Earlier this week Microsofts new Edge browser based on Chromium (codename Anaheim) leaked in en few different builds, and today Zac Bowden retweeted this interesting tweet about Spotify apparently having a PWA app, and guess what? It installs in Anaheim!
@ZacBowden, senior editor at the Windows Central, today retweeted this tweet from one Owen Williams about the Spotify PWA (Progressive Web App):
Here’s something weird/unexpected: Spotify’s web player lets you install as a PWA and it… works better than their desktop app! 😍 pic.twitter.com/JVZ01hx37p
— Owen Williams ⚡ (@ow) 28 maart 2019
I immediately tried this is in production Edge, but it wouldn’t throw an install notification. And since current Edge has no menu option for this, one should need to revert to Chrome for PWA support. But rather than Chrome (which I haven’t got installed and never will), I thought I’d give it a try in new Anaheim.
The leaked Edge with Chromium builds are actually quite far developed as it stands, because quite some stuff is already being supported, like for instance the menu option to manage PWA apps, where the ‘Install Spotify’ notification was waiting for me 🙂 :
After clicking that, an install prompt pops up:
And presto: Spotify PWA resizes to its own app window…
When installed, it adds a Spotify logo shortcut to your desktop, and from there you can also pin it to your start menu. No Live Tile yet, but who knows what’s in store for the PWA in the future.
The PWA performs very well and indeed: better than the desktop app for Windows 10. Especially on the small mini PC running an Atom on which I made these screenshots (7 inch One Notebook One Mix).
To try this yourself, simply add “?pwa=1” (without the qoutes) to the web player URL in either Chrome or Anaheim (dunno if Firefox supports PWA’s, will try soon) and look for the ‘install spotify’ notification somewhere. Maybe you’ll need to reload the first an extra time.
According to Owen the PWA also support media keys, as long as you set the correct experimental feature flags.
🙂