago
  Wasn't the Twitter Mac app just an Electron app?
  - evan_ 9y ago
    no
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    I think it was a native app and predated electron by quite a bit.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  The Twitter app in no way has lower memory usage than a browser. It leaks GPU buffers like crazy.
- eh78ssxv2f 9y ago
  > They do not solve any problem I as a user have. That's a pretty broad statement. As a user, I hate installing apps. They take up disk space, and then I need to remember to remove them if I am not using it. Also as a user, I am not sure how much additional security holes are created by installing a third-party binary. With a webapp, there is only a single source of security issues (browser).
reednj 9y ago
Its much easier to manage multiple accounts. I think on the website you can only be logged in as one account at a time. The twitter app has a vertical 'tab' for each account.
hoistbypetard 9y ago
It used to be much nicer to use, back when Twitter acquired it. (It was called Tweetie then.) The notifications were better, the mechanics of doing things like following conversations or refreshing a conversation were simpler, filtering options were better, etc. And I don't think it had a prominent spot in the dock... IIRC its icon was mainly in the menu bar. It's been a while since I used tweetie or twitter, though, for very much at all. I'm really sorry to see it go away more because it used to be a nice UI playground for a talented developer than because of any recent experience with it.
evan_ 9y ago
For me at least the killer feature in the twitter app is the global hotkey I can press to hide/show it: when I have 5 seconds of downtime I can press the hotkey, read three tweets, and then send it away. Great for filling short pauses while other things load or I'm waiting for a response from someone. Fortunately Tweetbot has that same feature now, so I've switched to it.
ttepasse 9y ago
A better UI. As every native app does. Yes, in principle web apps can do more, from drag & drop to .. stuff. But in practice they never do, they never go the extra mile but instead just building for the lowest common denominator. Also the dock spot is important for my method of using windowing. The browser is for websites. I wouldn't want to mix it. I could banish twitter.com to a wrapper window with Fluid, but it's still just a crappy web app. I use Tweetbot instead. And before that Tweetie for Mac. Which was killed today. Fingers crossed that the API survives.
stesch 9y ago
You can block twitter in the browser so they can't track which sites you are visiting. Same goes for Facebook.
rahoulb 9y ago
One of the greatest things about the Twitter native apps were that the guy who originally wrote them (Loren Brichter, who Twitter acqui-hired) literally invented the Pull-to-refresh gesture that is used everywhere nowadays. Before Twitter killed native clients by restricting their acccess tokens, they were an amazing place for people to try out new UI ideas - a really simple concept (one text area and a scrolling list) but a huge explosion of ways of presenting and interacting with it. Then twitter bought Tweetie and Twetdeck and restricted what the 3rd party clients could do and it all just died.

Chrome + (Windows / Mac / Ubuntu) should let users dock any "Web App". That would enable new possibilities. No one would ever write an app specifically for mac / windows.

nielsbot 9y ago
Unfortunately. Personally I much prefer apps that provide a native experience.
- zanny 9y ago
  The broader ecosystem doesn't seem to think so. All kinds of software like Atom, VSCode, the desktop Slack client, Discord, etc are all just Electron or React apps wrapped in native installers and launchers.
  - lokedhs 9y ago
    I think this is a case of everything looking like a nail if all you have is a hammer. A lot of programmers these days have been brought up on JS and web technologies so they literally do not see any other solutions, regardless of how much better they may be.
derefr 9y ago
Native app launchers (which you can stick into the taskbar/dock/etc.) are built into Chrome. • Windows: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-create-desktop-shortcuts-for-web-pages-using-chrome https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/how-to-create-desktop-sho... • Mac: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/3A5ZTe-HrVE https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/3A5ZTe... What this feature doesn't do, is to track the tabs spawned by launching the application shortcut using that taskbar item/dock icon/etc. Instead, you just get a new window spawned in the Chrome application's window-group. This is really a failing of our desktop window managers, not of web browsers: we need to separate the semantic concepts of "process" and "application", such that one process can be responsible for driving several applications, and choosing to "quit" an application can just result in an IPC message being sent to the process telling it that the user wants that window-group-context gone, rather than telling the window manager to go terminate the entire process. (Such a feature would also greatly help with things like managing "non-rooted" Remote Desktop or X11 or virtual-machine windows. Right now, some of these use a workaround of generating a stub binary to register each foreign application for the local DWM's sake. But it's a leaky abstraction: Alt+Tab/Cmd+Tab to the proxy "application", and the RDP client/X server/VM "app" gets focus instead. If window-groups—with metadata for the name and icon of the "application" they represent—were something a process could publish to a DWM, rather than something the DWM tried to determine heuristically about an application process, all of these problems would go away. And, even without offering this up for webapps to use, browsers would benefit from this change: Chrome's "profiles" are exactly separate "application" window-groups in the same sense as apps under an X server or VM process.)
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  > What this feature doesn't do, is to track the tabs spawned by launching the application shortcut using that taskbar item/dock icon/etc. Instead, you just get a new window spawned in the Chrome application's window-group. Works perfectly on windows. Let's say I pin Gmail as an app on the taskbar. When I open Gmail using that button, it remains attached to that taskbar button, which is an icon of Gmail for convenience. In fact it's not obvious to figure out that it's running on Chrome.
LaGrange 9y ago
> Chrome I'd rather not, thanks.
briandear 9y ago
> No one would ever write an app specifically for mac / windows And then we'd all have lowest-common denominator crap. Imagine if Final Cut Pro were a web app. I much, much prefer Apple Mail to some Gmail webpage for instance. I also like apps to be able to actually take advantage of my hardware. Web browsers ought not be treated like de facto operating systems. Web apps aren't the panacea they're being promoted as.
- sincerely 9y ago
  I do think there's a lot of things that probably /do/ make sense as web apps though, like twitter

jiqiren 9y ago

no ads is one of the many good features. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

xenadu02 9y ago

Better battery life? Lower memory usage? Integration with the platform conventions? I don’t want to use Twitter in a tab. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Websites, wrapped web views, react native, et al solve a developer’s problem. They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse, the only question is how much worse. How much better are you forcing me to pay? How much cognitive tax am I paying?

derefr 9y ago
> They do not solve any problem I as a user have. They make things worse I mean, webapps obviously have a positive value for you over the alternative of not using the service—otherwise you would be doing exactly that (and maybe using a competitor's service.) At least personally, I appreciate first-class web-app versions of apps (with or without wrappers), since I use a not-very-popular OS and web-apps are basically the only way any company is ever going to give me a version of their software I can use.
msvan 9y ago
Wasn't the Twitter Mac app just an Electron app?
- evan_ 9y ago
  no
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I think it was a native app and predated electron by quite a bit.
pcwalton 9y ago
The Twitter app in no way has lower memory usage than a browser. It leaks GPU buffers like crazy.
eh78ssxv2f 9y ago
> They do not solve any problem I as a user have. That's a pretty broad statement. As a user, I hate installing apps. They take up disk space, and then I need to remember to remove them if I am not using it. Also as a user, I am not sure how much additional security holes are created by installing a third-party binary. With a webapp, there is only a single source of security issues (browser).

reednj 9y ago

Its much easier to manage multiple accounts. I think on the website you can only be logged in as one account at a time. The twitter app has a vertical 'tab' for each account.

hoistbypetard 9y ago

It used to be much nicer to use, back when Twitter acquired it. (It was called Tweetie then.) The notifications were better, the mechanics of doing things like following conversations or refreshing a conversation were simpler, filtering options were better, etc. And I don't think it had a prominent spot in the dock... IIRC its icon was mainly in the menu bar. It's been a while since I used tweetie or twitter, though, for very much at all. I'm really sorry to see it go away more because it used to be a nice UI playground for a talented developer than because of any recent experience with it.

evan_ 9y ago

For me at least the killer feature in the twitter app is the global hotkey I can press to hide/show it: when I have 5 seconds of downtime I can press the hotkey, read three tweets, and then send it away. Great for filling short pauses while other things load or I'm waiting for a response from someone. Fortunately Tweetbot has that same feature now, so I've switched to it.

ttepasse 9y ago

A better UI. As every native app does. Yes, in principle web apps can do more, from drag & drop to .. stuff. But in practice they never do, they never go the extra mile but instead just building for the lowest common denominator. Also the dock spot is important for my method of using windowing. The browser is for websites. I wouldn't want to mix it. I could banish twitter.com to a wrapper window with Fluid, but it's still just a crappy web app. I use Tweetbot instead. And before that Tweetie for Mac. Which was killed today. Fingers crossed that the API survives.

stesch 9y ago

You can block twitter in the browser so they can't track which sites you are visiting. Same goes for Facebook.

rahoulb 9y ago

One of the greatest things about the Twitter native apps were that the guy who originally wrote them (Loren Brichter, who Twitter acqui-hired) literally invented the Pull-to-refresh gesture that is used everywhere nowadays. Before Twitter killed native clients by restricting their acccess tokens, they were an amazing place for people to try out new UI ideas - a really simple concept (one text area and a scrolling list) but a huge explosion of ways of presenting and interacting with it. Then twitter bought Tweetie and Twetdeck and restricted what the 3rd party clients could do and it all just died.