I just built a ‘SU Free’ single page browser, using nativefier…
Nativefier is a command line tool that allows you to easily create a desktop application for any web site with succinct and minimal configuration. Apps are wrapped by Electron in an OS executable (.app, .exe, etc.) for use on Windows, macOS and Linux.
This is interesting! I’m right now tied up in a extension project and can’t really pause to look more into this. However screenshots would be much appreciated. Also, do the shortcuts that collides with normal browser shortcuts works?
We cannot distribute it (like with all terms of service, “framing” and “embedding” are probably not allowed). But this is something SketchUp should have created (or should create).
I do not beleive that is what it is.
I think this utility / compiler packages up “snapshot” of a website into a standalone offline working package.
I think your using the package’s internal copy of the website.
A browser without browser GUI (chromeless). A headless browser is a CLI process that does not open a GUI at all (and if possible not relies on Quartz / Xorg / Windows Shell).
Most electron app developers usually include all resources and application logic (and electron apps can in principle work offline if they do not strongly depend on web services). It seems to me all that nativefier does is a sketch-up-free-####-x64/resources/app/nativefier.json configuration file that tells electron to load a web page. So basically not much different from a bookmark in a stand-alone browser. SketchUp-related files are only loaded into the cache once you connect to the internet, but they become not part of this app package.
And most mainstream browsers allow to bookmark web pages into a desktop app that opens in a stand-alone process (with no extra “copy” of the browser executables).
I would normally refer to this ‘type’ as a Single Site Browser [SSB], but it was late…
I have a number of mac apps for making them, but they all have some access restrictions that break SU Free…
i.e. block popups, have local file restriction, or use a smaller subset of javascript then their ‘parent’ engine…
others inherit too much functionality, like all the Shortcuts…
I was actually building, a mac only, CEF SSB when I stumbled across nativefier which is cross platform, far simpler and not massively bigger than CEF on it’s own…
I think a lot of unused ‘app’ overhead can be stripped out, which I’ll look at next…
BTW: If you run Chrome, which I don’t normally, there is a command line start…