Generate web apps that open in a new window in Focus Mode

Techcable Standalone app and progressive web app are two different things. We are all for standalone web apps. can you move your comment to the other thread that discusses it.

Cannabat
Wow these look amazing

I'm thinking something like this but maybe more lightweight & integrated into Orion.

Also, Firefox's "pin tab" feature is nice.....

gp

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:

1. Option to run in a separate window
2. Option to run in the background (keep running but no visible tab) in a separate window or available in the background.
3. 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'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.

kagill I think you are advocating for web-based app support? There is a thread on the site for that already, and a fairly popular as far as I remember, can you find a link to it so I can merge this?

Vlad thanks for getting back to me, two things:

1. can you provide the link? I'm simply not finding a similar / related thread with searches...
2. this is not so much a singularized web app, although traditionally people have called it SSB or web-app-like support. The idea is more along the lines of Orion being able to generate differently named apps of itself for a kind of containerized approach for web browsing so that it keeps browsing context as is deemed appropriate by the user. I'll walk through the kind of scenario with Epichrome and the other competitors and perhaps you can tell me if we're on the same page:
   1. Orion would have an app generator or method to save a new "Orion" app that would be saved into a folder (eg, "/Applications/Orion/Apps/") with a custom name.
   2. A custom icon would be selectable by the user if the default icon is not chosen.
   3. The new app (might, but I don't care about this feature) would have a choice of being a single window or multi-tabbed window version of Orion (I always choose multi-tabbed since I use this for many websites).
   4. Orion would link the Orion engine to the new app and would be automatically updated when Orion itself is updated.

I can go through this and help with the process in more detail if you'd like. I think this would be a big home run for Orion and frankly I would pay for this functionality since Epichrome was the only one that did things right, but the developer had to abandon it due to his frustration with Google and Brave and not being able to control their choices whatsoever.

@kagill merged

Cannabat sadly all of the aforementioned apps are just not really any good. I've used/tested them all. I used (the best, but now no longer maintained) Epichrome and still do and will until it no longer functions, but would love to see Orion step up to make a similar and even superior experience. There just aren't any real viable options that work well and honestly I'd like to move away from Google Chrome and Chromium based browsers, but retain the extensions. Orion seems a natural move in this direction.

kagill Care to summarize the minimum requirements/UX?

Greetings!

One app that can make "safari-based" progressive web apps on Mac, can be found at
https://www.fluidapp.com
, though that one is "freemium."

In addition, I did try using the Firefox PWA extension to install the YouTube PWA as an example:

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

, though that seems to not be working at the moment with this browser.

Keep in mind, I am running MacOS 13 and Home Brew is at the moment not officially supported with said version.

More info on Firefox PWA extension at:

https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox

since profiles are now released, some of the existing concepts could be reused to do this

• separation of data: data could be separated per-(pwa/app)
• proxy apps: with the new and super cool implementation of these proxy apps that all are controlled by the main Orion app instance, this could be reused to create proxy apps that basically act as profiles that can only have one website. this concept is also kinda similar to what containers do
• dock icon customization: p self explanatory

Chrome has a feature where you can convert any website into a standalone app icon on your desktop without any navbars or tabs.

https://www.lifewire.com/create-shortcuts-in-google-chrome-for-windows-4103617

For example, you can use YouTube Music as an app by creating a shortcut:

It would be nice to be able to do the same on Orion since it is more lightweight.

jvacek I would love the ability to turn websites into standalone apps (aka standalone Orion instances) that can be added to my dock, similar to what Chrome offers.

Came looking for this today, any rough forecast on when this might be coming? I see it tagged "Planned"
Thanks!