Forum Discussion
[Wayland] PWAs no longer appear as separate app windows — all group under main Edge icon
Hi,
Since around 2025-09-07 to 2025-09-10, I’ve noticed that on GNOME (Wayland) all installed PWAs (even across different profiles) now appear grouped under the main Edge browser icon in the GNOME Shell dash/taskbar.
Previously, each PWA would open in its own window group with its own icon. This is still the behavior in Chromium/Brave/Chrome, and can be restored there by editing the PWA’s .desktop file to set:
StartupWMClass=<same value as Icon>
However, Edge now seems to ignore StartupWMClass completely on Wayland, breaking workspace separation and making task switching hard.
Environment:
- Ubuntu 25.04
- GNOME 48.0 / Mutter (Wayland)
- Kernel 6.14.0-29
- Intel Iris Xe GPU
- Edge (latest stable, observed post 2025-09-13)
Repro steps:
- Install any PWA (e.g. Outlook, Teams, Spotify) from Edge
- Launch it (from any profile)
- Observe that it appears grouped under the main Edge browser icon
Expected:
PWA shows under its own icon and window group like in Chromium-based browsers
Actual:
All PWAs are bundled into the main Edge window group
Editing StartupWMClass in the .desktop file no longer helps
This regression makes PWAs much harder to manage on Wayland. Please route to the Linux/Wayland team if possible. Thanks!
19 Replies
Ran into this same issue while trying to create apps for Teams and Outlook on Ubuntu 24.04. Thank you to the earlier comments about how to resolve this! There was some data missing so here are the steps I followed in case anyone else runs into this later. It's a shame Chromium/Chrome/Brave work but Edge somehow broke this and Microsoft either hasn't noticed or doesn't care.
- Install your sites as apps.
- Go to edge://apps and click on "Details" for each app.
- In the URL for each app detail, take note of the long string. This is your app ID. In my case, the URL for Outlook was "edge://apps/details/outlook.office.com/faowiofnngnfdaknnbpskhgogbobgeg".
- "faowiofnngnfdaknnbpskhgogbobgeg" is what you need to note.
- In the URL for each app detail, take note of the long string. This is your app ID. In my case, the URL for Outlook was "edge://apps/details/outlook.office.com/faowiofnngnfdaknnbpskhgogbobgeg".
- Once you have the app IDs, open your Files app and navigate to "~/.local/share/applications".
- You should see .desktop files for each app you made. The string in the filename should match the string you recorded in step 2.1.
- Open one of your apps. Press ALT + F2 and type in "lg". This will open a Looking Glass menu. Click on the "Windows" button and find your app. Look for the line below the app name. It should start with "wmclass: msedge<some value here>"
- Take note of the structure of this string. You shouldn't need to record the entire string, but pay attention to the structure.
- In my case, the string looked like this: "wmclass: msedge-_faowiofnngnfdaknnbpskhgogbobgeg-Default"
- Take note of the structure of this string. You shouldn't need to record the entire string, but pay attention to the structure.
- Close Looking Glass (press escape). Open the .desktop file that matches your string.
- Look for the line that starts with "StartupWMClass=<something here>"
- Replace the data after the "=" to match the structure of the string in Looking Glass.
- My line looked like this after: "StartupWMClass=msedge-_faowiofnngnfdaknnbpskhgogbobgeg-Default"
- Save your file and close it. Repeat this process for any other apps you installed.
- Log out and back in. Open your apps. They should now open under their own icons in your dock.
Hope this helps! I made this to help save someone's time. If you encounter any issues with my guide, please share and I'll fix it!
Hello!
Update:
With microsoft-edge-stable.x86_64 141.0.3537.71-1 it was possible for me to use the information of ArloGilbert and get separate windows and the icons have a dot after starting the PWAs.
What I had to do was to find out the StartupWMClass with lg and correct the "crx__*" Entry with the correct one, which is similiar to the Icon String, but with an additional "_":
Icon=msedge-abcdef-default
StartupWMClass=msedge-_abcdef-default
Only problem with MS Edge left for me at the moment is the instant crash of all Edge processes when opening the "save as" Dialog in the downloads section, but I´ll open a separate issue for that!
Thanks!
With kind regards,
Steve- m8yng
Microsoft
not an ideal approach, but if anyone don't want to deal with the .desktop files, what i did is hold back to older version:
sudo apt install microsoft-edge-stable=139.0.3405.125-1 sudo apt-mark hold microsoft-edge-stable # and if it got fixed in the future version: sudo apt-mark unhold microsoft-edge-stableAnd forego all the security updates that have been released since then? That can't be the solution!
Problem persists in Microsoft Edge Stable microsoft-edge-stable-141.0.3537.57-1 ! Workaround of ArloGilbert not working for us on Fedora 41/42.
same here! I also couldn't get ArloGilbert's workaround to work (also on Fedora 42)
Here's what just worked for me. 25.04 insiders edge-dev.
- Get your PWA opened with the window you like, ignore that the icon doesn't appear.
- Find your app id edge://apps, you'll see it in the URL, long string.
- Alt-R (run), type `lg` (built in window class analyzer for Wayland)
- Click `Window`, find your window and find the window class, mine was msedge-_[YOUR-APP-ID-HERE]-Default
- Edit the .desktop file to pass the correct WM Class to Edge, i'm lazy so I used PinIt from flatpak but it's on snap too. If you use PinIt, just change the window class to the window class you found in step 4.
- Then launch your app and viola, icons are back!
I can't take credit for this resolution, it's a bug from 2022 when Microsoft introduced a Wayland optional flag, I'm guessing now that Wayland has become the default so now all the unresolved Wayland bugs are showing up. Either way, i've got my PWA back, hope it helps y'all!
That fixed worked for me! It's annoying to have to do it for each pinned PWA, but I only have two right now. This issues was annoying enough to me that I switched to using Firefox for most of my PWAs (which aren't even supported natively).
"Alt-R" does nothing on my distro, nor is there an "lg" executable installed or available. Can you expand on what you're running?
try "Alt-F2"
Hello ArloGilbert !
You write "..icons are back" but the main problem described here is:
"All PWAs are bundled into the main Edge window group
Editing StartupWMClass in the .desktop file no longer helps"
Was this solved for you as well or ever a problem? Did you mean to add this to PWA shortcuts don't keep asociated with window - Linux | Microsoft Community Hub ?With kind regards,
Steve
Yeah "icons are back" as in "The individual PWA Icon in the dock is back such that the PWA launches and behaves as an independent app with a single window that doesn't open multiple and which does not show up as part of the browser app".
Just updated Edge today and I'm also experiencing the issue with all PWAs/WebApps in Ubuntu 24 LTS.
We are also affected by this.
I'm also affected by this issue. It's really annoying and decreases my productivity by a lot.
Also experiencing this issue
I have just been experiencing the same issue in Chromium-based browsers (Fedora 42, Gnome, Wayland), but editing the StartupWMClass in the .desktop file DID fix the problem for me (in edge at least).
yes. i have found out the same issue. please fix it microsoft
