The browser these days is the centre of a hells of a lot of desktop activities. I mean, how often do you actually spend “browsing” the internet? I know I spend bugger all. I go to Facebook, Twitter, LWN, LinuxForDevices, XKCD and a handful of other websites all the time but fairly rarely actually sit down and browse. And I suspect you’re the same.
If the regularly visited sites are apps the browser is a complete secondary desktop environment with tabs instead of windowing and a whole lot besides. Why do I want another desktop when GNOME/KDE work so well? Why shouldn’t web apps be Revealed, ALT-Tab’d and resized like anything else?
There are solutions – both major Linux desktops have widgets which can bring some sites to my desktop and Twitter’s well defined API means that I can just use Gwibber. All well and good where it works but I want to treat every web app this way.
In steps uzbl, a browser conforming to the UNIX philosophy that one program should do one thing and do it well. In fact, browser may even be overstating it – let’s try interactive web renderer. It uses the WebKit renderer so you get CSS, Javascript, Flash, all the things you need but nothing you don’t.
Using uzbl and a little bit of BASH we get Page Apps. Normal apps which can be launched from GNOME-DO, run dialogs or menus but are nothing more or less than the web apps we all know and love.
page apps in action
OK so maybe people won’t get it. What’s the problem with 1 extra mouse click or a few extra key strokes? But they’re missing the point, it isn’t about that, it’s about promoting web apps to first class citizens.
By default uzbl is modal, VIM-like, so as yet my PageApps don’t quite act as you’d expect. But they will. You can get uzbl at http://www.uzbl.org/ and I’ll release my PageApps scripts just as soon as they’re ready.