This is something I have been thinking about too and I would love to see standardised. I would see it as an html flag that indicates to the browser the user has the option to run the page in an Atom style shell. The main things I would want when running in privileged "app mode" include:
1. full access to keyboard short-cuts without browser mediation. Web-based tools like spreadsheets really suffer from inability to assign short-cuts for basic features like "add row".
2. no browser chrome e.g. url bar, toolbars, bookmarks etc. taking up screen real estate. Really important when running on mobile but also nice on the desktop too.
3. no addons by default (perhaps a different addon profile) to reduce performance overheads and behaviour conflicts on already performance constrained web-apps. The assumption is that these are tools like IDEs, word processors and spreadsheets.
4. aggressive caching of js/fonts/images for faster load. Even Google Docs suffers from "flashes of unstyled content"
5. cross-platform access to OS features for file-system access. One reason users have lost control of their data into the could is because browser-filesystem interaction is so painfully hobbled. If we used the file-system more then users could choose the dropbox style sync service of their choice rather than be locked in to the web-app developer's hosting. Users becoming responsible for their data again simplifies the web-app developer's architecture and hosting costs.
6. isolated process \ memory space from the user's other browsing activities. As a user, I don't want my office web-apps compromised by a broken video player in another tab of my browser. It would give a middle ground between Chrome's 100s of processes taking GBs of RAM versus Firefox vulnerable single process.
The main issue is that any unsandboxed behaviour would be abused. I wonder if browser vendors could support some type of app-developer certificate system. A nominal fee from a registered company would help track identity and certificates for malware developers can be banned.
unsandboxed behaviour being abused... you mean like all other apps written natively for any platform since the dawn of time? There's no vetting process for Windows utilities or bash scripts you find online. The closest you can get is that it's hosted on a store, but that's a mobile paradigm and is a problem as much as it is a solution.
I know what you mean but if a web page just has to to request "run me as an app" to get unsandboxed access then you know every popup from every shady site is going to have a go. It will kill the feature as dead as ActiveX plugins. I want to have the cake and eat it.
1. full access to keyboard short-cuts without browser mediation. Web-based tools like spreadsheets really suffer from inability to assign short-cuts for basic features like "add row".
2. no browser chrome e.g. url bar, toolbars, bookmarks etc. taking up screen real estate. Really important when running on mobile but also nice on the desktop too.
3. no addons by default (perhaps a different addon profile) to reduce performance overheads and behaviour conflicts on already performance constrained web-apps. The assumption is that these are tools like IDEs, word processors and spreadsheets.
4. aggressive caching of js/fonts/images for faster load. Even Google Docs suffers from "flashes of unstyled content"
5. cross-platform access to OS features for file-system access. One reason users have lost control of their data into the could is because browser-filesystem interaction is so painfully hobbled. If we used the file-system more then users could choose the dropbox style sync service of their choice rather than be locked in to the web-app developer's hosting. Users becoming responsible for their data again simplifies the web-app developer's architecture and hosting costs.
6. isolated process \ memory space from the user's other browsing activities. As a user, I don't want my office web-apps compromised by a broken video player in another tab of my browser. It would give a middle ground between Chrome's 100s of processes taking GBs of RAM versus Firefox vulnerable single process.
The main issue is that any unsandboxed behaviour would be abused. I wonder if browser vendors could support some type of app-developer certificate system. A nominal fee from a registered company would help track identity and certificates for malware developers can be banned.