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Firefox just walked away from a key piece of the open web (fastcompany.com)
14 points by matthewn on Jan 26, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



The "key piece" is support for "desktop web apps".

The article explains what it is, and champions it (perhaps to get the click friendly title, perhaps legitimately). But I have never felt the need to "run" a website in a separate "app".

If you use these, and can see their use case, please help me understand. Is the point that the web browser opens a new window and hides its toolbar to give you more screen real estate? Changes icon to match the favicon, so it is easier to switch to that window later?

What usability features am I missing out on if I just go to the website in my regular browser window, like the caveperson I suppose I am? :)


Funny, I just mentioned using a SSB in another HN item (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25919351>).

I don't use SSBs to eliminate UI. On the contrary I usually keep the tabbed browser UI in a SSB.

I like SSBs because I can remain logged-in to a site without those cookies being available to a browser that I'm using across the open web.

Also I can clear all the cookies on my regular browser and not get logged out from the SSB site.

The killer aspect is being able restore workspace sessions: It's easy to close the SSB with multiple tabs and restore it later with all the tabs. For example lately I've been using Epichrome to log into various gsuite accounts. For any account, I'll tend to have multiple tabs open to gmail/gdocs/gdrive/gcalendar. I wouldn't want to keep this these tabs open in my regular browser. I just need these tabs open (all at once) whenever I'm doing work for that particular client. So if I make a SSB for that account I can recreate my workspace session easily and close it all at once easily, and it's not eating up laptop RAM/swap space unnecessarily when I'm not using it.


Easier to tab to it and launch it, basically, and takes up less space on your screen.




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