965775 - Ability to create Web apps from arbitrary URLs

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: Web Apps, defect, P3)

Description

[Caspy7]

Add the ability to create a web app from a URL.  In effect, this would be a simple chromeless window.

I've seen many users asking for this (and apparently Chrome has this).

(There is an extremely short discussion here: http://mike.kaply.com/2014/01/28/site-specific-browsers/#comment-364295 )

Additionally, consider the option to include rudimentary navigation (forward, back) via a checkbox on creation.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Young]

+1 I've wanted this since before Prism was a thing. I now use http://fluidapp.com/, but would much prefer to have a Firefox-based system.

Maybe it's just a UI on top of XULRunner, but regardless, I want to download this from mozilla.org somewhere or other...or (ideally) have it in the UI in Firefox--even if that's via an Add-on.

Thanks!

Comment 2

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

I wrote an add-on that does this:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/standalone/

It's core functionality makes it usable (I can't go back to life without it), but there are shortcomings:

* favicon->appicon often doesn't work, not sure why

* If you're using Firefox <30, you can ctrl+click links to open them in the default browser instead of a new window in your app. However, that's broken as of 30 due to bug 847518, and needs bug 980010 to be fixed in order to work again.

* No context menus

* Downloads seem to work sometimes now, but not always

I've been using/testing solely on Nightly, so ymmv with other versions of Firefox.

(Thanks Myk for pointing this bug out to me!)

Comment 3

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

(In reply to Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich) from comment #2)
> * Downloads seem to work sometimes now, but not always

This sounds like bug 965414.

Comment 4

[Caspy7]

(In reply to Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich) from comment #2)
> I wrote an add-on that does this:
> 
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/standalone/

Awesome!
If this is just basically creating a Web App, then it sounds like the more people we have using the addon, the more testing we have for desktop web apps, yes?

Once we flesh out the issues, I hope we will be able to fold it into the release.

Comment 5

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Per bug 1238079, we're going to disable the desktop web runtime and remove it
from the codebase, so we won't fix these bugs in the integration between Firefox and the runtime.