What's your use case for PWAs?

[MrLion28]

Hello everyone, I just saw a feature request post being on the top of the list about PWAs. I used to use them when I was using Edge, only for a while. After I realized it was not better personally for me than just pinning the tabs. What is your personal use case and benefit for this?

I found it kinda neat at first, but after it was annoying. Not all sites activate the "refresh" and "back/forward arrows" buttons to be available and then, links are opened often times on another tab in the browser. So in that occasion, I found myself sometimes switching "windows" instead of just tabs and it was a bit of a hassle and not much better.

What about you? I ask because I always like to know how other people use the tools we have available.

[curmudgeonly]

My strongest use case is for productivity and window management at work, and many people I've introduced to it are thrilled once they see how they can use it, even when they're workspace is less extreme than mine.

The current feature in Edge allows me to have a uniquely identifiable icons in my taskbar for email, RMM application, web based documentation app, web based appliance portals, etc.  This is huge for me as I usually have at least 4 or 5 browser profiles runnning, multiple tabs in each profile, in addition to 3 or 5 PWAs open.

This means that I can snap windows across 3 monitors in layers, and then easily jump back and forth between my PWA apps and browser profiles via the taskbar.  This is opposed to first going to a browser window and hunting for the tab, or finding the correct single browser window then they all have the same icon on the taskbar.   It's not just convenient, it's sanity saving.

That being said, I love it almost as much for personal use.  It's like I have an email app but i don't have to cache data on my computer like with Outlook or other installed email clients.  I have a separate one for my web calendar, so I look down at the taskbar, click my calendar icon, and there is neatly in it's own window.

I know someone who uses it for multiple instances of teams.  Installing Teams as a PWA in separate browser profiles allows them to switch between them more easily or have them open side by side, instead of switching within the Teams app.  The Teams app also prevents using two work accounts and PWAs are a great workaround for that as well.

I'm sure the list goes on, and it's not specific to Windows either, I did the same thing when my daily driver at work was a MacBook.

I've been using this feature for at least 3 years now and I shudder at the thought of going without it.  It's hard to say what the future will bring, but I firmly believe it will continue becomming increasingly popular for years to come.

[六六]

首先感谢阅读，请谅解我用中文回答，我的英文不太好，机器翻译担心误差很大，请谅解

我把pwa理解为，本地快捷的页面缓存。

First of all, thank you for reading. Please forgive me for answering in Chinese. My English is not very good. I worry that the machine translation will have big errors. Please forgive me. I understand pwa as a local and fast page cache. I built a navigation site myself, which is usually used as my homepage when opening the browser. It is simple and convenient. But I want to use it on mobile too Many browsers support custom URLs as homepage display. I only switched to Firefox browser in the past six months and found that the support for pwa on the PC is not very good (because I did not add a pop-up window for the pwa function, so I did not find the installation entrance in the PC browser. But I saw it on the Android side) installation, which is fine) On the PC side, I used the edge browser to install it. Edge's support for pwa is quite complete. Its use is a bit divisive though. Like you said, some link jumps will open new browser windows. However, the experience on the mobile phone is much better and does not have this problem. According to my observation of programs running in the background of the device, pwa creates a window to provide services to you, but at the same time, it also launches the browser in the background. What I like about it is that it's easy for me to convert my website into something like a native app, its interface is not as complicated as a browser, and since it caches the site's relevant data, it's fast and has no network issues. In some cases, you can also preview, which is very useful for graphic and text sites.

我自己搭建了一个导航站点，通常作为我个人打开浏览器的主页使用，简洁方便

但是我想在手机端也使用它

很多浏览器都支持了自定义url作为主页展示。我最近半年才换到firefox浏览器，发现pc端对pwa的支持不太好（因为我没有对pwa功能做弹窗添加，所以未在pc端浏览器找到安装入口。但是我在安卓端看到了安装，这很好）

在pc端，我用edge浏览器进行了安装，edge对于pwa的支持相当完整。不过它的使用有点分裂。就像你说的，一些链接跳转会新开浏览器窗口打开。不过，手机端的体验好得多，没有这个困扰。

根据我对于设备后台运行程序的观察，pwa创建了一个窗口向你提供服务，但同时，它也后台启动了浏览器。

我喜欢它的原因是，我很容易将我的网站转换为了类似于本地应用的东西，它的界面没有浏览器那么复杂，由于它缓存了站点的相关数据，所以它速度很快，没有网络的情况下，也可以预览，这对于图文类站点还是很有用的。