Browser Workflow: Another Approach to Web Apps (Premium)

I’ve spent the past several months forcing myself to access my primary web apps differently than my normal approach of pinning them---whether they’re “real” PWAs or not---to the Windows taskbar and using them like native applications. In doing so, I’m opening up new browser options, since not all browsers support this usage.

As you may know, I kind of obsess over workflow. But my current experimentation---which, really, has just turned into the new normal for how I do things---probably dates back to my Living with Chromebook series from last Fall, when I expressed my frustration with certain norms from Windows that aren’t available in Chrome OS.

More recently, I’ve come to understand that we collectively need to stop using Chrome and use a more private browser that doesn’t exist solely to serve the needs of Google’s advertising business. Some Chromium-based browsers, like Brave and the new Edge, satisfy this need nicely because both aggressively take on trackers (especially Brave) and remove Google dependencies while retaining the same level of website compatibility provided by Chrome.

And then there’s poor Firefox, which is ceding ground monthly in the usage share wars against its Chromium-based competitors. I feel bad about Firefox: It’s a fine browser with excellent, innovative built-in privacy and security protections, and it’s created using uniquely moral guidelines that should be an inspiration for the rest of the market. But as I predicted, its decision to stick with its own rendering engines appears to be dooming this browser to irrelevance.

I hope that doesn’t happen. But its lack of support for pinning web pages and web apps to the Windows taskbar is one of the other reasons I no longer use Firefox. Chrome does this. So does Brave. And the new Edge. And other browsers too. But not Firefox.

That said, most users probably don’t even know that you can pin web pages and web apps to the taskbar, even with those browsers that do support it. And there’s a good debate to be had around whether browser-based app/site navigation, as we see in browsers and in Chrome OS, or native application navigation is the better approach. Or, as I’ve been testing, whether they can coexist.

There are all kinds of ways in which one might access their most-used websites and web apps. You could simply manually type in the URL in a browser, hope that autocomplete figures it out early, and rely on a browser’s ability to reopen your previous set of tabs. You could use a home page of some kind of that links to them. If you’re a power user, you could pin them to the taskbar as I’d been doing.

Or. You could pin tabs within your browser. This is a capability that has existed for many years and is available on most if not all mainstream browsers. But it’s not something I ever seriously considered using myself, until fairly recently.

There are advantages to this approach.

Pinned tabs appear as mini ta...

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