Gerv, I spent my first few months at Mozilla telling people that Apps and web pages are the same. But then I had these two experiences:
1. When I first made birdwalker.com into an App and launched it in a chromeless window, I was so stoked. After only a few minutes, however, I realized that it really doesn't work very well without a back button; and that it looks completely non-App-like when the whole window scrolls and the text has lots of blue hyperlinks. It's a pretty good web page, but a lousy App. 2. Conversely, when I use Lucid Chart (which I ADORE), i think it looks really goofy when it has to create its own menu bar within a browser window; if it could take over the native menu and lose the back button, it would be indistinguishable from a "real" App; IMHO it's a funny looking web page. So, while web pages and Apps share a lot, I don't think they're the same from a UX point of view. -Bill On May 21, 2012, at 6:56 AM, Gervase Markham wrote: > On 19/05/12 01:52, Ragavan Srinivasan wrote: >> * Apps are primarily about mobile where the "browser" is either an >> invisible runtime (Android) or in the case of B2G, the phone is the >> browser. > > I think you have got too caught up in the Apple/Google-promoted model of > "apps" as a different class of thing :-) Surely if "the web is the > platform", then also a web page _is_ an application. > > If you have a mobile phone, it may allow you to take certain web pages > and promote them to top-level "apps", such that they can be run from the > home screen etc., but this is an implementation detail. Other than > perhaps that it triggers a different or more limited set of permissions > prompts, why should a web page need to care if it's being run in "app > mode" or in a browser window?
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