Windows 10: Windows 10 to get a new web apps feature in Chrome and Microsoft Edge

In 2020, Microsoft confirmed that it has been exploring support for protocol handlers for progressive web apps (PWAs) to improve the overall experience on Windows 10.

The feature is currently available for testing behind an experimental flag “Desktop PWA URL handling” in all builds of Edge/Chrome. Once approved, web apps will be able to register themselves as handlers of custom URL protocols/schemes using their installation manifest.

In other words, this will allow Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge-based web apps to appear in a new “Open With” dialog box alongside the traditional Windows 10 apps when you click on a URL protocol, such as mailto://, ms-word:// or web+music:/.

In a Chromium post, Microsoft noted that the current implementation of the experimental web app handlers relied on the integration between the browser and OS to register new protocols with the OS. As a result, the “open with” dialog appeared inside the browser’s window.

“This creates an awkward experience since only the first app registered looks “native” to the user and subsequent apps lose that nativeness by having the browser be registered in all Windows surfaces for protocol handling management,” Microsoft explained in the new documentation.

Microsoft is now exploring a new approach that involves additional app registrations with the OS so that every PWA installed has its own registry associations at a registry level. To facilitate this new behaviour, Microsoft will completely separate the browser protocol registration from app protocol registration on Windows 10.

“This will allow multiple apps to register to handle the same protocols on Windows,” the company noted.



As you can see in the above screenshot of the “Open With” dialog box, Microsoft’s new approach towards web apps protocol handlers will also enable support for multiple profiles, such as Personal and Work.

“In terms of UX, this provides a much more streamlined experience for customers since apps are now completely handled on the OS side, and can be disambiguated against the browser, other Win32 apps, other web apps and itself (if installed in multiple profiles) at the same time,” Microsoft noted.

The above dialog box would be visible when you’ve multiple apps installed for the same URL protocol. For example, if you open click on a protocol “web+music://songid”, this will allow you to choose between the web app or desktop app to play the song.

The web app will launch automatically instead of opening a new tab in the browser if there are no other apps registered for that protocol.

In addition, Microsoft is also working on a new post-installation pop-up for Chromium Edge-based web apps to enable a native apps-like experience on Windows 10.

The post Windows 10 to get a new web apps feature in Chrome and Microsoft Edge appeared first on Windows Latest

Weiterlesen...

 

Top Border edges of Web Pages in Microsoft Edge or in the Mail App missing Windows 10.

Hi Samson,

Welcome to Microsoft community.

We understand that, top Border edges of Web Pages on Microsoft Edge and the Mail App are missing on Windows 10.


We are glad to assist you to fix the issue.

• Is this issue specific to Microsoft Edge and the Mail App ?

I suggest you to press F11 key on these Microsoft Edge and Mail App Windows and check, if you could get all options on top Border edges of these Windows.

Hope the above information helps. Reply with necessary information and the result to help you further.

Thank you.

 

Microsoft is developing a built-in ad blocker for its Edge browser

"One of the first browser add-ons many people install to improve their online experience is Adblock Plus or something similar. Until recently, Microsoft Edge's lack of support for add-ons put off a lot of would-be users, but reports from Build 2016 suggest that native ad blocking is on its way to the Internet Explorer successor.

Adblock Plus is coming to Edge, but built-in ad blocking would negate the need for such an add-on. A slide shown off and snapped at a Build presentation shows that the next version of Edge, in response to user feedback, will feature ad blocking capabilities. There's no word on delivery timescale, but the upcoming Windows 10 Anniversary Update would seem a likely candidate.

ZDNet's Ed Bott photographed the slide which shows Microsoft's development roadmap built around feedback from testers. Right at the top of the list is reference to plans to create a plugin and extension store for Edge, but it's entry number four that's more intriguing.

"Build ad blocking features into the browser" is listed as a Feature Request from users. But the good news is that it is not only listed as being "Deliverable 4682811", but as "Targeted for the next version".

This will no doubt come as good news for those who have fallen in love with Edge, but it's not something that will be welcomed by the likes of Adblock Plus. It does seem that, particularly in the mobile arena, there is a move to baking ad blocking into the browser so it makes sense that Microsoft is following the trend. But it is the fact that Edge straddles Windows 10 on the desktop and Windows 10 Mobile that makes this a particularly interesting move.

Keep an eye out for Insider builds in the coming weeks as the feature may be just around the corner."

Forget extensions, built-in ad blocking is coming to Microsoft Edge - [UPDATE... no it's not!]

 

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