Using a browser for a few of the web applications I use isn’t always a great experience. I have a problem where I leave tabs open for far too long and ultimately end up losing the application in the sea of tabs over the course of a day. The solution is Quick Web Apps which takes a given URL to work inside a separate window of a browser of your choice.
Bottom Line Up Front: This has been great for making some of my regular web applications I use more easily accessed and comfortably closed out when I am done with them. It’s not a perfect solution but it is a near perfect solution.
You can find more information from the developer’s Github here:
https://github.com/elevenhsoft
Installation
I have become a fan of using Discover more and more on openSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s been great for discovering new applications and it also makes it easy to manage software and updates on my system. Search “Quick Web Apps” and proceed to install. There are two delivery options for this, Flatpak and native packages. I have chosen the Flatpak for this example.
Alternatively, navigate to this page with a browser of your choice.
https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.elevenhsoft.WebApps
Or install it directly from the terminal
flatpak install flathub io.github.elevenhsoft.WebAppsOnce installed, run it by the method of your choosing but since the whole purpose here is to easily access applications from your menu so I recommend that method. Easy to just stab your Meta/Super key and run it.
Use
When you first get going with Quick Web Apps, you will notice that you have absolutely nothing listed. That is expected. Your first step is to select the “New Icon” in the upper-left corner.
For an example here of how I am using this, I am going to add OnShape, a web-based CAD application that I have been using frequently.
From here you input the title of the application, URL the location for the application to live in your menu and what browser backend you want to use.
Click on the big circle button with the downward facing arrow, which I believe means “download” to automatically pull the appropriate icon for this application. For my purposes, I have selected Chromium which is also installed as a Flatpak for my browser component. This has been performing best for me for this purpose due to the password management portion.
When you are satisfied click “Create”.
This will bring you back to the first screen but with an entry that describes the backend, the application name and options for you for you to edit the name, configure, or remove from the list.
Using your application launcher, you can now launch your application, conveniently, like anything else you have in your menu.
This is clearly still a web based application but rather than it live in my sea of open tabs in my Firefox browser, it now has an entry in my task manager at the bottom of my screen. I can clearly see that OnShape is open and with a quick click, I can get right back into doing CAD.
CubicleNate.com
One of my challenges with using WordPress has been, like OnShape, I will loose track of a post or page I am working on and forget about it. This is a me problem and I thought I’d have a little fun and add my WordPress “portal” as an application too. When I open it up, I want to see my stats first because I like numbers and I can quickly go into writing.
Clicking on the same “new” icon, I entered the information but unfortunately, my CubicleNate icon didn’t actually populate so it is just as easy to select the icon location and add one of your choosing.
For this “App” I want it to live in my Internet sub-menu but likely, I am going to type to find it anyway.
I now have two web sites wrapped up as applications and if there is another that I would like to add, it is simply done. Another great candidate for this would have been Duolingo but there is already a Flatpak for that so it is already working out great.
Here is where you may tell me that there is already a WordPress app that I can use. I will tell you that you are not only correct but also that the spell check function doesn’t exist and I need every bit of help I can get to ensure that my spelling is correct.
What I Like
This is a quick and easy, incredibly convenient way to turn web-based applications into something more like any other application on my computer. I find this rather fantastic as it makes it much easier to access what I need to access from a few quick keystrokes.
The interface is incredibly simple and straight forward, so much so that the pictures included on this post is almost entirely unnecessary which is a good thing because I don’t intend on adding or removing web based applications from my menu all that often.
Having the Web app in my task manager is a “chef’s kiss” of digital beauty and quite a quality of life enhancement. Being able to click-to-focus or activate a window is way, way more convenient than the browser tab-shuffle I have been doing.
What I Don’t Like
Clicking on a link doesn’t trigger Junction for an external site, but realistically, that may be a good thing. I just know that I would like to pick a browser for some of the links I click on from the OnShape or WordPress “apps” but doing the copy/paste thing is perfectly fine. I would prefer the occasional copy and paste a link over to another browser than over selecting something a destination with Junction.
Quick Web Apps, the application sort of looks out of place on my desktop. This isn’t a big deal because I am not living in this application but rather, using it occasionally to add or remove a “web app.”
Final Thoughts
Although I would prefer to have a “proper” application for in my menu, this is the next best thing. There are some websites that are indeed applications you interact with that would not be possible to have as a local application so this makes absolute sense. It is, at least, a great stop-gap for bridging the user experience.
Quick Web Apps is a great tool for improving productivity on the Linux desktop. Even though utilities like this have been available for quite some time, it has been a unique feature of Linux distributions like Peppermint OS from years past. Flatpak has enabled this feature to be available to nearly all Linux distributions with nearly any desktop environment. This can absolutely enable you to app-a-fy every web based service you use bridging that user experience on Mobile devices to the Linux desktop a little bit more.
References
https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.elevenhsoft.WebApps
Duolingo Application on Linux
Junction | Application Chooser for Hyperlinks
https://mastodon.social/@elevenhsoft
https://github.com/elevenhsoft
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