1602117 - (ssb) Site specific browser prototype

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

A tracking bug for landing the site specific browser prototype. The goal is to be able to launch a site out into its own window with minimal UI. Attempts to navigate outside of the site will be redirected back to the main browser.

This will land preffed off by default for the time being.

Comment 1

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Just so you know, we had a lot of platform-specific code for "installing" apps when we had the webruntime (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Apps/WebRT). You could possibly re-use some of that code.

Comment 2

[709922234]

Is this the installation feature of PWA?

Comment 4

[709922234]

SSB need support webextension.

Comment 5

[rihcus02]

Hi guys is there a way create a independent desktop web app on mac using firefox SSB? Looking for a way to run messages.google.com in a pwa like app on firefox (if thats possible). I tried launch in app mode but it keeps all the windows under the firefox app no dedicated launch app like chrome.

Using firefox nightly 80.0a1 (2020-07-14) (64-bit) on Mac OS

The feature i listed above works on windows

https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-site-specific-browser-firefox/

Original reddit post (bit new here)
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ht3myp/firefox_ssb_equivalent_to_chromiums_pwa/

Comment 6

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to rihcus02 from comment #5)

Hi guys is there a way create a independent desktop web app on mac using firefox SSB?

No and you'd be better off asking in support forums or in chat, bugzilla is not a support tool.

Comment 7

[Arun Das]

The intention of SSB/PWA is to make web-apps first-class citizens right next to regular desktop apps. But I don't see how that's happening yet, when the SSB feature (experimentally enabled) is still very basic and web apps launched in SSB act very differently to how web apps launched in the regular browser window. They act like interactive picture frames right now.

I hope this can be fixed so that the SSB windows are merely clones of the regular browser window, without the "browsery" elements of the window chrome but otherwise retain or improves upon the normal functionality that's already expected from a web app running in a browser window. They shouldn't really be some kind of weird second implementation of the browser that only shares the rendering engine and requires you to duplicate the normal functionality of the browser from scratch.

From: https://superuser.com/a/937210/117986

• There's no "Loading" progress indicator in the SSB window. Sometimes you'd stare at a blank window and wonder what's happening.
• There's no Zoom function. If you had already set Zoom level in Firefox main window, it doesn't carry to the SSB window. It's always at 100% zoom level.
• The window title never changes. It's always the fixed title. This is bad for web-apps that change the title to indicate something. (I suppose the icon may not change either.)
• If you had already enabled notifications via Firefox main window you may get them, however if you've never enabled it, I'm not sure if you can enable it from the SSB window.
• There's no standard right-click context menu - not even on text fields. This really hampers usability since you cannot copy, paste, refresh page, etc. without using keyboard shortcuts. (Application-specific right-click menus still work, since these are part of the website's own code, not from the browser itself.)

From: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1292666#answer-1331059

... when I test, it is difficult to tell whether extensions are available because there is no toolbar and no right-click context menu in the SSB window.

If I have Firefox running in my default profile before launching the SSB window, I notice some connections:

• downloads in the SSB window follow the setting in my regular profile (save in one folder versus ask me where to save)
• the browsing and download history from my SSB window is added to my regular profile history

However, the style hacks applied to the site using Stylus only appear in regular windows and not the SSB window. So it seems to be some kind of hybrid behavior. I don't know where this is all documented, if anywhere.

Comment 8

[aforceno]

I hadn't realized that some SSB functionality appears to be global (across all windows, even those opened before SSB was enabled). I don't know if this is intended, but it feels like a bug to me. I've noticed two issues when browser.ssb.enabled is set to true:

• Right-click context menu is missing in all firefox windows, not just the SSB window.
• Opening new windows from a non-SSB firefox window causes new SSB windows to open

Here's how I can reproduce this:

1. Have an existing firefox window open, from that, go to about:config to enable browser.ssb.enabled by setting the value to true.
2. Launch an ssb, in my case I executed firefox --ssb http://website-url in the Linux command-line
3. SSB window opens without usual browser UI, right-click menu is disabled.
4. Going back to the original firefox window, the UI is still present, but right-click menu is gone. Right-click on hyperlinks on a page has no effect. Opening a new window from the original firefox window (non-SSB), opens a new SSB window, without browser toolbar, status bar, bookmark bar, etc.

Maybe this is intentional, but not what I expect at all. I expect only the firefox instances that I launch with the --ssb argument to have the ssb features.

Comment 9

[Gaetano Giunta]

FWIW, I am sad to see that the SSB feature is being canned, right at the moment I discovered it.
It seems that more and more applications are being developed as website/electron-app combo - slack, spotify, ... you name it.
Electron apps are nice because they are managed as standalone applications from the OS, allowing nice integration with task switchers, task bars etc.. but they come with many downsides too, such as consuming huge amounts of memory, taking up space on disk and having each its own updating mechanism.
I would thus prefer to run those apps using the plain "website" version, but I really have a hard time navigating between the gazillion open browser tabs, when half of them are "content" that I am reading, and the other are "long-lived apps" that I need to interact with, such as chats, videoconferences, and media players. SSB seemed to be the exact match for that usecase.

Comment 10

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Closing per bug 1682593.

Comment 12

[Serge Matveenko]

Is this on pause or "won't fix"? It's a shame the feature implemented in many other browsers is abandoned. This feature is one of several things that define the modern web experience and seeing it in such a state is just a shame, especially for Firefox which aims to drive web technologies forward.

Comment 13

[Arun Das]

Attachment: StatCounter Browser Market Share - Jan 2009 to Feb 2021

I'd like this feature too, but it was so half-baked anyway that it needed a lot of work. And I mean A LOT (see comment 7). So I understand why the decision was made to can it instead, so that the developers can focus on bigger priorities.

Mozilla Firefox was very well on its way to overtaking Internet Explorer back in early 2010s when Chrome was released and stole the crown from IE like no other browser in history. Ever since the market share of Firefox had been dismal in comparison the >60% share of Chrome. And more people must be buying Macs now because even Safari has more users than Firefox. And(!) Samsung Internet (what a unimaginative name) is hair-thin close to Firefox, once again proving the power of a preinstalled browser to capture market. But remember this: Firefox is the only non-profit open-source browser with the largest market share, and longest surviving too. (Sure, Chromium is open source, but Google Chrome & MS Edge are still proprietary and used to collect data.)

Let's give our loyal open-source developers some credit for continuing to believe in delivering an excellent browser that isn't a symbol of a for-profit corporation and isn't phoning home every-time I use it (except with my consent to send telemetry data).

I believe if other browsers continue to deliver an excellent PWA feature and users continue to install them and use the PWA feature, Firefox developers will eventually re-prioritize PWA implementation. Perhaps we will see a much better polished version in a future release. I'd want PWAs to not just look like a desktop app, but behave like one too. A browser naturally requires a lot of resources because it's more general purpose than other applications. But since each PWA has a specific purpose, the best implementation would only pool the resources required to deliver that specific purpose. That is the biggest challenge in PWA implementation.