I am interested in knowing if there are any technical advantages/disadvantages to running a web app/site in kiosk mode.
I have heard from someone that running your site in kiosk mode gives additional permissions to your site to access files, write files,print etc. which could be useful for my site but I can't find anything online about technical differences between the two. I only managed to find info regarding session management and ways to "hack" kiosk mode.
Specifically I'd like to know about print functionality. I'd like to print a slip to a dot matrix printer without having to use a windows service. Important things to note are that this content should only be printed once, the built in PDF/web page functionality doesn't suffice as that allows multiple prints. So I would like to either track/limit the amount of prints printed.
Does anyone know of a list of the technical differences between normal- and kiosk mode for Chrome other than the fact that it show a page full screen and lock a user out of the device to a certain extent?
From what I found, you can not access file system in kiosk mode and there is not any special differences:
Kiosk mode does not have an accessible file system of any kind. All elements accessed by Kiosk mode must be hosted by a remote web server.
The exception to this rule is in managed devices, or the Google Apps for Work world. Signage licenses will allow more advanced options, like caching files locally. You might want to look into those options, as they're quite reasonably priced.
But I also found, that you can automatically print using --kiosk-printing
startup command.
Enable automatically pressing the print button in print preview.
Found on chromium site referencing to this list.
How to set it up? (Windows)
chrome.exe --kiosk-printing --kiosk https://example.com
Sources: