Forum Discussion
Dev channel update to 84.0.516.1 is live
sprite-1 no, this issue will likely take some time to get right. The problem isn't with PWAs, it's actually with sites installed as apps that aren't true PWAs. PWAs know what pages are and aren't within their scope, so navigation to other pages within that scope are fine. Other sites installed as apps don't have any way of knowing that, so any navigation causes the behavior you see. We're trying to figure out the best way to tackle this issue, but it will likely be a while.
josh_bodner Then what was wrong with letting sites installed as apps be dependent on the domain the way it originally worked? Since the site itself is installed as an app, it would make sense to consider all of that domain's pages as part of te "app" then?
sprite-1 in some cases it would, but it gets tricky really fast. Google Docs, for example, share the same subdomain (docs.google.com), but each type of file (sheet, slide, etc.) should arguably have their own application since Google considers them three separate applications in their waffle menu. After all, does it really make sense to have a shortcut to a Sheets application, but then open a Slide with it?
Or, going the other way, Facebook has a bunch of games you can play (I still play Angry Birds, for example). Those games live on their own subdomain though (apps.facebook.com). If I have a shortcut to the main Facebook app, then I also expect that clicking a link to a game keeps me in the app since since it's just another link to a Facebook page, and any other link to a Facebook page like somebody's timeline or a message keeps me in the app. A rule like "all that domain's pages" doesn't allow for that.
The obvious fix to this is to have some list of exceptions to any rule, but creating such a list isn't a trivial task, and is very expensive to maintain. The right answer ultimately may end up just being to wait for the website developer in question to make a real PWA, since they can ship those exact rules as part of the PWA package and have it "just work" across all browsers (that support PWAs).
