Probably like most of you, my dear readers, I have too many browser windows open, with tons of tabs for each window. But there are always apps I come back to very often, like my email (professional & personal), my calendar, my chat app, or even social media sites like Mastodon or Twitter. You can switch from window to window with CTRL/CMD-Tab, but you also have to move between tabs potentially. But for the most common webapps or websites I’m using, I wanted to have a dedicated desktop application.

Initially, I was on the lookout for a Mac specific approach, as I’ve been a macOS users for many years. So I found some Mac-specific apps that can handle that. This website mentions 5 approaches for macOS, including free, freemium, non-free apps, like Fluid, Applicationize (creating a Chrome extension), Web2Desk, or Unite. However, some of them create big hundred-mega wrappers. Another approach on Macs was using Automator, to create a pop-up window, but that’s just a pop-up, not a real app. There are also some promising open source projects like Tauri and Nativefier which seem promising.

Fortunately, there’s a cool feature from Chrome, that should work across all OSses, and not just macOS. So if you’re on Linux or Windows, please read on. The websites you’ll turn into applications don’t even need to be PWAs (Progressive Web Apps).

Here’s how to proceed:

First, navigate to your website you want to transform into an application with your Chrome browser.

Click on the triple dots in the top right corner, then More Tools, and finally Create Shorctut: