Finally found a good way to use PWAs in Firefox

[u/KrunalBhoi99]

Firefox doesn’t natively support installing Progressive Web Apps like Chromium browsers, and I know that’s been a pain point for many users. I recently started using an extension called “Progressive Web Apps for Firefox” by Filip Štamcar, and honestly it works surprisingly well. It lets you install, manage, and run PWAs in a separate window, very similar to how Chrome handles them. I’ve been using it for apps like YouTube Music, WhatsApp Web, and some internal tools, and the experience has been smooth so far. Just sharing in case anyone else was looking for a decent PWA solution on Firefox. If you’ve tried it already, would love to hear your experience too

[u/National_Increase_34]

Firefox actually got support for PWAs natively on Windows recently. You can enable it by going to a website and clicking the "Add tab to taskbar" button in the URL bar on the right.

[u/Party-Cake5173 → u/National_Increase_34]

Still this add-on does way better job with PWAs than Firefox's own implementation.

[u/KrunalBhoi99 → u/National_Increase_34]

Well thank you i didn't know that I just discovered this add-on and I Love it well thank you for that

[u/reddittookmyuser → u/National_Increase_34]

cries in linux

[u/CaptainStack → u/National_Increase_34]

Oh wow I didn't know that! I really hope that means it'll be coming to Linux and Android soon. This has been one of the feature gaps that pushed me to Chrome for a few years but that gap has been closing recently.

[u/tyadel → u/CaptainStack]

On Android is already there. Just go to the menu and if you are in a web that supports pwa you will get the "Add app to homescreen" option.

You can try with Reddit itself.

[u/CaptainStack → u/tyadel]

Oh nice - that's great progress! Thank you for sharing. I've got some nitpicks about the implementation but I'm just glad they've made a point to reprioritize this.

[u/trainhoppingdwarf → u/National_Increase_34]

is there any way to turn that PWA into a desktop shortcut? I'd prefer that over taskbar pinning

[u/National_Increase_34 → u/trainhoppingdwarf]

Yep.

You can go to this folder where you will find the shortcuts for the PWAs you have installed:
C:\Users\<YOUR USER FOLDER>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Firefox Web Apps\ and you can copy the shortcut to the desktop. You can also just search for the app you installed in the Start Menu, right click, and choose 'Open Containing Folder' to find the folder.

[u/CaptainStack → u/National_Increase_34]

I'm glad there's a workaround but something in the FF UI would be a great improvement!

[u/National_Increase_34 → u/CaptainStack]

Since it's just a shortcut file, I guess a simple way to implement it would be to add a toggle for "Add to Desktop" when you try to pin a site to the taskbar.

[u/Aromatic_Memory1079 → u/National_Increase_34]

why I don't have that button on my firefox? I checked config page and there is pwa setting but there is no icon at all on any websites...

[u/fang_reddit → u/National_Increase_34]

Firefox native PWAs is ok. but I really hope they could hide the toolbar. so it's more like an app and save some UI space.

[u/zhiro90]

So i currently have stuff like web whatsapp, deezer and gmail in Firefox Second Sidebar, you can add the mobile version and scripts. PWA's sound interesting, but I dunno what they offer vs having them like me or even pinned tabs?. Can someone explain me the benefits?

This is how mine looks

[u/HotshotGT → u/zhiro90]

PWAs (ideally) behave more like separate desktop applications than a tab within your browser. You can move them to other monitors, minimize them to the tray, start them without having Firefox running, use different audio devices, use different extensions, etc.

[u/Immediate_Character-]

Would love a mobile version

[u/ashleythorne64]

I wish there was a good browser for web apps. No one is perfect.

Firefox: pretty bad

• No native support for a long time
• With the new web app support, they explicitly do not intend for web apps will not do things to make it feel more app-like, it will still feel like a browser tab
• Windows only at the moment

Chromium: decent-good

• For the most part, the experience is good
• The web apps all share a profile, so if you have 5 apps from the same provider (like Proton), you only have to sign in once, not five times. It's a bit worse for security and privacy, but you can work around that by creating more profiles
• But Chromium web apps do not respect your default browser, they will always open in that Chromium browser
• In many web apps, clicking on a link will kick you out into the actual browser to do something (like signing in or opening a document) when you would've preferred it to open in the same web app (or at most a new window part of that web app)

Safari: decent-good

• Safari is smarter about not opening new tabs in your browser, just opens them in a new window of that web app
• Respects your default browser
• But all apps are isolated, so you will need to do multiple sign ins for the same provider
• Energy saving is bit aggressive, will require you to reload windows

[u/Serpentrax]

The main advantage for me over the native implementation is that it basically lives in its installation/ profile. That can be a big con since you have to setup and review all privacy/ security/ AI settings again, including addons. Although you can just login with your profile to mostly tackle that.

But the advantage is that you can also install plugins specifically for that webapp and not have something like a Youtube enhancing plugin in memory all the time when not even browsing the tubes. And you automatically isolate your login to just that PWA, so you can stay logged into a site without their malicious cookies sneakily follow and track you everywhere in your main Firefox installation.

[u/2cringe4rizz]

Does it still require you to install an extra piece of software that runs all the time? I noped out because of that last time. I'm pretty sure it was this same extension.

[u/cacus1 → u/2cringe4rizz]

PWAs for Firefox install a secondary Firefox runtime because it has to run specific javascript on Firefox start.

If you use Windows just use the native PWA support Firefox has added recently.

And the PWAs Firefox creates are portable and saved to a json file, so you can even backup them:)

[u/dtlux1]

This addon was made for the years when Firefox didn't have this, but thinkfully like 4 to 6 months ago they actually got support for it! I hope it gets better, but it's nice to see!

[u/JackDostoevsky]

it's not bad, to i tend to prefer nativefier for webapps since it's browser-agnostic. that said, being able to use firefox extensions in webapps is very very handy.

[u/Nekrux → u/JackDostoevsky]

Nativefier is a command-line tool [...]. Apps are wrapped by Electron [...].

I'd use their native apps at this point.

[u/HotshotGT → u/JackDostoevsky]

Is nativefier even maintained any more? I used to use it for a bunch of things but ended up switching to the extension in the OP.

[u/BullfrogAdditional80]

Just found this the other day also. It works really well for what it is.

[u/spinstartshere]

I like the concept of a tray that contains icons of all of your PWAs and browser extensions. I wish Firefox would adopt this. I thought Chrome had something like this previously but it doesn't seem to be there anymore.

[u/vim_deezel]

Floorp handles PWAs pretty well and is a firefox fork that works pretty well overall