It would be great if Orion allow the creation of webs apps by opening webpages in a new window in Focus Mode. This is what apps like Unite or Nativefier is doing.
What make Unite great at this already it that Orion's Focus mode is already so good thanks to auto hiding the title bar, making it look like a native app. Coupled with Orion's efficiency and extension support, pages like FB Messenger or Instagram DM would be a great fit!
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Generate web apps that open in a new window in Focus Mode
I would love this as well!
alohaquanhoang Thanks for suggesting this.
Can you describe how do you imagine UI in Orion working for this?
Vlad added the Clarification tag .
Also, a button overlay for the window to have window buttons would be nice
Still looking for description of the UI that would be activating this feature.
24 days later
- Edited
Vlad Here to add my vote for this feature as I think it would be fantastic.
As some context, this is in addition from normal PWA's which can be installed from Chrome's url bar. Both Chrome and Edge have the option to create any webpage as a standalone app with its own icon in the dock, menubar name, etc. The benefit of this is the ability to have seperate apps for each site, but still use extensions installed in the normal browser. Here is a video showing an example of making this feedback site an app: Chrome Example - Streamable
iOS has this feature too, available using the Share Menu of Safari. It works best on pages that are PWA's as it creates them as a seperate app, rather than just acting as a bookmark to a Safari page. Here is an example video using Starbucks's Webapp: iOS Example - Streamable
Orion's implementation could copy from the iOS version by creating a new "Create App" option in the share menu. This would create a standalone app in ~/Orion Apps/. These apps would just be permanently in Focus Mode (possibly with a small titlebar just for window controls as suggested by @Fortrikka).
Example of the Share Menu:
And the app would look like this when launched (just the site in focus mode):
brianholderness Still need a small titlebar for controls. How would you drag the window?
brianholderness Fantastic input Brian! Thank you.
Fortrikka You can already drag the window in Focus mode, just by using the very top of the window; but, as I mentioned, some type of small, thin titlebar for the window would work great. (Possibly even using the color tint of the website like Chrome and iOS do for their implementations.)
One thing that I really like about Chrome and other Chromium based browsers is their ability to save certain web pages are stand-aline PWAs. Firefox, for some reason, has decided not to do it. Safari, on iOS, has the feature but not on the desktop. Would be great to have this on Orion.
2 months later
- Edited
One of the reasons this is important to me is because of the resource consumption of Electron apps.
I feel that having PWA support would make Orion a usable alternative to Electron apps. A particular feature I would like is enabling "Low Battery Mode" specifically for the progressive web apps (separate from the main browser).
What would be really amazing is if we could enable some of these UI changes for normal sites, even if they've chosen not to support PWA (like Discord).
I've made a more specific proposal in a separate issue, to have "isolated background sites" (Or: Progressive Web Apps for all)
- Edited
Electron apps are infamous for being resource-intensive. They use noticeably more RAM and battery than their corresponding website versions (especially Electron vs Orion).
As a particular, on any given day, the 12-hour battery consumption of Discord is about 2x that of IntelliJ (a java-based IDE) and 4x that of Firefox or Orion. It is consistently in my "Apps using significant battery consumption". Across all platforms, Discord's RAM consumption rivals Firefox and IntelliJ.
I am aware that Discord is a particularly bad example. However, other Electron apps like Spotify, VS Code, and Mailspring display many of these tendencies too 
For Electron apps that have web versions (Discord/Spotify), Progressive Web Apps serve as a potential alternative to their Electron versions.
They offer:
- Shared resources with the main browser process
- Background service workers & notifications
- Seperate windows, able to be minimized indepedentently of the main browser
However, as I understand it, progressive web apps have to be enabled by the website author themselves. Discord has chosen not to do that.
What would be absolutely amazing, is if we could have some of these PWA features enabled for normal sites 
In particular, I would like to have Discord enabled in the background (in a separate user-visible window) and specifically instructed to use low battery mode (independent of the main browser)
A lot of this is probably hard. I'm basically asking you to make Orion support "background sites" as an alternative to Electron. Something like Progressive Web Apps, even for websites that weren't designed for it in the first place 
However, think of the potential! Even if users don't choose to use Orion as their main browser, they are almost certain to be tempted by this feature. Who in their right minds wouldn't want a lighter alternative to Discord & Spotify? 
This can probably be split up into several different steps. Most of these don't have to be done in any particular order:
- Beginning to isolate certain (user-requested) sites from others.
- Maybe not full separate windows, but at least make the "Low Battery Mode" website per-site
- Maybe not full separate windows, but at least make the "Low Battery Mode" website per-site
- Support for service workers. Firefox has these, despite not supporting PWA in full.
- Support for running these sites minimized, visually separate from regular tabs
- The UI of "closing discord" should be separate from "closing a tab", even if the implementation is the same
- I close tabs aggressively, but I often have to be careful not to close the discord tab
- The UI of "closing discord" should be separate from "closing a tab", even if the implementation is the same
- Supporting some subset of PWA features, even if the site wasn't designed for it (Desktop Notifications?)
- In particular, PWA requires service workers even when the website is disconnected and off. I'm suggesting never actually closing the underlying tab, just hiding it from the user. This would allow the regular notification API to work even without a background service worker (I'm looking at you Discord)
I've mentioned Progressive Web Apps support, but really this is somewhat of a different feature.
Unlike PWA support, the implementation of this feature doesn't really have to be separate from that of a regular tab. The main request is a change in UI.
These sites could be preconfigured in preferences, the only real requirement is that they have
- Independent "Low Battery Mode"
- Closed independently of regular tabs (visually in the background while semantically still a tab).
This wouldn't be a full-featured alternative to Electron or PWA, but it would significantly improve the UI (and resource usage) of using website apps like Discord & Spotify.
Let me know what you think
Some other relevant feature requests - one around notifications in particular.
https://orionfeedback.org/d/512-allow-notifications-similar-to-that-of-chrome-or-safari
https://orionfeedback.org/d/400-progressive-web-apps
https://orionfeedback.org/d/425-misc-possible-bits-of-missing-webkit-functionality
Orion appears to support service workers just now (https://orionfeedback.org/d/974-maybe-bug-service-worker-processes-stay-open-after-last-tab-is-closed). Maybe based on your points here, service workers should last "longer" than after the tab closes? How should Orion ensure websites can't choose to run forever for tracking or other nefarious purposes?
Take a look at pinned tabs for helping avoid unintentionally closing your discord tab - maybe that could be adapted to do what you need?
Low battery mode "per-tab" could be an interesting idea, but I am not sure what it does specifically - does it not just "sleep" a backgrounded tab? Or would that be sufficient?
FWIW, there are a number of apps which do this.
I have used Flotato - I think it uses WebKit.
A few others:
Fluid.app (WebKit)
Unite (WebKit)
Coherence X (chromium)
macOS also can do this all on its own (albeit with fewer options): https://www.chriswrites.com/turn-any-website-into-an-iphone-or-ipad-app-with-automator/
Maybe based on your points here, service workers should last "longer" than after the tab closes? How should Orion ensure websites can't choose to run forever for tracking or other nefarious purposes?
For the service workers to persist, these tabs would have to be enabled manually. They are basically like pinned tabs, except they have the option to run in the background or a separate window.
Take a look at pinned tabs for helping avoid unintentionally closing your discord tab - maybe that could be adapted to do what you need?
Yes. I use pinned tabs in Firefox. This is very similar to what I want, except I would also like:
- Option to run in a separate window
- Option to run in the background (keep running but no visible tab) in a separate window or available in the background.
- Low-battery mode specificalaly for these tabs
- I don't know the specifics, but basically, I want them to just be normal tabs, but with low-battery life tweaks and different UI. Battery life is very important to me
- I don't know the specifics, but basically, I want them to just be normal tabs, but with low-battery life tweaks and different UI. Battery life is very important to me
4 months later
I've found that containerized browsers are heavenly. The concept is basically the SSB (Single Site Browser) concept but turned around such that you have a web browser that is used based on some concept that you feel is useful.
The organizational and compartmentalization benefits are absolutely astronomical and I cannot imagine living without the functionality now after living with this for around 5 years.
The idea is that I can keep all of these browsers in a folder or in my Dock (macOS) or fire them up with something like Spotlight, Alfred or LaunchBar.
Some examples that I use it for:
- Customer browsers (I keep all services I manage or work with for a client within a browser and when I need to work on anything related to them I open it up. This opens up to a restored session so I can pick up where I left off and I have all bookmarks handy related to them. Google accounts I manage for them, Documents, their website and/or management consoles, SEO/SEM control panels, and the list goes on and everything is neat and quick!!!)
- Amazon (I like to single Amazon out into a single "/Applications/Epichrome/Apps/Amazon.app" so I don't cross pollinate other things and I tend to have a lot of things that I look at and want to come back to, so when I open my Amazon browser back up my 10 or 20 tabs just pop back open so I can keep shopping and remember what I was doing during my last session.)
- eBay and book research sites (I have a library and I like to collect books and do research. Amazon, Abe, and other sites like WorldCat and more are all right there and my research sessions are saved when I quit. Wonderful!)
- Family management (I have a complex family with multiple schedules and emails that pertain to different things. This helps so much to keep things straight, manage shopping lists and take care of family events quickly.)
- Church (I can keep all of my religious topics in a nice neat browser session.)
- YouTube (I love the Chrome extension to turn off autoplay on YouTube and I can return to watching various videos of interest very easily. It's a huge life saver to just stop and quit the YouTube browser when I need to switch context to another task or customer.)
- Games - I have a browser for EACH game our family plays together. Whether it's Warcraft III, an MMORPG or just couch co-ops, I love being able to pop open my browser for something so I can find info quickly or figure out how to modify a game server, etc.
- Programming languages (I know several programming languages and it helps tremendously to just open up the browser that pertains to a language with its documentation.)
- Human languages (I speak a few languages and study a few others and I like to keep them compartmentalized into a browser I can just open up when ready to work or need to look up words and verb conjugations.)
- Business operations, state and federal taxes, etc.
- Music (I follow a few musicians that have podcasts and I like to follow them and download their tracks and split them in order to rank them in iTunes and load them up each week with new releases. Epichrome is a huge help here to allow me to just pick up from the last week and stay in my groove.)
- Network administration (I manage a few different networks, not to mention my own home and office. I can quickly open up "Home LAN Dashboard" to configure pfSense, OPNsense, and other systems that these different locations use as well as resolve DNS issues and quickly have past research at my fingertips.)
- Banking (I have several bank accounts to manage and I couldn't imagine having to log in separately within the same web browser!)
- Gardening, farming and forums thereunto.
- School (Yeppers, kids have school and when you've got to deal with more than one or even two schools in my case, it helps to just fire up the browser that has all of that's school stuff easily accessible.)
- Facebook (Oh yeah, I don't do any FB usage without isolating those suckers to their own little box.)
- Udemy (I have a number of courses for family on there and I even made some courses. Nice to have it in one neat space.)
- Phones (Google Voice, MightyCall are really useful when you have a quick way to use them like this that doesn't get lost in the mix and a quick cmd-tab get's you to your phone or voicemail and texts.)
- Family history (Researching genealogy can be a massive undertaking. It's horrible if you can't keep it straight and be able to resume sessions!!! I couldn't even imagine living without Epichrome to resume my late night family deep dives and when I suddenly realize it's 2:00 and I must stop, but know I won't be able to pick it back up in the morning. I can rest well knowing I can just open the browser in a few days or week and be right back where I was.)
- Weather (UGH! It's a pain in the butt to watch the weather. I have to keep my eyes on the radar on multiple sources. I can just fire up "Weather Radar.app" and boom, I can rapidly see what's going on.)
- Restaurants make nice targets! Quick and easy ordering and menus load right back to where you want them.
- I can literally give about 50 more examples within just another 5-10 minutes of typing here, but I think this illustrates so many useful examples of how to use a containerized Orion web browser with the functionality of Epichrome / Coherence X / etc.