Questions[webapps](ubuntu)

Just installed Ubuntu 20.04 and tried to get my favorite webapps (i.e. Google Calendar, WhatsApp Web) working again. Since Firefox removed this feature years ago, I'm now using Chromium for this. On 18.04 I could just head to my favorite website, click the hamburger menu, 'More tools', 'Create shortcut...', tag 'Open as window' and bam, the WebApp was ready.

In 20.04 on my system with the Chromium Snap however, creating a WebApp sometimes results in Chromium crashing which leaves a .desktop file that does not work. The .desktop file, which is created on the desktop, you then right-click and choose 'Allow Launching'. In most cases, this works and the webapp will get a proper icon and can be launched.

In other cases (i.e. when creating a shortcut from chrome://apps or when creating the shortcut resulted in Chromium crashing), the icon turns into a "faulty" sign:

When I double-click WhatsApp, it's opened as a 'real' app (as can be seen in the screenshot). When i double-click Google Calendar however, a new empty full Chromium window is opened. And when I double-click Trello (of which the shortcut was created from chrome://apps), a new full Chromium Window is opened (instead of an 'app'-window) but it does lead to trello.com.

I've tried to find the culprit of what's going wrong by looking at the .desktop files of all three apps, but so far I'm unable to see what could be causing this behaviour.

Furthermore, when I was trying to find out why Chromium crashed when creating the shortcut to Google Calendar, I started Chromium from the commandline: $ /snap/chromium/1123/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome.

To my surprise, Chromium now did NOT crash when creating the shortcut. Also, the .desktop file was now placed immediately in ~/.local/share/applications/, which was not the case in my previous attempts.

So in the end, all seems to be well and looking back I'm suspecting some old leftover cruft / bitrot perhaps being the cause of all this - I did install 20.04 using my unmodified 18.04 /home partition after all...

Which leaves me with the question if I should actually post this - I guess I will in the hopes of giving anyone else who might be running into this some options to look at.

If indeed this is something other people run into, I'd be happy to provide more info so it can be debugged.

I backed up my home directory from Ubuntu 14.04, installed Ubuntu 18.04 on a new PC, then restored my home directory.

I went ahead and installed the native app following these instructions. Now I'm trying to remove the Chrome web app and I can't figure out how to uninstall it.

Both the Chrome app and the native app are showing up in my launcher - in fact, the Chrome app has an icon and the native app is missing its icon. But the Chrome app is not in Chrome's chrome://extensions page, so there's no option to uninstall.

I've searched my home directory for references to Postman (find ~ -iname "*postman*") and moved my ~/.config/Postman directory. This did remove my Postman history but did not remove the Postman Chrome app (not that I really expected it to).

How can I completely remove the Postman web app?

Edit

I fixed the missing icon image; the directions I followed had the wrong path for the icon image. The good news is that the old icon and the new have slightly different colouring, so I can tell them apart. But I'd still prefer to just have one.

I thought I would try out the new webapps ppa and everything seems to be working fine. However, google reader now floods my messaging menu with all my feeds and turns the icon blue. How can I remove a specific site (google reader) from accessing webapps after I have accepted it?

I'm using webapp integration and I accidentally clicked "No" when asked if I want to integrate with the website.

How can I have Firefox or Chrome reask me to integrate the site with Ubuntu?

I've read that Ubuntu will support web applications out of the box, how can I set this up on my computer to play with it?