This function that only has Chrome, is the only reason why no browser change
Google Chrome completely seized the throne to the most used browser in the world, although not precisely for lack of competition or worthwhile alternatives. Firefox is living one of its best stages, finally with the arrival of multiprocessing. Opera each time becomes more interesting and presents more unique features, such as integrated messaging services.
And, they are not the only ones. New alternatives such as Vivaldi show that there is still much to innovate in the field of browsers. And yet, many of us, knowing this, we stay in Chrome despite their excessive consumption of resources that Google is still promising to solve, but we get old waiting for it to happen.
One of the best features of Chrome that few take advantage of
Personally, the only reason I am currently using Chrome as my main browser, is for just one function: add web applications and pages to the desktop and open them as separate windows. This way you can add any webapp to the desktop or to the taskbar as if they were individual apps.
These windows have their own icon that you can change to the one that best suits you. You can run the apps in your own window, without address bar, buttons, extensions, or bookmarks.
It is especially useful not to cram Chrome from tabs and have to walk around the whole bunch that we open to find those that we need to keep open all the time.
You can do it with any application for Chrome that appear in chrome://apps/. You can do it with any webapp that you have open at that moment in a tab, or you can do it with any web page. You could create your own webapp if you wanted to. Add it to the Windows desktop or superbar, and if you use Linux, you can anchor it in your dock.
This feature unfortunately does not exist in any of the other modern web browsers such as Firefox, Opera, Safari, Edge, or even Vivaldi, although several are based on Chrome.
If we consider that what some “native” applications like Slack or Spotify hide are complete instances of Chromium thanks to the extended use of Electron, it is even stupid to install this type of apps if you already use Chrome and you will have the same high consumption of resources in your system.
In addition to this, with the domain of web technologies, fewer and fewer services are dedicated to creating native applications for all systems, and we always have to resort to webapps.
In my case it happens with Asana, Trello and Tweetdeck, to mention the most important ones. With this Chrome function I believe the “illusion” that I have independent apps, and not only that, I can manage their windows separately, outside the disaster of tabs that I must open daily.
