Treating the navigation bar as a problem is a problem
Henri Sivonen
I already have Twitter as an app tab, so I was interested in seeing what the Open Web App experience for Twitter would be like. It turned out that the Open Web App experience for Twitter was just like the usual app tab except the navigation bar was gone.
I think this is a problem for three reasons:
1) It takes away the back button.
2) It takes away the ability to copy the URL (e.g. to paste the URL of a tweet to IRC or email)
3) It takes away the ability to search past application views using Awesomebar (I've actually done this with Gmail)
While it may be that there are some apps written with Web technologies where the concept of going back in a sequence of states doesn't make sense or linking into a particular view in the app (such as a tweet) doesn't make sense, in cases where those things do make sense, I think it's a problem to take away the navigation bar (so thoroughly that pressing ctrl/cmd-L doesn't bring it back) is a problem.
--
Henri Sivonen
hsiv...@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/