I’ve decided (after seeing the advice repeatedly!) to try and move away from Chrome and use FF instead. However I’ve immediately come across an issue which is a bit of a deal-breaker for me, and although I’ve looked into it, I haven’t seen an answer anywhere.

One of the best features in Chrome is the abilty to create a shortcut for an individual URL. This shortcut can then be placed on the desktop, start menu or quicklaunch toolbar (Win 10) and opened as if it were a program in its own right - so, no URL bar, no tabs, no bookmarks, just the site content.

I use this method every day for a number of different sites - Outlook, Gmail, Calendar, Keep, Sheets, Docs, etc, and it’s perfect. So much so that I usually forget that I’m technically opening all of these in Chrome at all, not least because the site favicon shows in the taskbar in place of the browser logo.

So, I assumed that FF would be able to do the same thing… but apparently not. Am I missing something? I’ve found people discussing old features like SSB (site-specific browsing) and PWA (progressive web apps), but as far as I can tell all work on this in FF has been discontinued.

I would maybe just put up with this, and use Chrome shortcuts for these sites, and FF for everything else, except that links clicked from within them will open in Chrome intead of FF, which makes for a confusing experience.

Anyone know of a good solution to this? Thanks in advance!

  • Admiral Patrick
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    18 hours ago

    In mobile FF, yes, it works natively. The “Add to home screen” works the same as it does in Chrome. Later versions, or at least Fennec, will open them as “apps” even if they don’t have a PWA manifest.

    On desktop, lack of PWA support in FF continues to be a thorn in my side as well. I’ve resorted to using Web App Manager which is part of Linux Mint (you can install it on any distro, though. I’ve got it working fine in Debian Bookworm).

    https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/01/install-linux-mints-web-app-manager-ubuntu-20-04/

    • SanguineParOP
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      318 hours ago

      Ah, thanks very much - but I’m only just dipping my toe into moving to FF, so I probably won’t be moving from Windows to Linux anytime soon! ;-)

      Appreciate the advice though, cheers.