November 30, 2025
Tabs are the new windows
Replacing My Window Manager with Google Chrome
Chrome becomes the boss of a Linux desktop, and the comments riot
TLDR: A coder used Chrome (via CEF) to control their Linux desktop’s look and behavior, making customization as easy as web design. Comments erupted into nostalgia, skepticism, and a Firefox-vs-Chrome brawl, with some loving the hack and others demanding the exact opposite—proof the browser-on-desktop idea still polarizes.
A developer just made Google Chrome run the show on their Linux desktop—literally letting the browser handle window borders, backgrounds, and interactions—while the old-school X11 display system quietly does the heavy lifting underneath. The idea: use familiar web tools like CSS and JavaScript to style your computer, not just websites. It’s all open source at github.com/FoxMoss/DoteWM, powered by the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), which is a way to plug a mini-Chrome into apps.
Cue the comment section meltdown. One camp is cheering the hack, waving nostalgia flags for Pyro Desktop and early Chrome OS days. Another camp says: absolutely not. The spiciest skeptic begged for “the absolute opposite result,” while a top reply called it “weird and not in a good way” and insisted Firefox would “feel better.” Meanwhile, a meta-thread pointed out Mozilla never embraced a CEF-like path, stoking the eternal Firefox vs Chrome turf war.
The jokes? Oh, they flowed: “Your desktop now asks for notification permissions,” “Time to install more RAM,” and “Tabs are the new windows.” Love it or hate it, the move to let a browser decorate and control your computer lit up a classic internet divide: clever experiment vs slippery slope to Browserland. And yes, people are already arguing over which browser should run their life.
Key Points
- •DoteWM is an open-source Linux window manager that delegates decorations, wallpaper, and interactions to an embedded browser.
- •The project uses Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) with a custom dote:// scheme to load local HTML/JS/CSS without external network requests.
- •Files are served from ~/.config/dote/ with a simple extension-based MIME mapping (e.g., .html -> text/html).
- •Browser-to-native communication is implemented via cefQuery (CefMessageRouter), allowing JavaScript to invoke C++ handlers over an IPC socket.
- •DoteWM supports X11 and aims to lower the barrier to customizing window manager behavior using web technologies.