PWA alternatives?

Hey all,

I’ve been intently watching the discussion on browser Ram usage here Chrome on M1 Macs - #18 by Danny_Pettiona

This has led me to thinking about an alternative to PWA’s.

The 3 reasons I love PWA’s.

  • keyboard maestro application switcher (it shows as an app).
  • the removal of the top address bar (basically the simple view).
  • I don’t like tabs (I feel like I get to easily lost in them).

Any suggestions for options to replace the PWA’s

What’s a PWA?

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3 Likes

Probably Progressive Web Apps?

1 Like

I am not sure what you mean by alternatives to a PWA.

As mentioned in that thread it seems that Brave is more efficient than Chrome, and as you probably already know you can create a stand alone PWA directly from any Chrome/ium browser.

Nick

Hey all,

I was thinking about alternatives to the use of a PWA, like a tab manager or other software solution that meets what I’m after.

PWA’s are great because they get an individual ‘app’ you can select in the Keyboard Maestro app switcher(CMD TAB).

Plus I also love the ‘focus’ of a PWA ➝ hidden address bar and toolbar.

Any ideas?

It might be 2 different app combinations?

Im not sure I’m following what you are after, if PWAs work for you, why would you want an alternative? Nothing bad about them -apart from memory usage maybe-.

Some food for thought.

1.- Use something like Rambox/Franz/Ferdi/Biscuit.app to embed your most used web apps. This is a crowded space so it’s not difficult to find a lot of alternatives.

2.- Use a solution inside the browser. I find Orion’s vertical tab groups & windows very intriguing, but maybe for your use case you just need pinned tabs in Safari, always a shortcut away. Another similar option is Vivaldi, that can embed any responsive web app in its bookmarks & history sidebar: its kind of a kludge but works, you can set the width of the window to be used for this “app on a sidebar” and also set a keystroke.

Alas, with these two approaches you lose the global app switcher, of course. Maybe a third one could be dedicated Spaces for different browser windows?

Not particularly fancy but it gets the job done for me.

The question I have is what problem are you trying to solve?

From the other string, I wonder if it is that there are problems with memory. So is your issue that you are having memory issues?

If not, and the PWA apps are working for you, and your post gives a number of benefits you enjoy, I’m not sure I understand what the reason for replacing PWAs is?

I too find the benefits of ‘web site apps’ to be quite useful. @ThatNerd suggests a command line tool to great such ‘apps’. I use Unite to create such apps (although if I had known of the command line tool I may have gone with that).

(Now my Studio has 64 GB of RAM, so I’m not experiencing memory issues).

[Edit for spelling mistakes]

nativefier uses Electron (and thus Chromium); Unite uses WebKit.

For me that’s enough reason to prefer Unite.

Using a different web engine might help or not with the original problem (but it’s not clear to me either what that actually is).

Amazing thanks for all your help.

The problem - RAM usage!

Very intrigued by nativefier.

I installed and uninstalled unite multiple times, never seemed to work.

The solution may be a MacBook update!