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!
It sounds like this is happening because your computer still has Chrome as the default browser. Assuming this is Windows: right-click one of the icons on the desktop, click Properties, then click Change and select Firefox.
This will now set Firefox as the default browser for your computer and these icons should now automatically open in Firefox as well as any new ones you create.
Creating an icon on the desktop is very similar in the process you would have done for Chrome too.
The problem here is that you can’t create icons that are exclusive to Chrome or Firefox, as far as I know, since Windows chooses, by default, one app that will open these by default.
Technically you could bypass this by right-clicking the desktop icon and then select “Open in” and then choose the other browser in case you need to open one in Chrome and the other in Firefox.
Pretty sure if you set the path in the shortcut to the Firefox executable and passed the URL as a parameter it’ll open it.
Yeah, but I don’t think it’ll open it in the way I want, with only the site content, and no browser furniture. I’ll try it, but I’m not sure. Cheers though 👍
Thanks, but I’ve already changed default to FF - the icons are Chrome shortcuts though, so they will only open in Chrome. And I can’t see a way to make equivalent ones for FF, it just doesn’t seem to have the same functionality, in particular opening a link in a window with no tabs, bookmarks of address bar. Although I am going to check out an add on someone suggested that might do the job.
Thanks though 👍
In mobile FF, yes, it works natively. The “Add to home screen” works the same as it does in Chrome. Later versions, or at least Fennec, will open them as “apps” even if they don’t have a PWA manifest.
On desktop, lack of PWA support in FF continues to be a thorn in my side as well. I’ve resorted to using Web App Manager which is part of Linux Mint (you can install it on any distro, though. I’ve got it working fine in Debian Bookworm).
https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/01/install-linux-mints-web-app-manager-ubuntu-20-04/
Ah, thanks very much - but I’m only just dipping my toe into moving to FF, so I probably won’t be moving from Windows to Linux anytime soon! ;-)
Appreciate the advice though, cheers.
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
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 :-)
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
Not currently supported but it looks they they are actively scoping the feature with the intention of implanting it soon.
Oh wow, that’s great, I didn’t realise it was back on the agenda - thanks a lot! 👍
That said, I found this line a bit surprising: “it’s not a goal to make it feel like you’re not in Firefox.”
That’s a shame, because being able to have a website run as if I’m not in a browser is exactly what I want to achieve! Still though, at least they’re looking at the concept.
The loss of built-in PWA support was the biggest disappointment I had when switching from Chrome to Firefox, with the add-on solutions I tried having one problem or another in replicating my goal of making opening a handful of websites I had set to be PWAs look as much like regular applications as possible. While I wouldn’t switch back to Chrome in a second, and am still trying to get the rest of my family to make the switch, there’s a number of things Firefox needs to implement to remove the remaining roadblocks for people looking to make the switch away from Chrome or another Chromium browser.
