Update metadata and transcripts through end of July 2026

Refreshed episodes/hosts/comments/series from hpr.sql, and added
official HPR transcripts for the 180 episodes aired since the last
sync (hpr4516-hpr4695).

hpr_transcripts/hpr4625.txt

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+Episode: 4625
+Title: Site Specific Browsers
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4625/hpr4625.mp3
+Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:22 (official HPR transcript)
+
+---
+
+This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4625, for 2026-04-24
+Today's show is entitled, "Site Specific Browsers"
+The host is Lee and the duration is 00:07:37
+The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
+The summary is "Lee talks about using Progressive Web Apps on the desktop"
+Hi, I'm Lee.
+I'm going to talk to there about my experiences using various tools
+that make web-based apps seem like desktop apps.
+Firstly, you might wonder why anyone would want to do this,
+because surely if you're using a desktop computer,
+then you want your apps to be real apps running on your computer,
+not a femoral things, running on some machine
+that doesn't miles away.
+There are a few reasons, and the main one
+I can think of relates to what in software engineering
+you would call a non-functional requirement.
+That is, it has nothing to do with what the software does,
+but instead with how it does it.
+And that requirement is partly due to laziness of developers
+like me, but partly due to practicality
+when time and cost are issues.
+This is that you can write the app once,
+and it will run everywhere.
+Despite various technologies that promise
+to make it possible to build an app,
+where the source code just compiles down to a program
+that works wherever you might want to deploy it,
+that really isn't fully realized.
+I discovered this when I built a Swiss army knife app
+containing dozens of handy,
+cisadmin and dev tools, mainly for converting
+or generating snippets of data that you would paste into it.
+I thought I was being clever when I chose the KD
+plasma base framework called Kirigami,
+and was careful only to use standard cross platform
+compatible libraries in my code.
+However, when I actually clone my code,
+developed on my Ubuntu machine,
+and tried to build it on MacOS on my Mac mini,
+all help wrote loose.
+I was juggling with the Mac cross platform
+in Stahlahombrou, and the KD cross platform
+library environmental craft, and the command line tools
+in sort via X-code, and then trying to match together
+one version of one thing with another version of another.
+This is the thing about building software.
+One theory, lots of stuff is compatible.
+In practice, you can end up balancing spinning plates
+on your nose, or riding you in a cycle to get it all to work.
+And I'm not pinpointing Kirigami in particular.
+I've obtained my own genes like Flutter or Electron,
+I've found to have these issues.
+And it's not that the technology itself
+is poorly conceived or implemented,
+but that the program is complex and without investing time,
+effort and resources, making code that you write once
+and compiles everywhere is problematic.
+If it does work, it's often a matter of skilled
+local perseverance.
+This is why so many companies
+will opt to make different app for each platform.
+One for Windows, one for MacOS, hopefully one for Linux,
+one for Android, one for iOS.
+So I'll come back to the reason for using web-based technologies
+for running low-coaps on a desktop computer.
+It's because web-technology, CSS, HTML, JavaScript,
+and so on have become a universal standard.
+It's often said nowadays that the browser
+has become the operating system.
+Well, that's not quite true, but it's getting close.
+Operating systems like Chrome OS, for example,
+based on that tenant, where to a large extent,
+everything you see on the screen is a web page.
+And then there are some disadvantages
+to using web technologies, perhaps.
+One of these is that they're often cloud-first.
+You have to log in so credentials, give away
+a load of personal data that you should be able to do
+perfectly well on a computer without all that nonsense.
+Also, if the internet connection goes,
+you could have lost access to your data.
+Often, things that might easily be perfectly well stored
+on your computer without relying on an always-on connection.
+These disadvantages have been
+ameliorated somewhat nowadays as some web-absorbed
+what is often termed respectful in that they do not
+demand linking yourself to some online-rich-driven users,
+and they can also take advantage of web-technologies
+that store data locally on your computer without loading it.
+The exception would be if you explicitly
+wanted to synchronize your data, it may give an option
+to sink to some way out of your own choosing,
+even to some service that you host yourself.
+These reservations aside, there are some types of web-abs,
+we might accept it's okay to trust the provider in question,
+especially if you're paying them,
+and there is less incentive for them
+to treat you as a broad fodder for data collection and marketing.
+Another thing, if like me, you run a Linux
+distrayer as your daily driver,
+and that means you do pretty much all your proper computer
+really stuff within the Linux.
+Then you'll notice you can get treated as a second-class citizen
+by often in quotes, big companies,
+the like to assume everyone is running windows
+or maybe macros, or at least an eye-fine or an Android phone.
+This often forces you to run these tools in the web browser,
+and you lose that app-like experience
+that other platforms enjoy.
+That, as I said, web-tool-onjies and browsers,
+well, have moved on.
+I've encountered a few tools
+that let you run a web application more or less
+as if it was a proper desktop app.
+I think the first time I became aware of this
+was with Peppa Mint Noes,
+which had a single-side browser tool called Ice,
+though that's been replaced by one called Kuma apparently.
+More recently, I installed a program
+on my Ubuntu machine called France.
+The key advantage of this was it detected things like notifications,
+so you would actually know when a webmail email arrived
+versus having to check it.
+After a while, I realized this did not seem
+to be getting that much support,
+especially when the web app changed something
+that broke the recipe that was allowing it
+to work within the France container.
+I swapped France for what looked like
+a more community-driven branch of the same tool,
+called Ferdium, and this I've been using for a while now.
+During an update to my PC, though,
+I somehow lost all the services I'd set up,
+and rather than setting them up again,
+decided for a while to just run everything
+in my web browser, despite my common problem
+of out-of-habbit closing tabs or closing the browser,
+then realizing the service I was working with had gone.
+Another issue being that some web services
+don't do too well if you're using more than one tenant
+or once, tenants being effectively a different user.
+At this point, I found there was another option
+that I've only been using for a short time,
+but suits my needs remarkably well.
+This is to install these services
+as what are called progressive web apps.
+While I generally browse the web with Firefox,
+I found the Chromium handles these quite well,
+and it seemed to me to keep these PWA separate
+from my general web browsing,
+especially as they're often work-related,
+so I don't want them available,
+unless I'm actually doing something specific with them.
+So at the moment, I have two different email providers
+fast-mowing outlook, a software development project
+management tool called Jira,
+and a general collaboration tool called Teams
+or sitting at separate apps in my KD plasma task bar.
+The specifics of how to install a website
+as it's own desktop app will vary from browser to browser,
+and from one Linux distro and desktop environment to another.
+And while this way of doing things
+is born out of compromises or ground,
+it does seem to be a case of the lowest common denominator
+winning out.
+Your own mileage may vary, but practically speaking,
+if you happen to have Chromium running
+and have navigated to a particular web app,
+you can go to the three dots menu,
+scroll down to cast, save and share,
+and click and still pages app.
+For me, it was that simple,
+and even in one case, the web app was smart enough
+to prompt me to do this without me needing
+to even search for that menu option.
+For me, it's a bit like having a Chromebook,
+or having mobile apps on my desktop,
+not to everyone's taste,
+and not suitable for all use cases,
+but this is working for me quite well at the moment.
+Anyway, that's all for now.
+Thanks for listening.
+You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
+Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
+If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
+Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
+Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.