[whatwg] Installed Apps

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 8:42 PM, Robert O'Callahan<robert at ocallahan.org> wrote:
> Indeed, the most difficult issue here is security and the permissions UI,
> which you haven't addressed at all.

One obvious solution would be to have installation UI like extensions,
but somewhat less scary (no signing requirements, countdowns, "this
will explode your computer" warnings, etc.).  These would effectively
be sandboxed browser extensions.  So you could view and disable any
background windows from the Add-Ons menu or browser equivalent.  Even
browsers that don't support extensions have some UI already for
plugins that could be partially reused.

I'm not clear how the UI requirements here are different from
persistent workers, though.  Those also persist after the user
navigates away, right?

> Maybe you could have a browser window containing regular tabs, but presented
> differently, with just icons and titles in some sort of tray, so users can
> see which applications are running "in the background"?

So the browser becomes still more of a mini-OS.  Tabs already usurped
some of the window manager's functionality, and now we're talking
about having system trays too. What next, a clock in the corner?  :)

I'm not saying this is bad, necessarily, but it's something to keep in
mind.  We have an operating system independent from the browser that
provides general-purpose process management for a reason.  (Unless
maybe you use Chrome OS!)