Shipping a website as a standalone desktop application

Question

I would like to ship a web application as a desktop application, the only restriction is that this desktop application needs to work even without the existence of any web browser. For example, imagine a machine with no browsers at all, now you download this executable on Mac/PC, run it, and you have an application that is simply a frame (preferably Chrome but FireFox works fine too) that runs in it this webpage, nothing else.

This is very abstract, I understand but I am just wondering if there is an easy way to do it.

Mozilla used to offer Prism as a way to do it but that has been discontinued.

Google Chrome offers Chrome Packaged Apps but that requires the existence of Chrome on the machine (since it is basically an extension).

What I am trying to do is to be able for users to download the executable and get the app. I was going to try and download the whole Chrome source code and start digging in it to find a way to ship it as something that it is not right now, but thought I would ask here first.

Let me know if more information is required.

Answer 1

You could take a look at https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit or http://appjs.org/ .

Answer 2

Try the standalone extension for firefox and make sure you have the latest firefox version installed.

Answer 3

I've seen 3 that seem to have some traction:

• NW.js
• Electron
• Tint 2

Looks like there's kind of an interesting comparison/write up on them. Just my 2 cents... for better or worse, I think this type of a solution will become more common for desktop (win/mac/linux) clients. This is especially true when the desire is to provide a cross-platform solution. I think the attitude is that most people probably just use a regular web browser anyway to access things on a desktop, so why spend more time developing a native app unless it is absolutely necessary?