Introducing Ubuntu Web Apps: setting the web free of the browser

http://blog.canonical.com/2012/07/19/introducing-ubuntu-web-apps-setting-the-web-free-of-the-browser/

by sciurus • 14 years ago

138 77 14 years ago

blog.canonical.com

johnernaut• 14 years ago

So... aside from the HUD integration, which is cool, what's the difference between what they've made and having multiple browser windows open?

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

It seems they managed to integrate the desktop controls with the web apps - you get unread message counts from Gmail on the messages menu and can control Last.fm from the sound indicator (and, presumably, from its kebyboard bindings). I imagine Google Calendar reminders are included.

rcthompson2• 14 years ago

I assume that one major difference is that the web apps are treated as separate applications from the main browser, so they get put in their own icon on the Unity side bar, which gives them their own keyboard shortcuts and the ability to pull up just the windows related to a single webapp. For example, maybe Super+5 would be the shortcut to either activate your existing Twitter webapp window or open it if it isn't already running, regardless of whether your regular browser happens to be running or not at the time.

If you just had multiple browser windows open, they would all be together on the Firefox (or Chrome) icon and it would be difficult to distinguish them. The important part is that the name of the executable associated with a window (i.e. firefox/chrome) is no longer synonymous with the identity of the application running in it (i.e. Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, etc.).

diminish• 14 years ago

A smooth user experience on Unity is needed in order to ensure the well functioning of the web apps and browsers together.

Encapsulating the browser process, is what usually kills web widget performance, and I end up going back to the browser..

pluc• 14 years ago

How is it different than Prism and the likes?

sciurus• 14 years ago

Examples they provide are

"Launch online music site Last.FM directly from the Dash and control the music from Ubuntu’s sound menu

Access and launch your social media accounts (Google+, Twitter, Facebook) from the Launcher, and get native desktop notifications

Quickly and seamlessly upload photos to Facebook from Shotwell

Pause and play the video you are watching on Youtube

See how many unread messages you have in your GMail account, in Ubuntu’s messaging indicator"

ilaksh• 14 years ago

This is great! Does all of this stuff work with Chrome?

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

I think the whole point of this is not to use the browser.

king_magic2• 14 years ago

But it seems to be mostly just links to web sites, that open in a browser.

jcastro• 14 years ago

Not currently, there are extensions for Chromium and Firefox but it doesn't appear to work in Chrome yet.

skimmas3• 14 years ago

Currently I can only see these as yet another way to lose a little bit of your privacy. But I'm also a debian kind of guy so... :P

notatoad2• 14 years ago

what? how does this impact privacy in any way?

skimmas3• 14 years ago

every time you turn on the computer it will log you in. So there's info sent to the server... As time goes by I'm pretty sure these service providers will find more ways to get more info from you and more useful ways to analyze that data. I know my view on the matter is pretty extreme, but I can't feel comfortable not knowing exactly what is being done with my data.

mindstab2• 14 years ago

Only if you use these services. They are offering integration with them, far from forcing you to use them. And if you were already using them these features are an amazing boon and don't affect your privacy at all.

Using cloud based apps may affect your privacy but that is independent of this.

skimmas3• 14 years ago

"Using cloud based apps may affect your privacy but that is independent of this." Yes, you're probably right. But will ubuntu be developing code for specific apps like gmail and twitter or will that be codded by the web app developers? If it's the former than you'll probably not have many choices.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

What web apps need desperately in order to become true first class citizens is support for keyboard shortcuts across the board.

Doing Alt + <Key> should bring up the appropriate menu in the web app not the web browser.

Doing Ctrl + S should ask the web app to do a save , not ask the browser to save the .html page.

Of course this is all stuff that could be abused by aggressive websites so there needs to be a distinction between apps and pages.

lukifer• 14 years ago

That's one important area; also significant are full-screen interfaces (which is improving), and streamlined payment for apps/services (which is improving, slowly).

tysonjennings5• 14 years ago

Google Docs has both of the shortcuts you mention working correctly and many more so it is definitely possible.

SeppoErviala• 14 years ago

Accessing web application features with Alt + <key> is one of the things this Ubuntu feature is about.

mindstab2• 14 years ago

Android was leading the way in this (best sharing between online services etc). This looks like the first other OS to "get it" and push hard to integrate with the cloud. I think in some ways this surpasses Android.

Mean while we have iOS that's just congratulating itself for allowing photo uploads to twitter, meanwhile my Android phone has integration with services I've never even heard of.

And MacOS and Windows... nothing. Stupid silent sitting on the internet.

It's nice to see some real innovation in the Linux camp on the user end front.

tysonjennings5• 14 years ago

Exactly right and one of the main things I missed about Ubuntu on my desktop over Android on my Xoom was Android's seamless integration of "cloud" data and the operating system. In comparison desktop OSs feel like a collection of silos. I'm very excited about the future of Ubuntu and am beginning to think that Canonical actually do "get it".

jcheng• 14 years ago

Win7 and IE9 had some integration, not sure if anyone used it but they are trying.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/222712/how_to_...

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

That looks like a copy of chrome's "create application shortcut" and is less than a tiny percentage of what ubuntu is announcing. Am I missing something?

MatthewPhillips9• 14 years ago

I think you're a bit confused, Android doesn't do a very good job of making web apps 1st class citizens at all. Even though I don't use it, iOS does the best job there. When you create a desktop shortcut for an app, it will get an icon that looks just like all other apps' icons, it will launch into a full-screen chromeless browser that you wouldn't know was a browser at all (with a loading image, even). You can also control web apps that play HTML5 audio with the built in music controls from the multitasking pane.

Android has none of those things. I've had hit or miss experience of it even picking a decent resolution icon, and Chrome uses the favicon with an envelope behind it, so it sticks out as a second class citizen (chrome also doesn't go chromeless).

tysonjennings5• 14 years ago

I think you might be missing the point. Android does a great job of integrating data from the cloud with the operating system. An example is the Google Music player streams your music from the cloud and integrates the player controls with Android on the lockscreen, in the widget, in the status bar etc. The demo video from Canonical shows this kind of integration with last.fm. Nobody is saying Android or Ubuntu is perfect or whatever but there are similarities to what Android does and what Canonical is doing here.

stinkytaco3• 14 years ago

I don't just want to be able to open webapps on my phone with a shortcut, I want real integration. I'm sometimes not connected to the Internet so I like to have my data offline, but I like to be able to get it online quickly. Android does this very well. Share intents, music player integration, it's just a very slick offline to online seamless system.

jackalope• 14 years ago

OS X had all this in the Dashboard long before... anyone, maybe? There are some pretty amazing Dashboard apps, and quite a lot of them are well integrated with the Internet. They should have called it Floorboard, though, because that's where it seems to be hidden under, and system performance takes a huge hit as soon as you activate the Dashboard and every single app you've loaded into it, even if you only want to use one. If they had made them first class desktop citizens, you'd be praising Apple for this innovation. A nod should probably also go to Opera, which had something similar, but just as crippled in Widgets.

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

My biggest worry is tying the HTML and JS engines too deeply into the desktop and end up with drive-by exploits that can do more than a browser would ordinarily be able to do.

SkyMarshal2• 14 years ago

Agreed. They mention security once. Not enough.

Odds of me using this over the hardened Chrome/ium are pretty slim.

Having said that, as a long-time Ubuntu user, kudos to them for doing something new and interesting.

fingerprinter• 14 years ago

* Odds of me using this over the hardened Chrome/ium are pretty slim.

What are you saying here? This isn't a new browser, rather a plugin on the browsers. You still use Firefox or Chromium.

trentonstrong• 14 years ago

I think this is a valid concern, but as JS engines start implementing more and more of the rich web client working drafts like FileAPI (http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/), those same concerns will be valid for your browser too. I can only imagine that developers of desktop platforms like this are aware of these drafts too and are planning to utilize as much as they can of the functionality provided.

As with most security, our best hope lies in open implementations which can be audited for such problems, with consideration being drawn in during design and implementation stages from security experts. Hopefully some lessons were learned from the ActiveX desktop days!

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

I like the idea of assigning permissions to applications. Then if browser B runs under user U, its effective permissions would be the intersection of what both B and U are allowed to do. I don't see why Firefox should be able to write anything outside ~/.mozilla/firefox and ~/Downloads

miratom• 14 years ago

Uh, desktop web shortcuts? Didn't I have this in Windows 98 and IE 5?

streptomycin• 14 years ago

Watch more than the first 15 seconds of the video.

king_magic2• 14 years ago

Honestly, I'm not really impressed. The demo of Shotwell was the only thing that seemed to be more than a link to a web app, and even then, it just looked like a normal app.

sp332• 14 years ago

This is something that might highlight the serious deficiencies of the current HTTP model and drive discussion of HTTP/2.0 with real examples.

scribu• 14 years ago

I know this is a prototype, but if each app is going to load in a new Firefox window, with the full chrome, no thanks.

If it opens a new window without the chrome (or at least without the tabs), it might be ok.

rcthompson2• 14 years ago

Well, for some web apps tabs could make sense. For example, in Gmail I often open multiple messages in tabs when I need to refer to their content at the same time.

MatthewPhillips9• 14 years ago

Gnome 3 opens them chromeless, albeit it doesn't have as deep of integration as this appears to.

ralfn2• 14 years ago

Well, most of those webapps will likely navigate/open external websites.

I would love to have a hacker news window by default, so that external links i open there are nicely managed within the hackers news app.

So, the tab bar is a plus, if you ask me. The address bar and the new tab icon, should be removed though. Better yet, the new tab icon, should open he base url, or some other logical url: for gmail it could be a compose windows, for example.

And "mozilla firefox" should not be part of the window title. Other than that, actually hiding the fact its a browser is not really usefull. The tab bar, the menu .. No reason to remove those by default.

But i suspect, these apps are running in their own profile, and it is firefox, so we could always tweak the chrome ourselves.

repsilat• 14 years ago

To be honest if I clicked on a link in a "GMail app" I'd expect it to open a new "full" browser window (or a new tab in an existing browser window). You'd have to be able to distinguish between internal and external links, of course, but the domain name is a workable heuristic.

The ability to open new tabs should probably be configured on an app-by-app basis. Opening tabs of mail is a pretty sensible idea, but a game developer using HTML5 would likely want to prevent that. Ditto the location bar. (I agree that the user should be able to override these settings.)

daleharvey• 14 years ago

This is awesome by ubuntu.

But its incredibly frustrating that it has taken this long for browser vendors and/or operating systems to push the possibility for webapps as first class desktop apps. (not really counting air)

Firefox is starting to introduce this functionality at last, I imagine chrome have similiar functionality coming (this used to work on linux!)

Prism was nice when it existed, and fluid I used to use from time to time but there was just too many hassles with it not being mainstream

ww520• 14 years ago

Isn't this a throwback to the Windows Active Desktop? Windows actually had led the way to integrate webapp/webpage with the OS, but everyone hated it back then.

alttab• 14 years ago

Although they get a bad wrap, MS has likely been too early on many things. Things they got right: Commodity hardware, office, and directx. Active desktop put those things behind the icons of their applications making the desktop area dual purpose and thus confusing or distracting.

Given the state of HTML, the newbies inability to write proper HTML, and early browsing technology and you have a recipe for instability and system crashes.

They were too early technology wise, and also because they couldn't see entire application experiences being delivered that way.

rbanffy5• 14 years ago

I don't think this is like Active Desktop. It's not about rendering the desktop with a browser engine, but allowing the desktop apps to interact more completely with thin envelopes around browser engines that run HTML-based applications.

abc_lisper• 14 years ago

If ubuntu 12.04 is any indication, I personally wouldn't go near it again ever.

zimbatm• 14 years ago

It would be great to be able to easily and privately install the server part of the webapp. My hope by seeing the title is that canonical would have come with a system to do that.

akoumjian• 14 years ago

It's not a new idea, but I think it is finally the idea's time. There was Prism, and there's FluidApp for OS X. There was also MS's active desktop as others have pointed out.

DeepDuh• 14 years ago

I hate to nitpick, but that choice of background music strikes me as rather.. poor.

ekianjo• 14 years ago

You can install a preview version of this Web Apps already the current Ubuntu 12.04 :

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/07/how-to-install-ubuntus-ne...

pjmlp2• 14 years ago

I don't care, I only use web based applications in the few cases I am forced to do so.

For me, the control over my data, operating system integration, taking advantage of my hardware will win every day over dumb web applications.

wavephorm• 14 years ago

You're probably in the minority. My usage of desktop software has been dropping dramatically over the years. I'm basically left with 5 or 6 apps, including a browser, a file picker, a code editor, and a command prompt. The more powerful the web/internet apps become the more the desktop gets sidelined, and any reason to Ubuntu over any other desktop becomes a pretty moot point.

pjmlp2• 14 years ago

I'm used to it, Linux was also a minority for many years.

mwill• 14 years ago

Sort of unrelated, but it was my first thought: I sort of wish there was a cross platform store for wrapped web apps that could make them look sort of native-ish, that was widely adopted.

Not because this is actually something I want or think would be better than a browser, but simply because seems to be significantly easier to get users to pay for something that behaves like a native app, ie, turns up on their dock. I have a theory if you wrapped a web view and put it on the mac app store, the average user (ie one who has no idea what web view means) would pay more for it than the same product in a browser.

_urga• 14 years ago

The OS needs to provide machine power to trusted installed web apps.

i.e. raw UDP, TCP, POSIX, device APIs.

hotice• 14 years ago

This can already be installed in Ubuntu 12.04 or 12.10: http://www.webupd8.org/2012/07/install-new-ubuntu-webapps-te...

Introducing Ubuntu Web Apps: setting the web free of the browser

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