Can you guys open up the reasoning why not to include desktop browsers in Ionic the target platforms?
To me this is the golden combination and most relevant use case: use one codebase, responsive design and all tricks possible to serve everybody from the same source:
What am I missing Ionic, why not desktop?
(I have to wait for Foundation for Apps…)
What do you mean desktop browsers in the target platforms?
Ionic is for only building hybrid mobile apps and not intended, officially supported or maintained for desktop compatibility. Look around the Ionic for more info.
Ok! Your words were a bit confusing. Now I get you 
You see @bennett there is already a great tool for building mobile websites called Jquery Mobile. The Ionic team did mention the same.
Hence the Ionic team did not come up with another solution for the browser. Because JQM is doing that quite well.
But JQM is really horrible for building native mobile apps. It is here that Ionic triumphs up over JQM with Native focused,Performance obsessed and Beautifully designed UI framework.
JQuery Mobile?? You got to be kidding me.
For desktop apps you do not need many things you need for mobile devices, like plugin handlings (camera, update, …).
Additional to that you do not need many ux and usability stuff of mobile devices on desktops in these days.
So if you have a real complex app - you need to write many special cases for both (like event handling - touch vs mouse).
But it would be nice to have things like ion-scroll, ion-list, the new popover and the wonderful collection-repeat!!! also for non-mobile angularjs projects ;).
@mhartington
Maybe ionic will provide an ionicLight version in the future.
Greetz, bengtler
I bet you I am not kidding sir!
I feel (like most developers) that JQM is a really good tool for building mobile websites and you can never beat the fact that it is free and open source.
Hey all, so yeah ionic is heavily focused on mobile/hybrid app. But what you can use is the angular material project.
Since the main logic will be angular code, you can reuse most of it. But the app specific features would (camera, pull to refresh) will need to re thought. Also, it’s inspired by Googles Material Design.
Check out the demo page.
https://material.angularjs.org/#/
@siddhartha
JQM is not only a little crappy and slow as hell.
I would try to avoid to use this.
Nothing against jquery. They pushed javascript techologies to a new level, but JQuery mobile … it is an opion :).
If you only want to build a mobile website (not an app) -> use a reponsive layout and thats it.
For that you could use Foundation or Bootstrap (also very large framework) or build a layout with media queries.
No need for big frameworks like JQM or Sencha Touch or KendooUI.
If you want to build a “real” app… not only a mobile website - use ionic framework, appgyver steroids or Appcelerator Titanium.
Greetz, bengtler
@bengtler
JQM might be slow but it is not crappy.
You might avoid to use it but I am no preacher!
I have no experience with foundation so I wont talk about it. But yes bootstrap is really amazing to build responsive layouts.
But what about some amazing UI and darn good animations that come as a standard?
Bootstrap bows down to JQM at this one. Still bootstrap is not bad.
I guess when you boil down to build only a mobile website with reasonable performance, pretty clean UX and want get things done really fast then you cant beat JQM.
Yeah for a real mobile app nothing cant beat Ionic. I say that because I have never used appgyver or Titanium. Probably and hopefully I would never wanna use that, cos Ionic has got all ends covered even though it is still in beta.
Greetz, Siddharth.
For short, it will be like “I want to eat cheese burger while I’m diving”…
I really confused here. Seriously I don’t get clear answer for my question.
I am developing angularjs app using Bootstrap for responsive web design. This will be consider for all the devices like ipad, iphone, android (all mobile) and desktop. So I don’t need to rewrite my all the codes to support all the devices.
When I saw ionic framework for hybrid app, I can see like the exact mobile app only.
If I develop using ionic, can I support only mobile platform devices? how the ionic framework app will be viewed in desktop. should be the same as mobile or should we rewrite all the codes ?
Well if you want to build a desktop app with Ionic, yes it is possible, and it has even been documented extensively by some people.
See:
So I don’t know how much sense it makes, but if you want it, well there you have it.
You can add browser platform to ionic/cordova project and build it. I think this is the solution.
Just type ionic platform add browser and then ionic build browser. It should build assets to platforms/browser/build folder.