1524887 - Standalone Progressive Web Apps result in Blank Page if Firefox is not running in the Background

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1496684

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Web Apps (PWAs), defect)

Description

[c001-bug-squ33z3r]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:65.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0

Steps to reproduce:

Story: About a year ago, I built a Progressive Web App (PWA; display: standalone) and used it regularly since then. Recently (somewhen in January), starting the App often resulted in a blank page. However, starting the app, not from the Android home screen, but instead, by calling the URL in the browser worked just fine.

Even starting the app from the home screen, while Firefox is still running in the background works just fine. But if Firefox doesn't run and you start the app from the home screen, you get just a blank page.

At first, I thought my PWA is broken, but today I tried demopwa.com and it has the same issue. Therefore, I am assuming this is a Firefox bug. It might be helpful to know that, before today, I didn't change my PWA for a few months.

---

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open Firefox for Android
2. Visit https://demopwa.com
3. Refresh the page (not sure if necessary, but just in case to let the service worker do its magic)
4. Add demopwa.com to Android home screen via the icon in the address bar
5. Switch to Android home screen
6. Open demopwa.com via home screen shortcut
7. Close 'Firefox for Android' and the standalone PWA demopwa.com via 'Recently used Apps' aka Android menu button
8. Start demopwa.com via shortcut from the home screen

Actual results:

The PWA starts, but as a blank page

Expected results:

The PWA should have started normally