How To Turn Any Website Into A Desktop App

Do you want an easy way to turn any website into a desktop application? Nativefier is a command line tool to do just that! Apps are wrapped by Electron (which uses Chromium under the hood) in an executable usable on Windows, macOS and Linux.

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[scheimong]

Just some personal thoughts on web-based applications:

As a developer myself, I can well understand the appeal of building your applications with web technology (i.e. node, electron, deno, etc.). If you are resource or time constrained (and everyone is), this is the fastest way to make your application work on as many platforms as possible.
However, as a user of such software, I can also echo the unfavourable sentiment lots of people have towards them. Compared to native applications, they are big, slow, and sometimes buggy, not to mention things like themeing.
Therefore my position is sort of a compromise: I'm okay with companies and developers building web apps, but I would like to see them keep their APIs open and well documented, so that third parties can build native clients if they so desire.

[raylowe]

If you are using Brave as a browser, you can add any web page as a shortcut that opens in its own window without adding ANY software at all.

[matrikater]

i have always wanted a desktop app for youtube since i've got it on my phone. so thanks!

[kernelcortex]

I don't know if you already introduced this. But you may check Arronax for user friendly GUI create & edit .desktop file.

[jmacx]

I was thinking about seeking out something just last night probably about the time you released this video. Nice timing

[ZEoJEROMENATOR]

This is very helpful when you use self hosted applications like wger and you want a standalone app for it instead of using a web browser

[daveydark]

Is there any other benifit to this other than convenience? Does it have better performance than normally opening it in a browser or something?

[TheJoseppa]

I do this for a long time by just creating a app.desktop file with --app="website.web". No need for a separate electron app.

[TheJayman]

I use the Mint web app manager on Fedora. I got the idea from Nobara Linux which comes with it pre-installed. It allows me to use Firefox's engine, rather than Chromium's.

[paulj]

If it launches those sites in chromium. How is it in terms of privacy?

[summerWTFE]

How do I know which icons are available and what they are called?

[duffelo]

Hey DT,

iam pretty sure you have had been asked that a thousand times,
the font you are using in this video looks damn great!

Would you be so kind and tell me what font it is? (both UI and Monospaced)

Would be really great!

[PanoptesDreams]

You can do the same with any chromium browser and a launch argument. So why?

[nickgennady]

If I do this for YouTube and log in will the app be isolated? I don’t want to be spied on and data from outside YouTube being sent to google.

[CharlesCollins]

Hi DT, complete noob here. What is the difference between what you have done and simply going to a webpage of choice and going to menu/more tools/create a shortcut and ticking the Open as Window box. It creates a link in the Application List under Chrome Apps.

[corrupteddrive]

You could also skip the natifier step and install surf and just make a .desktop file with the line "surf <YOUR URL HERE>" after "Exec="

[alx]

What is the use case for this? Does the nativefier crawls all pages and downloads them, so you can have a locally saved copy of some site so you can browse it without internet? Or you just get a very pricy (hundreds of Mb) icon for your website, which still opens a web browser and requires an internet connection?

[ytuser]

Also consider GNOME Web has this feature built-in, as does Chromium, and Firefox has a third-party addon called PWAs for Firefox

[ii]

Okay, quick advice: don't install npm packages with sudo

[mjdevlog]

Really useful, thank you DT. Although app built with electron will be pretty heavy😅