It’s about time! Firefox starts testing support for progressive web apps

In recent years, Mozilla Firefox has lost a good deal of market share in the web browser space. It’s hard to pin that loss on any one factor, but part of it has been its slow speed in adding several popular browser features.

One such feature? Progressive web apps! Also known as PWAs, progressive web apps are basically websites that can be installed onto your device and behave like platform-specific apps. PWAs are still technically web apps, but they can be added to your desktop and work while offline, and they’re usually cross-platform as well.

This feature has been available on competitor Chrome since 2018, so clearly Firefox has been slow on the uptake. However, Neowin reports that Firefox will soon support progressive web apps.

Firefox began conducting tests with PWAs nearly five years ago, but the feature support was removed from beta versions in January 2021. Then, earlier this year, the feature was brought back in testing as “Taskbar Tabs,” which are slightly different since they keep the main Firefox toolbar and preserve the address bar, bookmarks, and extensions.

With Taskbar Tabs, you can pin a progressive web app to your platform’s taskbar, making it seem like a native system app. When you launch it, it appears in its own window and acts like its own app, except it also has all of Firefox’s usual protections.

To test this experimental feature, type about:preferences#experimental in the address bar and enable the Add sites to your taskbar option.