Chrome and Edge make it simple to ‘install’ pages, so they’re easy to pin to the task bar. PWAs for Firefox gives that capability to Firefox, but it’s a bit brittle, and breaks easily if Firefox updates. It’s broken again for me tonight and the usual ‘reinstall this reinstall that’ hasn’t fixed it.
In my opinion Firefox took a significant backwards step when they killed that feature years ago.
I appreciate I might not be the target audience for Lemmy since I’m half Windows half Unix, and a Gmail / Keep / Calendar / Facebook / Messenger user.
On the one hand, I agree that it’s a step back. In the other hand, I think it’s also partly a recognition that PWAs have not lived up to the promise and are essentially impossible to get right.
I’m sad for the slow languishing death of PWAs, but I’m not faulting FF for pulling the plug once it became clear it was a doomed endeavor.
I guess really all I want is the option to have a task bar icon for each ‘website’ - I’ve doubled them up in the screenshot as half are broken at the moment. Each Gmail session is tied to a separate address, so could technically just be a ‘bookmark’ but it’s nice that they act as their own window, analagous to being an app. That doesn’t really have to be a PWA I guess, but a separate window.
If you do this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/create-desktop-shortcut-website
…and then edit the created shortcut to add “–new-window” as argument, does that work?Maybe you can even drag the shortcut onto the Windows Taskbar…?
I fixed mine just yesterday on my W11. The stuff the addon tells you to install is out of date. You have to install the latest version from their github releases page. It fixed mine being blank white pages.
firefoxpwa-2.13.2-x86_64.msi
But also, I agree. It’s a shame this all isn’t a baked in FF feature.