You can save webpages as apps with chrome! And it is EASY.
- November 29th, 2011
- Posted in Tech
- By dai1313
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I found out something interesting the other day and I felt like I should share it, even though it feels like the sort of thing that everyone already knows.
In linux (I think you can pass command line arguments to chrome in windows, but I don’t know how) I would toss together little web apps by running ‘chromium –app=’http://whatever_url.com’
It turns out that there is a much easier way to do this in the tools menu. It works for gnome anyway, I don’t know about KDE or others.
This kind of stuff should really be better advertised. And to think gnome’s half-ass-backwards browser was marketing this sort of thing as a new feature in the current 3.2 release.
I wonder, just how long has that convenient button has been there?
So uh, what do these web apps actually do? >.< (yeah, not a chrome/chromium user atm)
Ah.
It runs a web page in it’s own window. Without the back/forward or url bar.
Like this.
http://ignorance.kokidokom.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Screenshot-at-2011-12-02-064306.png
So uh why would I ever want to use that?
Four main reasons I can think of just off the top of my head.
Firstly to not disturb the tabs I have open when the browser is closed.
Secondly, it remembers window sizes. Some things just don’t need to be stretched over 2/3 of the screen. It’s better to make those things smaller and shove them into a corner of the screen. I dislike re-sizing windows.
Thirdly, it is really easy to launch applications, and I can set my computer to pull things up with just keyboard shortcuts if I want to. This is probably overkill in terms of efficiency.
Fourthly, I think that the internet should not have to be contained in a browser window and should be more flexible and free~.
Fifthly, it’s cool.
Except it still is (contained in a browser window). I still hold that the www should evolve to be more metadata-based so that it is more integrable into native dedicated applications, instead of always having to use a browser.
/minirant
Oho! A good point indeed. If web services were to have API then it would easy to have nice little systems that work really with the desktop you are working with.
Everything could be seamlessly integrated to the desktop of the user’s choice and it would be seamlessly integrated.
Good, good. Now someone has to put in the manpower to writing those api(s) and applications.
Problem is, I don’t see the web evolving any time soon. At least, not as a whole.
It might happen in a long time, but you can’t quite do that sort of thing quite yet.
Lets face it, the applications that do have good API support tend to behave better using their main interface. Twitter does pretty well though.
Anyway, what I meant about not being in a browser window is that the URL and back/forward buttons aren’t there and they behave independently from the main browser process. I know that it is still just a chrome window.