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!

  • @[email protected]
    6•3 months ago

    I don’t personally use this feature, so I don’t honestly know if this would solve your problem, but there’s a firefox addon that might add the functionality you’re wanting.

    If it doesn’t, then this issue

    except that links clicked from within them will open in Chrome intead of FF, which makes for a confusing experience.

    could possibly be solved with a chrome extension

    • SanguineParOP
      3•3 months ago

      Oh wow - that add-on does look like exactly what I need. Will need to look into it a bit further, not least because of possible security issues, but thanks, that’s a really good lead! Appreciate it :-)

    • @[email protected]English
      2•3 months ago

      I use PWAs for Firefox and they work ok, although I don’t have the issue you mention. For me, in Ubuntu, if I open a link in a PWA for Google Chat, then the link opens in the PWA firefox window, not my main browser window. Maybe there’s a setting I missed?

      Also, the PWA acts like a separate browser, so opening Google Chat requires you to log in again to Google on the same machine. And if you open up a paywalled link, and it opens in the PWA, then you have to log in, even if you’re logged in in Firefox.

      Overall 5/7 rating on usability, but did allow me to get completely off of Chrome