1991315 - WebExtension API support for pinned web app windows a.k.a. Taskbar Tabs

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(WebExtensions :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Description

[Alex Eng]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:143.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/143.0

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox 143 introduced the ability to launch a website as a web app (essentially a simplified browser window) that is pinned to the Windows taskbar.

Please enhance the WebExtension APIs to:

1. Allow WebExtensions to open a URL in a new web app window. One idea is to pass a new WindowType enum value to browser.windows.create().

2. Allow WebExtensions to filter by web app windows when getting information on open browser windows using browser.windows.getAll(), by passing a new WindowType enum value to the windowTypes parameter.

My Firefox extension, Panic Button, has the ability to hide browser windows (by closing them after saving their state to storage) and restore them afterwards with a click of the browser action button. Currently, if one of the browser windows is a web app, the web app is restored as a normal browser window instead of a simplified web app window. This enhancement would resolve this issue by detecting which of the open browser windows is a web app so that when it is restored, Panic Button can reopen them in a web app window.

This proposed API enhancement also opens up new use cases. For example, a web app launcher extension could let users save links to web-based productivity apps which can be opened as web app windows when invoked from a "Start Menu"-style popup, bringing Firefox web apps to macOS, Linux and other platforms.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'WebExtensions::Untriaged' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Tomislav Jovanovic :zombie]

This might be Windows only, so I'm going to take a look