App request: Webpin

[ernstki]

Application name:

Webpin

Application description:

Creates and manages desktop launchers for individual websites to be loaded each in their own minimal WebKitGTK frame.

Prior art: Mozilla Prism¹, Fluid.app for Mac OS X, Fogger².

Reason for the request:

What was once called a "site-specific browser," nowadays most people know these as PWAs or web apps or "Chrome apps." Electron apps are not all that fundamentally different. And what's old is new again, because this request from the user community to add PWA support (back?) to Firefox is also getting some developer attention lately.

You essentially have a web browser with a minimal UI which loads one web site, with its own icon in the system menus and its own taskbar/dock entry, which can be opened and quit independently of your regular web browser. A website-in-a-box, if you will.

Having tried almost all of them, Webpin is one of the best. It just does what it says on the tin, with a lean UI and nothing extraneous added.

Additional requirements:

It works well, and is still functional without any patches on elementaryOS 7. I imagine GTK is going to be a sticking point at some time in the future.

A bit more work could be done in some areas:

• constrain URLs within the same domain (or a list of permitted URL patterns, à la Fluid.app) to load within the site-specific browser, rather than opening in an external browser
• allow clearing of cookies and other site data without needing to delete the app
• and providing for separate cookie stores for each app

I think userstyles and userscripts could be nice—Fluid spoils you on these capabilities—but with basically every major browser doing their own spin on this idea now, or soon, something that does less is preferable in my mind. It's nearly ideal exactly the way it is right now.

Repository or download URL (if available):

• https://github.com/artemanufrij/webpin
• https://appcenter.elementary.io/com.github.artemanufrij.webpin

Footnotes

1. there are several screenshots in this review of Prism ↩

2. here's a video overview of Fogger ↩

[ernstki]

Just wanted to see if there were any other fans out there.

I use this application heavily—almost as much as my main web browser during the workday—and I keep a personal fork with a few small quality-of-life patches.

I'd already acquiesced to the idea that I'm going to have to fix it if some future version of elementaryOS doesn't include the appropriate dependencies anymore, so I was happy to stumble across this repo and I dig what you're doing here!

[teamcons]

I could bring over the repo to here, and give you the rights
So you can do a public version with your patches, and maybe someone comes around to update it ?

[ernstki]

I could bring over the repo to here, and give you the rights So you can do a public version with your patches, and maybe someone comes around to update it ?

Thanks. Let me reach out to the original author first, in his issue tracker, to see what he would prefer to do. I think that's fair.