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Not loading for me right now. The web really needs the equivalent of an app store. Search engines don't do apps justice. They don't have enough content to inde

Not loading for me right now. The web really needs the equivalent of an app store. Search engines don't do apps justice. They don't have enough content to index and are often difficult to crawl anyway, being JS-heavy. Chrome Web Store is a good start, but a place with reviews and ratings of browser-independent, no-install, interactive websites would be excellent.

derefr 14y ago
I don't know about "no-install"--I for one prefer the Chrome Web Store's model, because it gives users a definitive point (hitting install) where they can grant my app extra permissions for things like geolocation and increased local storage, rather than bothering them with fifty different prompts once the app is running (and giving them the chance to refuse, even though my app won't work without those things enabled.) Personally, I'd prefer if other browsers just adopted the CWS's .crx app format, and every browser allowed app installation from sources other than its "own" store.
- mmahemoff 14y ago
  That's not trivial for them. Adopting "crx" means they wouldn't have any say in the evoluion. The point of the web is for a browser to be able to take the lead with something like CRX and then work with the other browsers to standardise it. Anyway, the permissions question is independent of the store mechanism. iOS apps ask for permissions on demand, Android apps don't. My main point about no-install is simply that they're regular websites, not downloadable packaged apps. There's room for both, but right now there's no good mechanism to find regular websites with apps on them.
Lukeas14 14y ago
That's a similar direction I'm headed in for http://www.iwaat.com http://www.iwaat.com. I think you'll see more sites like http://thetoolbox.cc http://thetoolbox.cc being created since searching for web apps from google.com is painful. And I can confirm from experience that most web apps have a miniscule amount of content to index, especially compared to blogs and other sites where content-centric sites. However, when you combine a web app's on site content with relevant content from the rest of the web (social media, news, etc), there's enough data to build a halfway decent search engine. The tough part of your vision is the store. Every web app has their own way of processing payments that would be tough to tie into a single site for an experience similar to Apple's App Store. Chrome Web Store would probably be best positioned to tackle this.
michaelbuckbee 14y ago
OneForty.com (before being acquihired by HubSpot) tried to do this for Twitter apps - which were often just as you described: JS-Heavy, not terribly crawl able and they had what seemed a hard time of it.

derefr 14y ago

I don't know about "no-install"--I for one prefer the Chrome Web Store's model, because it gives users a definitive point (hitting install) where they can grant my app extra permissions for things like geolocation and increased local storage, rather than bothering them with fifty different prompts once the app is running (and giving them the chance to refuse, even though my app won't work without those things enabled.) Personally, I'd prefer if other browsers just adopted the CWS's .crx app format, and every browser allowed app installation from sources other than its "own" store.

mmahemoff 14y ago
That's not trivial for them. Adopting "crx" means they wouldn't have any say in the evoluion. The point of the web is for a browser to be able to take the lead with something like CRX and then work with the other browsers to standardise it. Anyway, the permissions question is independent of the store mechanism. iOS apps ask for permissions on demand, Android apps don't. My main point about no-install is simply that they're regular websites, not downloadable packaged apps. There's room for both, but right now there's no good mechanism to find regular websites with apps on them.

Lukeas14 14y ago

That's a similar direction I'm headed in for http://www.iwaat.com http://www.iwaat.com. I think you'll see more sites like http://thetoolbox.cc http://thetoolbox.cc being created since searching for web apps from google.com is painful. And I can confirm from experience that most web apps have a miniscule amount of content to index, especially compared to blogs and other sites where content-centric sites. However, when you combine a web app's on site content with relevant content from the rest of the web (social media, news, etc), there's enough data to build a halfway decent search engine. The tough part of your vision is the store. Every web app has their own way of processing payments that would be tough to tie into a single site for an experience similar to Apple's App Store. Chrome Web Store would probably be best positioned to tackle this.

michaelbuckbee 14y ago

OneForty.com (before being acquihired by HubSpot) tried to do this for Twitter apps - which were often just as you described: JS-Heavy, not terribly crawl able and they had what seemed a hard time of it.