WebApps on Ubuntu 14.04 are now working well

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If you have not noticed, Unity WebApps in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS work really well now! You can finally play videos and copy/paste content without problems.

DevianWebApp

Do you remember that fantastic feature that lets you access your Facebook, G+, Gmail, Youtube, Reddit, Twitter, Launchpad and a lot of more accounts and content, directly from your desktop? That feature is still here and now, really, it is more functional and practical then ever!!

Ok, so, let’s refresh the memory and start from the beginning.

The story: why WebApps were not so popular in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

webappsUbuntu 14.04 LTS has been the first release to introduce Browser, the new pre-installed web browser made by Canonical. Due to the long term support of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, it was a good idea to make WebApps working with a browser which is not supposed to change in the years. Due to this, developers updated the WebApps to be usable with the new application Browser.

The idea was good, but new problems were introduced: Browser was a fresh application, a lot of bugs were discovered and a couple of them were really annoying. I’m referring to the following bugs:

  • Often Browser could not play flash contents; WebApps like YouTube or FacebookMessenger were not useful for users. Would you use an application to watch YouTube videos that can’t play videos??
  • You were not able to copy/paste text between WebApps and other applications; for example to copy/paste from Firefox or Libreoffice to Gmail WebApp, that was really annoying!!

A lot of bugs were fixed, but these two features were always missing and this caused the relative abandon of this really interesting OS feature. But things finally have changed.

The good news: now WebApps work as expected, and they are amazing!

browserYes, the good news is that now WebApps work really better, letting you to play all kind of videos inside Browser and to copy/paste content.
Those two missing features now are here and you have no excuse to not play with these exclusive WebApps. You have full access to your online content, directly from your Unity Launcher.

Install and try them, you will not regret.

How to install WebApps on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

This is as simple as immediate: open Ubuntu Software Center and search for the “webapp” entries, then install those you want. That’s all 😉

USCWebApp

Just remember that Browser is still in the first version introduced in April 2014, this app will not be upgraded to a new version (except for bug fixing), consequently some web browser-related features, such as tabs, are missing. But if you want to access rapidly to your content from the desktop, there’s nothing better than Unity WebApps.

Enjoy!

2 thoughts on “WebApps on Ubuntu 14.04 are now working well”

    • This is an Ubuntu Unity feature but hey, it’s open source software.
      However this feature is designed for desktops and laptops running Unity 7, it requires specific packages.

      In future, Unity 8 will be capable to run a lot of more WebApps in the desktop, much more integrated inside the system. If you are interested, you can take a look at Ubuntu Phone development.

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