Skip to main content

Google Chrome’s Progressive Web Apps will soon play nicer with Windows 10

Image used with permission by copyright holder

The Google Chrome experience is always evolving, and the popular web browser will soon pick up a new feature which lets it run nicer in Windows 10. As noted by Windows Latest, Google is adding a capability to an upcoming release that will integrate Chrome Progressive Web Apps with notification badges in the system taskbar.

According to development documentation posted by Google, the feature is part of a new Badging API. This will allow for any installed Chrome web apps that have been pinned to a taskbar in Windows to set a badge to notify the user of certain activities. Seen to the right, an example provided by Google includes Twitter, for which the icon can show an “8” for unread notifications, and also another app with more of a flag-style icon. The feature is also coming to MacOS but it is not clear how notifications badges will be made visible on that platform.

Google notes the feature can carry over to productivity websites, games, and other chat apps. It is available for testing in Chrome Canary 73 beta on Windows 10, but it is not immediately known when this feature will make it to the general public running stable versions of the browser.

Secondary documentation posted on the Chromium commit also suggests that Google could be making it easier to install Progressive Web Apps directly from the address and search bar. A flag is already available to test the functionality in Google Chrome Canary, but it does not appear to function as intended. “Add flag for Omnibox installation button for PWA sites. This CL adds a feature flag for the new omnibox installation button for PWAs,” explains the code commit.

Support for Progressive Web app badge notifications would be one of many new features coming to Google Chrome soon. It was previously confirmed that the browser would respect the dark mode settings in both Windows 10 and MacOS, and also allow for consumers to use the multimedia keys to control videos on certain web pages. There’s even a set of new themes which just became available. The color choices range from black, slate, oceanic, ultra violet, classic blue, banana, black and white, honeysuckle, rose, serenity, and more.

Editors' Recommendations

Arif Bacchus
Arif Bacchus is a native New Yorker and a fan of all things technology. Arif works as a freelance writer at Digital Trends…
This Google Chrome feature may save you from malware
Google Chrome app on s8 screen.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of Google Chrome extensions out there, and with so many options to choose from, it can be hard to know whether the plugin you want to install is hiding malware nasties.

That could become a thing of the past, though, as Google is testing a feature that will warn you if an extension you installed has been removed from its Chrome Web Store.

Read more
Chrome has a security problem — here’s how Google is fixing it
Google Chrome icon in mac dock.

Google is looking to get ahead of high-severity vulnerabilities on its Chrome browser by shortening the time between security updates.

The brand hopes that more frequent updates will give bad actors less time to access and exploit n-day and zero-day flaws found within Chrome browser code.

Read more
Playing games in your browser is about to get a lot better
A woman sits by a desk and plays a game on a laptop equipped with an AMD processor.

Google has just unveiled a huge improvement for browser games -- WebGPU. The new API might revolutionize the idea of playing games in the browser, and it won't be limited to just Google Chrome.

WebGPU will give web apps more access to the graphics card, enabling new levels of performance. The API is already out, and Google seems to have big plans for it going forward.

Read more