GNOME 3.2 will have a Web Application mode

Twitter as a GNOME Desktop Web Application The forthcoming version of GNOME 3.2 will provide support for integrating frequently used web sites into the desktop as web applications. This will allow "application-like" web sites to be saved and later opened as if they were applications on the GNOME desktop. GNOME developer Xan López has written in his blog about the progress in bringing the capability to GNOME, saying that he has "landed the bulk of the code for the upcoming 3.1.90 release".

As an example, he shows how Twitter can be saved "As Web Application" from the Epiphany browser, which brings up a dialogue allowing the new application to be named. The browser then creates an application which can be started from the Launcher using that name. The launched application has no UI chrome other than a title bar, is sandboxed to the domain it was created from, inherits cookies from the main browser but runs in its own process. The latter feature means that if the web application crashes, it doesn't stop other browser processes. Web applications will also show up in the overview mode and can be added to the dash for easy launching.

See also:

• First beta version of GNOME 3.2, a report from The H.

(djwm)