How do I use PWA/Web Apps in Vivaldi?
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Chrome, Chromium and Edgium all support "installation" of websites; Edgium does it best, allowing you to install any website as a PWA (Chrome/ium afaik limits installation to a handful of Google sites), adding "installed" websites to the Start Menu, and launching them in a tabless, almost-native-looking window.
Vivaldi supposedly supports progressive web apps in a similar manner (see here, maybe here, too); however, I have tried the procedure described without any luck.
Does Vivaldi support installation of PWAs? or are there plans to ever support it? It's one of the few things that's keeping me on the new Edgium at the moment - I like occasionally running e.g. Messenger or webmail as a PWA in its own window.
I guess my dream would be Vivaldi allowing PWA installation from any site, like Edgium, but with a native window frame for the installed site. Vivaldi already supports "Native Window" for the main browser; Edgium/Chrome/ium have pseudo-native window frames - looks native on Win10, until you try glass8 (mod that makes all native window frames glassy and transparent), or on Win7/8.1, where the border is clearly not native.
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@Gwen-Dragon Do you know of a website that 100% definitely works? I tried with mobile twitter, as per the help article, but without success.
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@Darthagnon Right click the twitter tab itself and there should be an "install" option. I don't think vivaldi shows a banner.
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@LonM said in [Help] How do I use PWA/Web Apps in Vivaldi?:
@Darthagnon Right click the twitter tab itself and there should be an "install" option. I don't think vivaldi shows a banner.
tried but only got the standard context menu. https://mobile.twitter.com/
EDIT: let me try that hotel website
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EDIT: disregard, see below. vivaldi://experiments has to have PWA option enabled
Tried https://snapw.at, https://www.trivago.co.uk/ - context menu (can't get screenshot) shows "Reopen Closed Tab" then immediately "Customize" - no PWA entry.
Clean installation of Vivaldi (no mods, afaik - wiped by update)
Vivaldi 2.11.1811.38 (Stable channel) (64-bit)
Revision 9238efe45704ece191a76e3bb210e3fe6716ccb2
OS Windows 10 OS Version 1709 (Build 16299.967) -
@Darthagnon said in [Help] How do I use PWA/Web Apps in Vivaldi?:
Tried https://snapw.at, https://www.trivago.co.uk/ - context menu (can't get screenshot) shows "Reopen Closed Tab" then immediately "Customize" - no PWA entry.
Clean installation of Vivaldi (no mods, afaik - wiped by update)
Vivaldi 2.11.1811.38 (Stable channel) (64-bit)
Revision 9238efe45704ece191a76e3bb210e3fe6716ccb2
OS Windows 10 OS Version 1709 (Build 16299.967)I'm an idiot. Re-enabled the Vivaldi Experiment for menu entries for PWAs, and they're there.
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Any chance I could feature request that PWA installation options be expanded to include all websites, the way Edgium does it? atm, PWA installation seems to be limited to very few sites.
Also found a bug: when PWA installation is enabled in Experiments, if you right-click on a background tab that has a PWA available, the installation options do not appear in the context menu. Only seem to appear with foreground tabs.
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@Darthagnon if its a feature you want, feel free to request it in the requests form
If you've got a bug, please report : vivaldi.com/bugreport
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@LonM Thank you for the suggestion, and for reminding me that the feature request subforum exists!
Submitted feature request here:
https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/44340/please-pwa-installation-for-all-websites
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I updated the feature request (here: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/44340/please-pwa-installation-for-all-websites/3) as I just discovered that you can drag-and-drop any bookmark onto the vivaldi://apps page, to "install" it as a PWA, regardless of whether the site has an "official" PWA or not - would be nice if the current context-menu option were extended to do the code-wise equivalent of this...
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@Darthagnon
Thank you! I've been wanting to 'install' outlook.com since november but vivaldi has never for Outlook.
Curiously I can't actually drop a bookmark in to vivaldi://apps, it didn't allow that, could drag and drop the URL though. -
@Leonick If you'd like it to be easier to install websites, I put a feature request in: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/44340/please-pwa-installation-for-all-websites
If enough people upvote it, maybe the Vivaldi team will consider it (?)
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I've found it really hard to figure out how to install a PWA, and I'm still not done.
The hoops I've had to jump through:
- Search online for PWA in Vivaldi, find this article with outdated information (expect Install button in the Vivaldi menu), spend a long time trying to figure out why the Install button doesn't appear.
- Eventually find this thread, and by golly, that is one well-hidden Install button. This feature is not discoverable in the slightest - which is exactly the opposite of how PWAs are supposed to be. So I "installed" it, but it doesn't appear anywhere except...
- Have to manually type in the address vivaldi://apps (i.e. even less discoverable)
- Right-click -> Create shortcuts... -> select only Start Menu -> OK
- For some reason, shortcut was created under Chome Apps folder instead of a Vivaldi apps folder. Compare with Brave, which creates a Brave Apps folder.
- Finally I've got a shortcut where I want it, but it still has the following issues (not present in either Brave or Chrome PWAs):
a. Address bar is visible and, best I can tell, cannot be hidden
b. The taskbar icon is Vivaldi rather than the app's favicon
Is ther a way to fix these two issues?
Bottom line - Vivaldi's support for PWAs on desktop is entirely not satisfactory. Even if there are ways to fix those two final issues (which I'll be happy if there are), the process of getting there is way too hard. PWAs by definition are supposed to be discoverable and seamless.
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Even this method does not seem to work any more (or for me): if I drag an icon from the bookmark panel on the left to the vivaldi://apps tab nothing seems to happen. Should one drag from somewhere else?
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@paulatz you have to drag it from the bookmark bar or you can simply select the url of the website and drag it to the vivaldi://apps page
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@arkas111 thank you: from the bookmark tab it does work. The behaviour is different, and not as good, as creating a real PWA for websites that support it. The icon is really just the low res favicon, and the window class is not changed, which means that the browser window appears as a normal vivaldi window to the operating system
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@paulatz yes.. that is the problem in vivaldi in case of webpages that doesn't support PWA. But the ones which supports PWA works fine. like youtube music webapp works fine, but the whatsapp doesn't
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@arkas111 said in How do I use PWA/Web Apps in Vivaldi?:
@paulatz yes.. that is the problem in vivaldi in case of webpages that doesn't support PWA. But the ones which supports PWA works fine. like youtube music webapp works fine, but the whatsapp doesn't
For me it only works fine the first time after creating the PWA and Vivaldi launches it on it's own. When I start it later again the window looks like a mix of the regular window and a PWA window.
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Same here. It used to have the ability to install from the menu but it doesn't matter what website that I know is a PWA, it doesn't appear. And dragging it to the apps folder leaves me with the same issue.
I really like Vivaldi, I use with in tandem with Firefox (since they won't support PWAs on desktop) and I would really like to get away from using Edge and Chrome for this purpose.