Safari 17 Web Apps
Discover web apps for Mac — a powerful way to experience your website from the Dock. Learn how you can customize your web app to give people the best experience when they add your site.
Thomas Steiner (via Hacker News):
The out-of-the box launch experience of web apps is fantastic. Nowhere does it give away that this is a web app. For apps with a manifest, there’s no Safari UI whatsoever, and the expectation is that such apps are single-page apps that provide their own navigation controls. If an app is well made, lay persons probably wouldn’t be able to tell that something is a web app.
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Different from iOS/iPadOS, credentials in cookies are copied over, so if you were logged in when running in the tab, you’re logged in when you launch the app.
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Extensions don’t run and likewise aren’t displayed. Also probably a conscious decision.
Web apps also respect Focus modes, so you can include or exclude them from allowed notifications based on what you’re doing. Lastly, with privacy in mind, Apple has added options to control web apps’ access to camera, microphone, and location in System Settings -> Privacy & Security, just like for native apps.
Previously:
Update (2023-06-28): Sven A. Schmidt:
macOS 14 Sonoma’s web apps (Safari’s “Add to Dock” feature) show up with a “Web” architecture in Activity Monitor 🤔
It’s a shame you can’t run extensions. One use case for me would be Twitter. Running the web version of Twitter in a Web app alongside Tweaks for Twitter by Jeff Johnson would make a compelling alternative to installing the native app.