Edge Receives Colorful Title Bars for PWAs

Edge Canary Fluent Big 256 Icon

Microsoft Edge Chromium receives an improvement for PWAs (Progressive Web Apps). The browser will colorize title bars for progressive web apps installed with Edge, making them easy to differentiate.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are web apps that use modern web technologies. They can be launched on the Desktop and look like native apps. While PWAs are hosted on the Internet, the user can create a special shortcut to launch them like a regular app, or install them in Windows 10 using Microsoft Store.

Besides the Microsoft Store app, Windows users can use the Chrome browser and certain Chromium-based browsers. The browser allows installing Progressive Web Apps using its main menu. When the browser detects a PWA on a web site, it allows installing it.

The installed apps will run in their own Chrome window. The Chrome address bar and other browser UI elements are hidden in this mode, so the app only has a title bar.

Starting in Edge 80.0.351.0, when you install a site as an app, it'll automatically theme the title bar based on the site's colors. This happens automatically, but web developers can specify their own color and override this automatic theming. Here are a few examples:

So, if you have Edge Canary 80.0.351.0 or above, you can already try this new thing in action.

How to give it a try

  1. Open Edge Canary.
  2. Navigate to Twitter and YouTube.
  3. From the menu (Alt + F), select Apps > Install this site as an app.
  4. Change the app name if needed and click on Install.
  5. Now it runs like a Windows app with its own title bar and taskbar icon.

Microsoft is currently using three channels to deliver updates to Edge Insiders. The Canary channel receives updates daily (except Saturday and Sunday), the Dev channel is getting updates weekly, and the Beta channel is updated every 6 weeks. The stable channel is also on its way to users. You can find the actual Insider Preview versions at the end of this post. The stable version of Microsoft Edge is expected to be released on on January 15, 2020.

Actual Microsoft Edge Versions

The actual pre-release versions of Edge Chromium at the moment of this writing are as follows:

I have covered many Edge tricks and features in the following post:

Hands-on with the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge

Also, see the following updates.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

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