Windows 10: Microsoft Edge PWAs are about to look more like native Windows 10 apps

Microsoft is fully committed to Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and it’s already bringing the web apps to the Microsoft Store and Windows 10.

As you may be aware, Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are simply websites that behave like native apps and used just like a normal app. Web apps use Service Worker, Push Notifications, Windows 10 Share UI, and other features to create a native app-like experience.

Microsoft is currently testing a new experimental flag called “Web Apps Post Install Dialog” that will enable a new launch experience for web apps. After the flag has been enabled, you’ll see a new pop-up when you launch the recently installed web apps. The pop-up will allow you to instantly pin the app to Start and taskbar menu.

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You can also create a desktop shortcut or allow the app to launch when you login.

Microsoft is currently testing the flag in both stable and Canary builds of Edge and it can be enabled on all supported versions of Windows 10.

It’s worth noting that no platform-specific code is required for these options to work and existing apps are compatible with Windows 10’s new PWA experience. And, of course, one of the major benefits for users is that Microsoft is slowly getting ready to add fresh web apps in Windows Store with native apps-like experience.

Window Controls Overlay to improve PWAs


In addition, Microsoft Edge is also getting support for Window Controls Overlay, which aims to make web apps more like standard Windows app. The plan is to add additional features to the web app’s title bar and Microsoft will be giving developers the ability to customize the title bar with a logo, search box, etc.

Currently, web apps only have basic controls (minimize, maximize and close. This will allow apps with additional controls, instead of leaving the title bar with empty space.



Users can already test the Windows Overlay Feature in Chrome/Edge by enabling experimental flags, but it’ll work only when the feature has been added by the developer of the web app.

These changes will definitely improve web apps running via Microsoft Edge and you’ll be able to grab more quality apps from the Microsoft Store soon, as the company plans to bolster the numbers of available apps in the coming months.

More details will be shared during the Build 2021 developer conference, which is expected is take place in the last week of May.

The post Microsoft Edge PWAs are about to look more like native Windows 10 apps appeared first on Windows Latest

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Welcoming Progressive Web Apps to Microsoft Edge and Windows 10

On the other hand, in the browser context, all the benefits of being a PWA should still accrue to the web site, empowering the user to choose how and where they want to engage with the experience.

Progressive Web Apps in the Microsoft Store

The first and most obvious distinction here is that we believe PWAs should be discoverable everywhere apps are discoverable – this means they should appear in the Microsoft Store alongside native apps.

In the next release of Windows 10, we intend to begin listing PWAs in the Microsoft Store. Progressive Web Apps installed via the Microsoft Store will be packaged as an appx in Windows 10 – running in their own sandboxed container, without the visual or resource overhead of the browser.

This has a number of benefits to users: PWAs installed via the store will appear in “app” contexts like Start and Cortana search results, and have access to the full suite of WinRT APIs available to UWP apps. They can differentiate their experience on Windows 10 with enhancements like access to local calendar and contacts data (with permission) and more.

It also has exciting benefits to developers! Listing a PWA in the Store gives developers the opportunity to get more insight into their users with channels like reviews and ratings in the Store, analytics on installs, uninstalls, shares, and performance, and more. It also provides more natural and discoverable access to your web experience on devices where the browser is a less natural entry point, such as Xbox, Windows Mixed Reality, and other non-PC form factors.

The road from the Web to the Microsoft Store

PWAs provide a natural signal of intent to be treated as “app-like” in the Web App Manifest, which allows us to leverage Bing’s web crawler in combination with our Store catalog to identify the best candidates for indexing.

The Microsoft Store has a two-pronged approach to publishing Progressive Web Apps:

1. Developers can proactively submit Progressive Web Apps to the Microsoft Store
2. The Microsoft Store, powered by the Bing crawler, will automatically index selected quality Progressive Web Apps

Submitting to the Microsoft Store with PWA Builder

Proactively submitting a PWA to the Microsoft Store requires generating an AppX containing your PWA and publishing it to your Dev Center account.

The easiest way to generate an AppX with your PWA is the free PWA Builder tool. PWA Builder can generate a complete AppX for publishing using your existing site and Web App Manifest – both website and CLI options are available.




PWA Builder takes data from your site and uses that to generate cross-platform Progressive Web Apps.

Publishing manually gives you full access to the benefits above—fine-grained control over how your app appears in the Microsoft Store, access and the ability to respond to feedback (reviews and comments), insights into telemetry (installs, crashes, shares, etc.), and the ability to monetize your app. This also gets you access to all the other benefits of the Microsoft Dev Center, including promotion and distribution in the Microsoft Store for Business and the Microsoft Store for Education.

Automatically indexing quality Progressive Web Apps with the Bing Crawler

We’ve been using the Bing Crawler to identify PWAs on the web for nearly a year, and as we’ve reviewed the nearly 1.5 million candidates, we’ve identified a small initial set of Progressive Web App experiences which we’ll be indexing for Windows 10 customers to take for a spin over the coming weeks.




We will crawl and index selected PWAs from the web to be available as apps in the Microsoft Store

Over the coming months, we’ll be ramping up our automatic indexing in the Microsoft Store from a few initial candidates to a broader sample. Throughout this process, we’ll continue to vet our quality measures for PWAs, to make sure we’re providing a valuable, trustworthy, and delightful experience to our mutual customers on Windows devices.

Whether automatically indexed by the Store or manually submitted by the site owner, the Web App Manifest provides the starting set of information for the app’s Store page: name, description, icons, and screenshots. Developers should aim to provide complete and high-quality information in the manifest. Once in the Store, the publisher will have the option of claiming their apps to take complete control of their Store presence.

Quality signals for Progressive Web Apps

We’re passionate about making the Microsoft Store a home to trustworthy, quality app experiences. With that in mind, we’ve identified a set of quality measures for developers to keep in mind as you build PWAs.

We won’t ingest every app that meets these criteria, but will be including them in our considerations for candidates as we gradually expand our program.

• Web App Manifests should suggest quality: In our initial crawl of sites looking for PWAs, we discovered over 1.5 million manifests across 800k domains. Looking at a selection of these sites, we discovered that not all are good candidates for ingestion. Some aren’t PWAs at all, and others have a boilerplate manifest generated by tools like favicon generators. We will be looking for non-boilerplate manifests that include a name, description, and at least one icon that is larger than 512px square.
• Sites should be secure: Access to the Service Worker family of APIs requires an HTTPS connection on Windows and other platforms.
• Service Workers should be an enhancement: We’ll look for a Service Worker as a signal for ingesting PWAs, but we also expect experiences to degrade gracefully if Service Worker is unsupported, as it may be on older browsers or other platforms. You can get started building a basic Service Worker with PWA Builder; Mozilla also has great recipes if you are looking for somewhere to start.
• Sites should consider automated testing for quality: There are a number of tools out there for this, including our sonarwhal, Lighthouse, aXe, and more.
• PWAs must be compliant with Microsoft Store policies: PWAs will need to meet the standards of the Microsoft Store, just like any other app. We will not ingest PWAs that violate laws or Store policies.

Once we have shipped these technologies to mainstream Windows customers with EdgeHTML 17, we will gradually expand our indexing of high-quality Progressive Web Apps into the Microsoft Store based on quality measures and the value they add to the Windows ecosystem.

PWA or UWP?

Given the overlap in terms of capabilities, we often get asked about the recommended approach: PWA or UWP. We see this as a false dichotomy! In fact, on Windows 10, the Universal Windows Platform fully embraces Progressive Web Apps, because EdgeHTML is a foundational component of UWP.

For developers who are building a fully-tailored UWP experience, building from the ground up with native technologies may make the most sense. For developers who want to tailor an existing web codebase to Windows 10, or provide a first-class cross-platform experience with native capabilities and enhancements, PWA provides an on-ramp to the Universal Windows Platform that doesn’t require demoting or forking existing web resources.

When evaluating native app development in relation to Progressive Web Apps, here are some of the questions we recommend asking:

• Are there native features the Web can’t offer that are critical to the success of this product?
• What is the total cost (time and money) of building and maintaining each platform-specific native app?
• What are the strengths of my dev team? or How easy will it be to assemble a new team with the necessary skills to build each native app as opposed to a PWA?
• How critical will immediate app updates (e.g., adding new security features) be?

In other words, the choice between PWA and native should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. For example:

• If you are looking to craft an experience that takes full advantage of each platform you release it on and you want to agonize over every UX detail in order to differentiate your product… native might be the best choice for you.
• If you are maintaining a product on multiple native platforms in addition to the Web and they are all largely the same in terms of look & feel and capabilities, it may make more sense to focus all of your efforts on the Web version and go PWA.
• If you are planning a brand-new product and the Web provides all of the features you need (especially when you also consider the additional APIs provided via the host OS), building a PWA is probably going to be a faster, more cost-effective option.

For a more in-depth discussion, check out our video from Microsoft Edge Web Summit 2017: PWA, HWA, Electron, oh my! Making sense of the evolving web app landscape.



Testing your Progressive Web Apps in Microsoft Edge and Windows 10

Service Worker, Push, and other technologies are enabled by default in current Insider builds in Microsoft Edge, and we intend to enable them by default when EdgeHTML 17 ships to stable builds of Windows 10 next year.

You can get started testing your PWA in Microsoft Edge today by downloading a recent build of Windows 10 via the Windows Insider Program, or using a free VM. We’ll be sharing more about Service Worker debugging features in the Microsoft Edge DevTools in a future post—stay tuned!

Service Worker features will be enabled for the UWP platform (including installed PWAs) with the upcoming release of Windows 10, but are currently not available to published apps in the Store, including on Windows Insider Preview builds. In the meantime, you can test them in Insider builds by sideloading your AppX using the install script provided by PWA Builder tools, or by running your PWA inside Microsoft Edge.

What’s next for Progressive Web Apps on Windows?

Over the coming months, we’re laser focused on polishing our initial implementation of the core technologies behind PWAs in EdgeHTML and the Universal Windows Platform—Service Worker, Push, Web App Manifest, and especially Fetch are foundational technologies which have a potentially dramatic impact to compatibility and reliability of existing sites and apps, so real-world testing with our Insider population is paramount.

In our initial implementation, we’ll be focused on those two components—the Service Worker family of technologies in Microsoft Edge, and PWAs in the Microsoft Store. Looking forward, we’re excited about the potential of PWA principles to bring the best of the web to native apps, and the best of native apps to the web through tighter integrations between the browser and the desktop. We look forward to hearing your feedback on our initial implementation and experimenting further in future releases.

In the meantime, we encourage you to try out your favorite PWAs in Microsoft Edge today, and get started testing your installable PWA on Windows, both via PWA Builder and in Microsoft Edge! We look forward to hearing your feedback and to digging in to any bugs you may encounter.

Here’s to what’s next!

– Kyle, Kirupa, Aaron, and Iqbal

 

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How to Install PWA on Lumia510 with Win10?

Joe, thanks for the other inputs.

The STRORE doesn't show PWA.

For example Twitter has both a native app for MS and a PWA. When look up the store, it only shows the native app, not the PWA.

So is it to be understood that the Twitter PWA is available by the web browser? If so, how does one pin it to the home screen? That is a more specific a Nokia Lumia 510 query.