Chromebooks are getting this powerful feature for desktop PWAs

Chrome OS will soon be getting a new feature that will further blur the lines between local applications and web apps. Progressive Web Apps have become a powerful source for mobile and desktop users alike with the ability to look and act just like an application that you downloaded from an app store. In some cases, some would say that the PWA experience is even better than installing an app from the Play Store. Twitter is a perfect example I’ve had the Twitter PWA on my phone for months. It has become so native to me that I literally had to ask Robby if he could tell which instance I had installed as I had forgotten. As you can see in the image above, the PWA on my phone acts very much like an Android application. I have multiple accounts logged in, I get notifications and long-pressing the icon presents me with a number of quick actions.

Desktop PWAs already mimic many of these features in the Windows ecosystem but I just unearthed a bug report that shows the “quick action” or shortcuts menu coming to Chrome OS. I use the Twitter PWA on my Chromebook and I like it just as much as I do the version on my phone. However, you don’t get these useful shortcuts for Twitter or any other PWA. This update will change that so long as the app/website developer has coded shortcuts into their respective PWA.

Add support for shortcuts menu for the PWA’s app launcher icon on ChromeOS. Typically, the menu is exposed via a right click.

Seeing how this already works in Desktop Chrome and Chromium-based Edge, I would presume that this change could make it to the stable channel very soon. It should only be a matter of updating the browser to read the data from the PWA and then, we’ll have these awesome shortcuts for our Progressive Web Apps on our Chromebooks. I’ll keep an eye on this bug report and hopefully, we’ll see it added to the Chromium repository in the very near future. The web is such an awesome place.

Source: CR Bug