Are you often struggling to find a particular website among the many browser windows and tabs already opened? Do you wish you could easily just launch your favorite websites and have them run in their own window as if they were desktop applications?
If so, Peppermint has the solution. They have a tool called “ICE” which is dedicated to turning your favorite websites into standalone applications. In fact, they’ve had that solution for a while since ICE was initially developed in 2010!
Fast forward 10 years and we’re planning to solve the same problem. We’re a little bit late to the party but we’re excited to bring our contribution. We started talks with Peppermint and we’re currently trying to figure out the best way to work together.
We started a project called Web App Manager which features:
A new icon and generic name
A new user interface
100% back and forth compatibility with ICE
A split backend to make it easy for ICE and Web App manager to use the same codebase if they both want to retain separate UIs.
The ability to edit Web applications
Icon theme support with icons automatically guessed for popular websites
Improved favicon downloads (including support for favicongrabber.com)
The ability to show or hide the Firefox navigation bar
Full translation support for all major languages (at the time of release)
Once you create a “Web Application” you can launch your website directly from the application menu. It runs in its own window and with its own browser profile. This makes it easy to switch to it using the panel or the Alt-tab selector. And you can pin it to your panel to make it even easier to launch or to access.
Comments and Reviews
I use the Manjaro community version of Webapp manager. It works as promised - I have used it to create several web apps with Ungoogled Chromium and have had no issues.