is or will there be an -app mode?

[PerBothner]

Chrome has an --app option to open a browser window in "app mode" - i.e. without location bar, menu bar etc. This has many uses - it can be used as an alternative to Electron. For my own use, the DomTerm terminal emulator can use any modern browser-like application for its display frontend - it is much nicer if we don't see the location-bar and similar unhelpful clutter. See this related dropped Mozilla issue.

It would be nice to a Firefox-based display frontend that could be an alternative to (some applications of) Electron. The Mozilla developers seem to have given up on this; I don't know if it would be relevant to the goals of the Dot browser project - but it would be nice.

Various refinements are possible, such an option to disable the system titlebar. But just the basic functionality equivalent to Chrome's -app option would be great.

[kierandrewett]

That sounds like a good idea, however we would probably implement this through "Apps" within Dot.

It would work the same as how Chrome does their PWA/Apps thing. You'd navigate to a page and in some context menu you would get the option to "Create app from page". From there you could customise the layout of the window and turn off the title bar or whatever you need.

Let me know if this is something you'd like.

[PerBothner]

The "Create app from page" model isn't really a suitable approach. For example the goal for DomTerm is to look and feel like standard desktop terminal emulator - but just one that happens to use HTML/DOM/JS for its display interface (GUI toolkit). I think asking the user to "Create app from page" would be awkward and off-putting. If it can be done automatically (using a background script, perhaps the first time a user runs the application), then I don't see a problem. I guess the "Create app" can be run by an installer script, but note that on Linux you might install a backage or copy an executable to your PATH; this should not require any extra user interaction.

Electron does not require a "create app from page" step.

[kierandrewett]

Hmm alright, I guess we could implement something like that. We'll let you know once we've thought about how it will all work.

[PerBothner]

Thanks - looking forward to trying it.

[PerBothner]

This may not have much to do with your project priorities, but you might find Wry interesting. I've experimented with using Wry (which is written in Rust and part of the larger Tauri project) as a front-end for DomTerm. It works pretty well, but it uses GtkWebkit (on Linux - Edge on Windows) which has some problems. It would be great to have Wry (or something similar) but based on Firefox instead.