PWA Archives - Microsoft Edge Blog

The Web Install API is ready for testing

Patrick Brosset — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:55:46 +0000

We're happy to announce that the Web Install API is now ready for testing on your own site, as an origin trial in Microsoft Edge. With the Web Install API, your website can request the browser to install other web applications on the user's device, by calling the asynchronous navigator.install() function. This allows you to invoke the browser's built-in web app installation experience from your own user interface and exactly when you need it. This can help you improve the installation experience of your own app or suite of apps but can also be used for app store-like experiences. The Web Install API origin trial is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. You can learn more about the API by reading our explainer document, checking out demos, or watching the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmFYlO4qln8

Test the API today by registering to the origin trial

The Web Install API origin trial is available now in Microsoft Edge starting with version 143 and running until version 148. To participate in the origin trial, and test the API on your live website, register to the origin trial. Here's how:

Go to the WebAppInstallation origin trial page, sign-in with your GitHub account and accept the terms of use.
Add your website's domain name to enable the Web Install API origin trial for that domain.
Copy the token string:
Add the following meta tag to your website's HTML code:

You can also send the origin trial token as an HTTP server response instead:
Origin-Trial: [paste the token here]

By registering to the origin trial, the users of your site will not need to enable the Web Install API locally. It will be enabled for them by Microsoft Edge automatically. Note that the earliest version of Edge where the origin trial is available is 143, which is, at the time of writing, available as Microsoft Edge Beta. Version 143 will become the next Edge stable release in early December, and the origin trial will continue running until Edge 148.

Or test the API locally only

You can also enable the Web Install API on your development device only, for local testing. To do this:

Open a new tab in Microsoft Edge and go to the edge://flags page.
Search for "Web App Installation API".
Change the flag's default value to Enabled and then restart the browser.

Let us know what you think

This is a very exciting milestone for the Web Install API. With this origin trial, we're hoping to gather early interest and feedback from the community on the API. The feedback you share with us will allow us to continue evolving the feature to better match your needs and use cases. To provide feedback, please open a new issue on our explainers GitHub repository. We welcome any comment, suggestion, and bug report you encounter while using the API, and we look forward to making web app installation much easier by building the functionality right into the web platform, thanks to your help!

Bring your PWA closer to users with App Actions on Windows

Microsoft Edge Team — Fri, 30 May 2025 16:01:13 +0000

We're excited to announce that App Actions on Windows are now available for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Starting with Edge version 137, you can now publish your PWA to the Microsoft Store to enable App Actions on Windows.

Integrating your app smoothly with user workflows

Many everyday workflows—like editing text, processing images, or managing files—involve switching between multiple apps, creating friction and lost focus. App Actions reduce that overhead by letting users invoke high-value features of your app directly from within their current context. For example, Goodnotes, a popular note-taking app that's built as a PWA, has enabled App Actions, so that users can select text in an article, and send it directly to the app as a quick note without manually switching windows. App Actions help users get more done—while driving engagement and discovery for your app.

Enable App Actions in your Microsoft Store PWA

To start using the App Actions framework in your Store PWA now, check out the documentation at Enable App Actions on Windows for a PWA. In short, you'll need to:

Define an Action manifest. The manifest describes each action in a simple JSON file.
Setup a custom protocol handler. So that the App Actions runtime can launch your PWA through a protocol URI.
Setup your app as a share target. So that the App Actions runtime can pass input data to your PWA.
Package your app for Microsoft Store with PWABuilder.

That's it. Optionally, you can also define a PWA launch handler to define exactly how your PWA gets launched by the framework and test your actions by using the App Actions Testing Playground. We can't wait to see the creative ways you'll use App Actions to delight your users!

Sidebar Extensions: Boost your users’ productivity with Microsoft Edge Add-ons

Microsoft Edge Team — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 16:25:25 +0000

Microsoft Edge is constantly driven by the power of innovation, which opens amazing opportunities. Today, we are thrilled to announce that extension developers can build extensions for the Sidebar in Microsoft Edge, and bring users an enhanced side by side browsing experience that empowers them to achieve more. Let's dive into the details!

Supercharge your users’ productivity

We invite developers to harness the potential of Sidebar extensions and deliver improved experiences to their users. Read on to evaluate how your extensions can benefit from this new feature. We understand that every user has unique requirements, which is why we have developed three additional functionalities to provide a tailored experience:

Default sidebar on every site: Set a default sidebar to display consistent content or extensions across all opened tabs. Default values persist across sessions, ensuring a seamless experience. Find the sample code available here.
Sidebar enablement on specific sites: Make your extension to open in the sidebar on a specific site using sidepanel.setOptions(). Customize the experience for your users based on their preferred websites.
Switching to a different sidebar: Welcome your users with a dedicated sidebar using runtime.onInstalled(). Seamlessly transition to the main side panel when they navigate to a different tab. It's all about providing a personalized touch.

Enabling your extension as a sidebar extension

Enabling your extension for the Sidebar is easy. Add the "sidePanel" permission in your manifest file and set the "default_path" to "sidepanel.html" using the provided code snippet below:

{ 
  ... 
  "side_panel": { 
    "default_path": "sidepanel.html" 
  }, 
  "permissions": [ 
    "sidePanel" 
  ] 
  ... 
}

Note that your sidebar page offers the same level of flexibility as other extension pages. You can load scripts, call APIs from your sidebar page and unleash the full potential of your creativity. Furthermore, users will continue to find and install your extension through Microsoft Edge Addons.

Learn more and get started

We have written comprehensive Sidebar API documentation and a collection of sample extensions is available on the Chrome repository to help get started. Explore the possibilities and discover how your extension can make use of them. With Sidebar extensions, Microsoft Edge is upgrading the way your users interact with extensions, boosting their productivity, and offering a tailored browsing experience.

Developer options for sidebar experiences

The sidebar in Microsoft Edge is a great canvas for you to provide a productive experience for your users, and sidebar extensions provide a great way to bring the power of browser extensions alongside browsing. In addition to sidebar extensions, sidebar apps allow you to adapt your existing progressive web app (PWA) to securely run alongside other browser tabs for a side-by-side co-browsing experience, which is a great choice for web developers who want to offer companion experiences including social, messaging, or media apps that don't require advanced extensions capabilities. We plan to help users discover and install sidebar apps as they browse the web, providing great discoverability for your app with just a simple change to your web application manifest file. This is a great option if you want to reuse your existing web app for the sidebar in Microsoft Edge and make full use of the web capabilities that are available to PWAs. If your experience relies on extensions APIs, such as reading or modifying the current page, then building a sidebar extension will provide these capabilities.

Feedback and Discussion

As we continue making improvements to these sidebar extensibility models, we welcome your feedback: You can join us on our Edge Extensions GitHub forum to share your thoughts and connect with fellow developers, or give feedback on sidebar apps and PWA capabilities on the Microsoft Edge Explainers repository.

Building hybrid applications with the WebView2 developer preview

Microsoft Edge Team — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 17:07:13 +0000

Last month at Build, we introduced the new WebView2 coming to Windows, powered by the upcoming Chromium-based Microsoft Edge. Today, we’re releasing a new update to the WebView2 SDK, and with it we’re ready to encourage a broader set of app developers to try the WebView2 preview and give us early feedback. The WebView 2 preview has a limited scope, with support for an initial set of Win32 C++ APIs on Windows 10. Support for other Windows versions (Windows 7+ and Windows Server 2012 R2+) and UWP/WFP/WinForms support will become available in the future. [caption id="attachment_23988" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Learn more about WebView2 in our session from Build 2019: "Moving the web forward with Microsoft Edge"[/caption] With today’s SDK updates, WebView2 addresses a number of popular requests we heard during the initial preview, including supporting 32-bit WebView on 64-bit machines, the ability to disable devtools, the ability to disable status bar, and more. Going forward, our initial plan is to update the SDK roughly every six weeks, with our cadence and roadmap primarily driven by your feedback. You can receive information about new releases via our release notes or via the RSS feed of the WebView2 NuGet package.

About the control

The WebView2 control allows developers to host web content within your native apps. This hybrid approach lets you to share code with similar controls on other platforms or with your websites, to inject dynamic content into your native apps, and to leverage the rich and growing ecosystem of tools, frameworks, and talent around web technologies, among other benefits. WebView2 can power a wide spectrum of apps and use cases. For example, we’re working closely with the Office team to bring a WebView2-powered Add-ins experience to future versions of apps like Excel, which will allow add-ins to leverage the full-fidelity Chromium engine that powers Microsoft Edge. [caption id="attachment_23987" align="aligncenter" width="960"] Office add-ins such as this one by Lucidchart will be able to leverage the modern capabilities of Microsoft Edge, enabled by WebView2[/caption]

A consistent foundation for web apps on all Windows devices

By building on the same Chromium-based foundation as the next version of Microsoft Edge, the new WebView2 control is compatible with the latest web platform capabilities and broadly interoperable with the web experiences you have already built. WebView2 is by default powered by the always up-to-date Microsoft Edge, so you can build your web content against the latest and most secure platform without worrying about fragmentation across Windows versions, or across your web content running in the browser and in your app. For developers that need a fully locked-down web platform, we’re working on a bring-your-own mode, which will allow bundling a redistributable version of the browser with a WebView2 app. The redistributable browser powering WebView2 gets no automatic update; in this case, app developers are responsible for servicing and updating the WebView to receive security updates and new capabilities. We recognize that many developers have invested in EdgeHTML and MSHTML-based web apps and hybrid apps over time. As we build out WebView2, we expect it to be a compelling successor for these developers, but we hear loud and clear that not every app is ready to move forward. Existing Windows applications built with Windows web technologies, such as EdgeHTML/MSHTML-based WebViews or WWA/HWA/PWA built on top of the UWP platform, will continue to work as-is without modification.

Getting started the preview

We’re early in our journey to provide a modern, robust WebView for Windows devices, and the future direction of WebView2 will be heavily influenced by your feedback. Visit our documentation to learn more about the developer preview, check out the getting-started tutorial, and share your feedback, suggestions, and details on your scenarios over at our feedback repo. Have fun building! – Limin Zhu, Program Manager, WebView Last month at Build, we introduced the new WebView2 coming to Windows, powered by the upcoming Chromium-based Microsoft Edge. Today, we’re releasing a new update to the WebView2 SDK, and with it we’re ready to encourage a broader set of app developers to try the WebView2 preview and give us early feedback. The WebView 2 preview has a limited scope, with support for an initial set of Win32 C++ APIs on Windows 10. Support for other Windows versions (Windows 7+ and Windows Server 2012 R2+) and UWP/WFP/WinForms support will become available in the future. [caption id="attachment_23988" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Learn more about WebView2 in our session from Build 2019: "Moving the web forward with Microsoft Edge"[/caption] With today’s SDK updates, WebView2 addresses a number of popular requests we heard during the initial preview, including supporting 32-bit WebView on 64-bit machines, the ability to disable devtools, the ability to disable status bar, and more. Going forward, our initial plan is to update the SDK roughly every six weeks, with our cadence and roadmap primarily driven by your feedback. You can receive information about new releases via our release notes or via the RSS feed of the WebView2 NuGet package.