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 �...

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