Mozilla’s long-standing antipathy in supporting Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in Firefox began to thaw earlier this year, as bods behind the browser finally announced plans to embrace them.

And if you install the Firefox 142 release, you can take an early look at the feature — albeit only on Windows for now.

Firefox’s web app features (Taskbar Tabs) is not stable, feature-complete, or enabled by default. It is experimental, and those trying it out should keep that in mind. It can be enabled in Firefox on Windows via Settings > Labs.

The feature blurb reads: “Open sites you frequently visit as a web app from your taskbar. Look for the “Add to taskbar” icon to the right the address bar to launch that site in a streamlined window with all of Firefox’s protections.”

Don’t see an “Add tabs to you taskbar” option? Enable it manually instead:

  • Go toabout:config in a new tab
  • Search for browser.taskbarTabs.enabled
  • Double-click the boolean value to set it to true

Now, when you load a website in Firefox, an icon is shown in the address bar (a box with an arrow in). Click on this to add the page to the Windows taskbar as a ‘web app’ (Windows may ask you to give permission before the shortcut appears, mind).

All websites can be “installed” as a taskbar tab in this way, but the idea is to use it with bonafide web apps – e.g., Spotify, Discord, Telegram, Mastodon, Tidal. The tooltip mentions it pulls info from a web app manifest:

Taskbar apps, web apps, all the same thing

Web apps get their own taskbar icon, stay open until closed, and will, in time, be able to intercept links to their website directly to open then, rather than a new tab in the main browser being opened.

But as I reported on in March, Mozilla does not plan to add support for the full PWA spec (extra processes and system workers, file handlers, background notifications, minimal window frames, badging, and more) to Firefox.

Instead, they want to web apps to continue to feel like they are part of Firefox, not decoupled or managed separately to it.

Firefox wants web apps to feel part of the browser

Firefox web apps do not use a minimal window frame. They have a toolbar, address bar (which can’t navigate off-site), extension buttons, bookmarks, and the main Firefox menu. No ‘new tab’ button, but there is a button to open the web app in a normal Firefox window added.

As a first pass goes, this is promising – don’t expect miracles, or integration on par with Chromium-based web browsers yet, but could save the need to install extra tools (like Linux Mint’s terrific Web App Manager) on Linux.

No word on when/if it will support Linux support will be available to test, but if you’re minded to try Firefox Nightly Builds, I dare say you should keep an eye there…

Thanks to everyone who tipped me to this.