This is What Microsoft Said About PWAs at Build 2020 (Premium)

Microsoft lost some PWA momentum during its year-long shift to Chromium for the new Edge. But that’s over now.

Microsoft lost some Progressive Web App (PWA) momentum during its year-long shift to Chromium for the new Edge. But that’s over now and there are some exciting new features coming down the pike.

As many of you know, I’ve been a proponent of PWAs for years now, and I’ve been charting Microsoft’s progress in adopting this important web application platform in Windows 10 since the beginning. It all started in 2017 when I interviewed Microsoft’s Jeff Burtoft and Aaron Gustafson about the software giant’s PWA plans. And in addition to regular articles about new PWAs and new platform-level advances, I’ve also provided overviews about what Microsoft has said about PWAs at its annual Build developer conference. You find my 2018 writeup here and my 2019 write-up here.

Despite all this, I know there are concerns in the community about the apparent slow pace of PWA adoption and even ambivalence about PWAs in other quarters. I see both sides of this issue, and as long ago as 2018, I was already wondering why PWAs weren’t more popular. But I still feel that PWAs are one of the key application platforms today and in the future, and maybe the key application platform.

And even doubters must admit that the popularity of web technologies—not just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but the many available JavaScript frameworks—is undeniable. And that PWAs really do solve the same problem that Java, Flutter, and so many other solutions have tried to solve, the ability to write a single app that works everywhere. Web apps—PWAs—are the truly universal apps platform. (In fact, that’s what the progressive part of this platform’s name refers to, its ability to scale UX and functionality based on the device that an app is running on.)

Regardless of your opinion on all that, Microsoft is finally in a good position to advance the state of the art in PWAs and discuss its plans, now that the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge now out of preview and soon to be deployed automatically to over one billion Windows 10 users. And if you were paying attention to its announcements at Build 2020, then you might have seen that the firm announced some important advances related to PWAs at this now-virtual show.

If not, you can find a nice video-based overview in the Build 2020 session Building Rich App Experiences with Progressive Web Apps. Here, I’ll summarize everything that Microsoft discussed in this session and provide some observations and notes of my own. Well, not everything: By this point, I assume everyone reading this knows what a PWA is and is at least passingly familiar with how the legacy version of Microsoft Edge handled this platform.

That said, Microsoft senior software engineer Judah Himango did provide an interesting positioning slide for where PWAs have traditionally fit in the scheme of things. On a scale from “Reach” to “Power,” a basic website is on the far left, indicating that it has the greatest reach, while native apps are on the far right, meaning that they have the most power. In between, from left to right, we see PWAs, Electron/Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), and then native app with WebView(2, a Microsoft technology).

So yes, PWAs have given up some “power” when compared to native and native-like platforms, but they also come with minimal costs, complexity, and overhead. And they represent, I think, the sweet spot of the web development world. If you can imagine comparing this to gaming, PWAs are the video game console of the gaming world, where casual web and mobile games would be on the far left and expensive and complex PC gaming rigs would be on the far right.

Looking at the move to the Chromium-based version of Edge, Microsoft senior program manager Sohum Chatterjee noted that this shift is already having a significant impact on how the firm handles PWAs because the can make changes that impact PWAs on other Chromium-based platforms as well. So instead of making changes in legacy Edge that would only benefit one version of Windows 10 (plus future upgrades), now the firm is making changes that span all supported Windows versions and other platforms too.

“With the new Microsoft Edge, PWAs will now run in a browser-based host and access native capabilities only through web standards,” he notes in the session, alluding to the fact that some of the work Microsoft did in legacy Edge was proprietary and specific to that one browser, which was built for a single version of Windows 10. “This addresses a major developer pain point that we heard again and again.”

And it does so without eliminating at least some of the nice features from legacy Edge, including the ability to distribute PWAs in the Microsoft Store on Windows 10. (All PWAs created by developers on Windows 10 can be distributed in the Microsoft Store, in any other app store—including the Google Play Store, the Samsung Galaxy Store, the Mac App Store, and more—and via the web.)

But Microsoft is now also improving PWAs for everyone, and all of the advances it’s making the platform will now be made available everywhere, and not just via Edge and Windows 10. It’s also not making these improvements in a vacuum. Thanks to an open source, cross-browser collaboration in Chromium called Project Fugu, Microsoft is working with Intel, Google, Samsung, and the web developer community to advance the state of the art in PWAs.

Here are some of the new PWA capabilities that Microsoft highlighted.

File associations. Given my experience creating .NETpad across WinForms, WPF, and UWP, I know how hard it is to associate a native application with particular file types, so the addition of this capability to PWAs is particularly impressive. (You will also be able to associate particular URL types and protocols with PWAs soon.) This is due in Edge 86 later this year.

Native file system access. PWAs will soon be able to read and write files to the native file system on any supported platform, just like native apps. Here, again, it’s impossible for me to not think about how this feature, combined with the previous one, will make a PWA version of .NETpad completely viable. This feature is available in Edge Canary today.

Run on sign-in. PWAs will soon be able to optionally auto-launch when the user signs-in to their device, similar to the way that productivity apps like Teams do so today. (Yes, it’s opt-in.) This feature will launch in Edge Canary this summer.

Title bar customization. Today, Windows and Edge allow you to run installed PWAs in their own app windows, but the only customization you see in the title bar area is a custom color. But advanced apps like Microsoft Word and Teams customize the top part of the application window, either by overloading the title bar with additional controls or by eliminating it altogether. And PWAs will soon support this capability as well.

Native share integration. PWAs will soon be able to register as native share targets so that you can share to and from PWAs just as with native apps. This is coming in Edge Canary in the coming weeks.

App shortcuts. This feature, which is already available, implements what Windows 10 calls Jump Lists, a list of app shortcuts activated by a right-click on long press. If the developer doesn’t provide any specific options here, the list can be automatically populated with recently-visited pages.

In addition to these Project Fugu-based improvements, Microsoft is also making improvements to Windows 10 so that PWAs behave even more like native apps. PWAs are now integrated in Apps & Features so that when you install a PWA—either from Edge or the Microsoft Store—it will appear in Apps & Features alongside any native apps you’ve installed. They appear in Task Manager. You get the same privacy settings controls, too, so that PWA system capabilities are managed just as they are for native apps. PWA shortcuts in taskbar and Start will provide jump lists whether they’re accessed from the taskbar or from Start. And Windows 10 provides the file handling and Share functionality noted above.

But more is coming. Today, PWAs can trigger native Windows 10 notifications via toasts and in Action Center, but they will soon support icon badging—like an unread email count on a mail app—for subtler notifications of changes too. Microsoft is also adding support for Windows 10’s dark and light modes so that a PWA’s icon and jump list will support those UI changes.

Microsoft is continuing to work on PWA distribution. There’s that new installation prompt in the address bar that we’ve already seen, but Microsoft is refining it based on early feedback. And PWAs will continue to be offered through the Microsoft Store in Windows 10, with Microsoft’s PWA Builder tool simplifying the process of converting a website to a PWA and packaging it for all app stores.

Overall, what we see here is the positive impact of Microsoft moving to Chromium for Edge. It collaborated with Google previously so that their competing browsers and platforms were somewhat in sync, but now it is partnering with the entire web developer community on a shared set of enhancements that will work identically on all supported platforms while evolving Windows to be the best possible environment in which to run PWAs.

So we’ll see how this goes. Windows 10 version 2004 should be available the public starting next week, while the Microsoft Edge will likewise be soon automatically deployed to over one billion Windows 10 users. Both of these changes will have a positive impact on PWAs, and perhaps we’ll one day look back on 2020 as they year that everything finally happened. Cross your fingers.