💻 With the rapid development of the front end of the Internet, more and more products have improved the experience of using web pages. Web applications built with Web technology not only have a modern UI, but even a much better experience than native desktop clients.

Native desktop clients, on the other hand, may have to make a lot of sacrifices in terms of interface, elements, and experience due to the need to adapt to multiple operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and even Linux, or to adapt to older system apis such as Windows 7 and WinForm before it. Not only does this create a fragmented experience, but the client and even user interface can look very different from one system to another due to different UI elements and font rendering engine schemes.


Here are two ways to do this: Use the web side services of our favorite apps as our “desktop apps” :

  • It can not only save the tedious steps of downloading and installing the desktop client
  • You can also enjoy a modern UI built by the latest Web technologies
  • For Windows, the first solution solves the serif Chinese interface caused by poor font rendering engines in Chromium-based applications like Notion, Slack, etc., built with Electron technology
  • O < span style = “box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 22px; display: block; word-break: inherit! Important;

Chrome App

The first no-fuss solution is to simply use Chrome to create a “desktop application” for our web pages.

First, use Chrome to open the page you want to convert to a “desktop client” (I’m using a minority Slack group at https://sspai-club.slack.com/messages) and bookmark the URL of the page you logged in to in a normal state:


Then, open the Chrome App page: Chrome ://apps, drag the TAB items you just bookmarked to the space below, right-click on the App icon, select “Open in window”, then click Create Shortcut, select “Desktop” or “Start Menu” from the menu bar that pops up:

Such a single window desktop application shortcut appears in our start menu or desktop:


However, we found that the name and icon of the shortcut were not correct, so we right-click > More > Open File Location, which brought us to the Folder of Chrome App Shortcuts. Here, we can directly change the file name and configure its icon by right-clicking > Properties > Change Icon:

Note that for Windows, ICONS only support ICO files. We can customize ICONS by converting PNG images into ICO files easily through ConvertICO.

After this configuration, a near-perfect “desktop application” is ready to use. I used it for a while and compared it to a version of Slack from the Microsoft Store:

  • Functionally, in my experience, there are no missing features
  • The UI interface is highly consistent, and the Chrome App version’s font rendering is normal non-serif — Microsoft Yahei


It’s delightful. 😄

Nativefier

Make any web page a desktop application.

Another solution is to use the open source Nativefier to turn the web page into an installable desktop application supporting macOS 10.9+ / Windows/Linux. The principle is to use Electron technology to encapsulate the content of the web page into an executable, installable application.

However, this approach requires some complicated installation and configuration. Because Nativefier is written by Node.js, you need to install both the Node.js environment and the NPM package manager to install Nativefier through NPM install. After the installation, Nativefier only uses the command line interface instead of a graphical interface. Fortunately, we have an expert to simplify this process: Web2Desk.

Our Favorite 🌎 websites to 🖥 desktop apps in 1️ one click 🚀

Web2Desk lets you type in web links, app names, and app ICONS, and then it builds on the server to provide you with native installer downloads for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

After my own tests, it took a long time for me to build and install a desktop application using Nativefier locally and on my own computer (it was very slow to download some dependencies due to the domestic network environment). , and the use of Web2Desk service, less than two minutes to complete the full platform of the desktop program loading, very convenient. My own Notion cloud note-taking desktop client in Linux is built using Web2Desk.


Experience with

To be honest, the main reason I like to use the web as a desktop application is to solve the Chromium app’s poor Chinese font rendering on Windows. For example, Notion and Slack, both Windows desktop clients render Chinese directly as Song Style. Using serifs in the UI of their applications is too disruptive.

For Notion and Slack, I really don’t have any loss of functionality. On the one hand, Slack itself needs to be connected to the Internet to use, on the other hand, I am not in the “offline” state.


At the same time, in addition to solve the problem of font rendering, who only provide the application of mobile terminal App (I sent and instantly, for example), or the desktop version of the application support very litter application (for example, weibo provides the desperate UWP version of the client), we can use this convenient way to give ourselves a “client”.

Web applications are getting richer and more comprehensive, and our experience of using them directly is getting better and better. At the same time, we save the tedious step of downloading a huge installation package and developers save the onerous task of adapting to the full platform, which is really the direction of the future of applications. Web first! 💪

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