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April 5, 2007
Making web apps more desktop-like, or, RealWebApp 0.1
A year and a half or so ago, I saw a demo that bsmedberg did that he called HTMLRunner. It had a copy of GMail running in its own XULRunner process. More recently, mfinkle has been doing more in that vein with his WebRunner app.
I decided to play around a bit and see what it felt like to do something similar as part of Firefox. The result is
RealWebApp-0.1.xpi.
It's very simple, and the UI is less than optimal because dealing with the bookmarks UI from an extension is rather painful. To use it, put a bookmark to any page that you want to use as a webapp in your toolbar. To invoke the app, select "Open As Application" from the context menu. This will open the app as a chromeless window, and if you have Firefox set to open windows in tabs, new tabs won't be randomly injected into your web app.
There are lots more tweaks and things that I'm interested in experimenting with, but I like using this enough in it's current state that I thought it would be worth releasing a 0.1. Let me know your thoughts...
Posted by dmose at April 5, 2007 2:01 PM
Comments
Something that would be useful (at least for me) is to allow this to be opened from the command line, so that (for example) I could make gmail a launcher on my desktop. That would be much more useful than awkwardly finding the bookmark, right clicking, finding this in the menu, etc., and make gmail feel much more like a real app.
Posted by: Luis Villa at April 6, 2007 2:30 PM
@Luis: yeah, that's something I'd like to do in a future version.
Posted by: Dan Mosedale at April 6, 2007 3:05 PM