Hi all. So Netrunner’s “web apps” feature was part of the inspiration for a little side-project of mine, and I hope it isn’t considered spam if I solicit some feedback. My idea is that instead of launching web apps in Firefox, I wrote up some Python to give each one of them the look and feel of a native, first-class app. So each web app gets its own cookiejar, preferences, and so on. They don’t appear as tabs in any other browser.
It’s still pretty early, but since the Netrunner community is presumably already familiar with the concept of a site-specific browser, I’m hoping to get some feedback. So here it is:
I’m actually a KDE user, but I made the screenshots with xfce just to demonstrate that it’ll work anywhere. It’s all WebKit-based, so rendering should be pretty good. Anyway, I hope I’m not out of line in asking for some feedback if anyone would like to give it a try?
Thanks! I’m certainly not aware of any outright bugs, although there are some things I need to improve upon, like desktop notifications and spell checking. (If anyone can point me in the right direction for using a NotificationPresenter class in PyQt, that would help.)
I too always keep a browser window open, but the use case is more that you want something separate from your browser. For example, I have my browser configured to clear my cookies every session, but if I hear a text message come in, I just restore my Google Voice web app and it’s right there without having to open a new tab or login.
A similar concept would be Plasma’s various “Web Slice” plasmoid. I just prefer the user experience of a regular application over a plasmoid.