Hi everyone, it's Quang from WebCatalog,

Certainly, if the built-in "install-as-app" of major browsers work well for you, then it's great.

WebCatalog tries to make the concept simpler and more accessible to average users. Most people are familiar with the concepts of apps and app stores so our vision is to build an app store for web apps that gives users easy access to desktop apps (many not available elsewhere). A user doesn't need to know what is difference between a website or an app, they just need to open WebCatalog and install the apps they want like they usually do on their phone. For a power user, this might sound unnecessary, but this is proven wrong as there are plenty of apps like "X for Gmail" or "Y for Netflix" on Mac App Store and Microsoft Store. It is also the reason why companies like Notion and Slack build web-wrapper desktop apps.

One more point, we're not only letting users install chromeless window apps. If you give it a try, for example, with the Gmail app on WebCatalog [1], you can switch between multiple accounts using workspaces, set the app as the default email client, attach it to the menu bar or taskbar, etc. They're real apps with executables, not just bash scripts. And we're trying to integrate the web apps with your system and make it feel native-like as much as possible. And we're going to add many more features soon. In other words, we're trying to bring the experience that web-wrapper apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Notions offer to every web app.

I've been bootstrapping WebCatalog since 2017. I and many people around the world use it every day. It's a well-tested idea. It's only now that we decide to launch the product widely.

[1] https://webcatalog.app/catalog/gmail/

Looking at the size of your catalog I'm going to guess that you didn't work with all those sites to distribute their apps through your site. Maybe I'm not understanding how this works, but wouldn't you need some sort of license to do this? If someone downloads the Gmail app from your catalog, but it doesn't work the same as the plain web client, they would probably blame Google and not you. I can't imagine Google would like that.

84.4MB AppImage, probably yet another electron wrapper. At least this one provides single runtime image for all apps.

Yes, it's built with Electron. But I don't think there's anything wrong with the framework. Plenty of amazing apps are built with Electron, and they're fast and snappy. Without Electron, we'd never be able to bring WebCatalog to all major desktop platforms.

People use electron because it's literally the only option in many cases.

Can you point to a viable alternative? Multiplatform by default, with the option to build rich reactive UI? Plus text editing with a sane document model (via ProseMirror etc)? Fast math rendering (via katex)?

If so I will happily jump ship! Even Microsoft's attempt at a react native for desktop excludes Linux so it's a non-starter. The Rust community seems to be interested in solving this problem, and I eagerly await their solution.

Is there a way to do this on Mac where you can open several app windows and use ALT+tab to switch between them? I know you can use CMD+` to swap between Chrome windows but this is a productivity killer if you have to first ALT+tab to Chrome and then use CMD+` to get the window you want.

Thank you for bring this up. This is exactly what WebCatalog is built for. Every app you install through WebCatalog works just like a Mac app so you can switch between them using Alt+Tab.

For each app, if you need to, you can divide the app into workspaces (similar to how Slack workspaces) which you can switch between using Cmd+1, Cmd+2, etc.