When it comes to features, Edge has the one critical item that always kept me crawling back to Chrome. If you are on a webpage, you can easily turn it into an app, by clicking the three dots in the top right and clicking install app. This is huge, as it allows me to turn Google Calendar, Tweetdeck, and a few other pages into applications on my desktop that makes my workflow, a lot easier.
we should definitely whitelist all Chrome based browsers @falco
We want to get this working, but the last time we tried with the āYou are offlineā page wasnāt a great experience. Also we had a lot of suggestions about making reading Discourse possible when you are offline.
The current changes only affect GET requests, so it will make you able to use the composer, if you ever did it while online.
Discourse already keeps submitting a topic in a persistent āSavingā blue bar, and this doesnāt touch that request, so it should keep the current behavior.
However, getting Discourse to work totally in write mode while offline would require a lot more work and be a long term project involving multiple people. That is not the scope here, which is just enabling installs in Desktop.
Itās in the same branch as always here. You could deploy from that branch but it is a lot behind master currently. I can rebase it to master, but I donāt recommend messing with this until itās proven stable here.
Another cool thing, if you try to use the pwa with a cold cache:
Is there a way to dismiss the icon in the address bar, either from Discourse or from Chrome? I prefer to just use the browser, so I donāt see the point in having that icon visible forever.
Iāve been googling around on the Chrome side, but couldnāt find anything. So I guess Iāll ask them.
Is this something that could theoretically be dismissable (e.g. with localstorage) or hidden permanently based on a Discourse setting? Iām asking because I donāt know if Chrome automatically detects if the website is compatible as a PWA or if thereās some flexibility on your end to only offer the option conditionally.
For anyone else interested, thereās a setting in chrome://flags called App Banners which you can set to Disabled to remove the icon in the address bar.
EDIT: Actually, the relevant setting seems to be Desktop PWAs installable from the omnibox.
Just for information, today on Chrome on linux (Ubuntu) I even had a popup to propose me to āinstallā discourse as an app. Something similar to the popups when websites ask to allow notifications.
Is Chrome trying to push for these kind of āinstallationsā ?
we should definitely whitelist all Chrome based browsers @falco
which calls attention to it.