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I've been using "install this webpage as an app" in Edge for about a year now for the vast majority of sites I visit on a regular basis. The site doesn't need t

I've been using "install this webpage as an app" in Edge for about a year now for the vast majority of sites I visit on a regular basis. The site doesn't need to have an app manifest or service worker to use the feature, you can just use it with any site. I also develop a Web-based VR app at work, have been doing WebXR and VR development for a while now. The two experiences together have me about convinced that tabs in the browser were a mistake. The operating system already has a means of managing multiple documents/app views, and that is just windows. It's disturbing that every browser has to implement most of their own media decoders, instead of relying on an OS level API and writing plugins for it. We have file systems for organizing our saved things. Bookmarks should just be links files on disk. You wouldn't need to have in-browser sync of your bookmarks, you'd just point it to your bookmarks directory and let Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever sync the files. If what we think of as the "browser" used more of what is available in the operating system, and operating systems were more closely involved in web standardization (rather than treating it as a completely siloed project) I think we could have better standards for web apps that integrate seamlessly with the user's desktop. We might be able to integrate different apps better, things like standardize an interface for image editors, let developers build to that interface, let users select their preferred editor, and have much more powerful image editing available in every app that wants to work with images. We might be able to have VR home environments where web apps represent objects within the user's environment, rather than exclusive mode, full "experiences". And having this ecosystem on desktop would make users expect to have this functionality everywhere. Smartphone OS vendors might find it a hard time to try to make walled garden, only-place-you-can-do-any-business-so-we-get-our-vig stores. But we don't. And now browsers are seen as "impossibly complex" (except the SerenityOS team seems to be killing it with Ladybird). All because browsers implemented their own multiple document interface and took over control from what should have been OS-level concerns.

lolinder 4y ago
> If what we think of as the "browser" used more of what is available in the operating system, and operating systems were more closely involved in web standardization (rather than treating it as a completely siloed project) I think we could have better standards for web apps that integrate seamlessly with the user's desktop. As a web developer, I do not want this. Currently, I can install Chrome and Firefox on my Linux machine and between the two I can test and get the same experience as 95% of my users. Safari is the only browser I can't directly install on my machine, but it's not hard to test that too, at which point 99% of users are covered. If what you propose came about, all of the sudden OS (and OS version!) becomes a major variable that has to be accounted for in testing and troubleshooting, which eliminates one of the biggest advantages Web development has over Native.
wruza 4y ago
It sounds great until I remember the experience with winhlp32.exe. Opening something in a new tab and bookmarking or pinning a location is a good idea on its own, web or not. And like the article suggests, if there were as many windows (apps?) as tabs my browsing session often has, I’d like to see a tab/side bar at least for all the apps which I have absolutely no intent to “install” or thread-navigate separately in their own window. I mean, sure, we never had this to quickly jump to negative conclusions for your idea, but it is more related to execution contexts and system integration imo rather than to how the ui for it could work. Personally I would like to also try the opposite - push all the native apps into a tabbed or tree-like interfaces with a capability to middle-click e.g. a file, an mpeg or a project file and spawn even more [tree]tabs from there, instead of doing that in separate windows and/or apps and giving them full control of the input. E.g. by left-clicking a link to any ls’ed resource in a terminal or an IDE you could go to “that app” and rocker-gesture back when needed, rather than alt-tabbing back to the original window. Restyling “apps” and adding/removing features from them would also be nice. Native apps and desktops as they are now are a little behind in ui sense, imo.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  Yeah, that's what I mean. OS vendors have almost completely stagnated on UI design for nearly 20 years now. Mozilla popularized tabbed browsing back in 2003. OS X Leopard released stacks in the dock in 2007. I'm much more of a Windows user, but I had to look up that it had taskbar grouping all the way back to Windows XP in 2001, so I don't think it was enabled by default, because I really don't recall using it until Windows 7 in 2009. What was it about tabbed browsing that was so much better than MDI? We've had MDI available for app developers since as long as I can remember. I don't know if it was in Win3.1, but I do know I used it in Win95. I think tabbed browsing is a key linchpin in this issue because I think it created an inflection point in how many open documents a user could expect to manage with ease. Before tabs, I don't think a lot of people tried to run more than a handful of apps with multiple windows at the same time, even with MDI. Nowadays, it's not unheard of to see someone completing about their browser crashing and taking it dozens, if not low-hundreds of tabs. So there is a huge window here that feels like the two most popular desktop OSes couldn't be counted on by cross-platform app developers to provide a good means to manage dozens of documents in working space, because their vendors just kinda sat on their hands. "You want TDI? We have MDI at home." Ooooh, transparency effects on windows. That's really improving workflow /s Honestly, stacks and taskbar groups aren't that good. Are they kind of junk because it's inherently impossible to do at the OS level? I don't think that makes sense; it's a pretty high level abstraction. It seems much more likely that folks at Microsoft and Apple just didn't feel any pressure to dramatically improve UX. We didn't get the first major, single-page-like web apps until round about 2005, but I don't think it really took off until 2008: smartphones giving people Internet access on the go, the popularity of the iPhone giving mindshare back to Apple so they might become a desktop contender again, and the desire by many developers to never have to ever ever ever touch Java Swing again. What real innovation and proliferation have we seen in desktop OS window managers since then? So I'm imagining an alternate universe where OS vendors didn't cede control of UI R&D to browser vendors.

lolinder 4y ago

> If what we think of as the "browser" used more of what is available in the operating system, and operating systems were more closely involved in web standardization (rather than treating it as a completely siloed project) I think we could have better standards for web apps that integrate seamlessly with the user's desktop. As a web developer, I do not want this. Currently, I can install Chrome and Firefox on my Linux machine and between the two I can test and get the same experience as 95% of my users. Safari is the only browser I can't directly install on my machine, but it's not hard to test that too, at which point 99% of users are covered. If what you propose came about, all of the sudden OS (and OS version!) becomes a major variable that has to be accounted for in testing and troubleshooting, which eliminates one of the biggest advantages Web development has over Native.

wruza 4y ago

It sounds great until I remember the experience with winhlp32.exe. Opening something in a new tab and bookmarking or pinning a location is a good idea on its own, web or not. And like the article suggests, if there were as many windows (apps?) as tabs my browsing session often has, I’d like to see a tab/side bar at least for all the apps which I have absolutely no intent to “install” or thread-navigate separately in their own window. I mean, sure, we never had this to quickly jump to negative conclusions for your idea, but it is more related to execution contexts and system integration imo rather than to how the ui for it could work. Personally I would like to also try the opposite - push all the native apps into a tabbed or tree-like interfaces with a capability to middle-click e.g. a file, an mpeg or a project file and spawn even more [tree]tabs from there, instead of doing that in separate windows and/or apps and giving them full control of the input. E.g. by left-clicking a link to any ls’ed resource in a terminal or an IDE you could go to “that app” and rocker-gesture back when needed, rather than alt-tabbing back to the original window. Restyling “apps” and adding/removing features from them would also be nice. Native apps and desktops as they are now are a little behind in ui sense, imo.

moron4hire 4y ago
Yeah, that's what I mean. OS vendors have almost completely stagnated on UI design for nearly 20 years now. Mozilla popularized tabbed browsing back in 2003. OS X Leopard released stacks in the dock in 2007. I'm much more of a Windows user, but I had to look up that it had taskbar grouping all the way back to Windows XP in 2001, so I don't think it was enabled by default, because I really don't recall using it until Windows 7 in 2009. What was it about tabbed browsing that was so much better than MDI? We've had MDI available for app developers since as long as I can remember. I don't know if it was in Win3.1, but I do know I used it in Win95. I think tabbed browsing is a key linchpin in this issue because I think it created an inflection point in how many open documents a user could expect to manage with ease. Before tabs, I don't think a lot of people tried to run more than a handful of apps with multiple windows at the same time, even with MDI. Nowadays, it's not unheard of to see someone completing about their browser crashing and taking it dozens, if not low-hundreds of tabs. So there is a huge window here that feels like the two most popular desktop OSes couldn't be counted on by cross-platform app developers to provide a good means to manage dozens of documents in working space, because their vendors just kinda sat on their hands. "You want TDI? We have MDI at home." Ooooh, transparency effects on windows. That's really improving workflow /s Honestly, stacks and taskbar groups aren't that good. Are they kind of junk because it's inherently impossible to do at the OS level? I don't think that makes sense; it's a pretty high level abstraction. It seems much more likely that folks at Microsoft and Apple just didn't feel any pressure to dramatically improve UX. We didn't get the first major, single-page-like web apps until round about 2005, but I don't think it really took off until 2008: smartphones giving people Internet access on the go, the popularity of the iPhone giving mindshare back to Apple so they might become a desktop contender again, and the desire by many developers to never have to ever ever ever touch Java Swing again. What real innovation and proliferation have we seen in desktop OS window managers since then? So I'm imagining an alternate universe where OS vendors didn't cede control of UI R&D to browser vendors.