Forum Discussion
Web App Separate Isolated Session
andrewvinci thanks for bringing this up. We are discussing this and running some experiments. Currently, PWAs are installed per profile, so if you have two profiles in Edge, you can have two PWAs installed (one for each profile) - those are completely separate. You are correct about the current design with one profile, though. PWAs behave the same with regard to cookies (etc) as if you were just on the website in the browser. You can imagine how much of a benefit this is for web developers who can trust that when you create a PWA from their site, you remain logged in.
But as I say, we think this is probably something that some end users want, and some web devs want. So we are planning on being very data driven. We may run A/B experiments, but first we will want to get developer reaction and try to figure out a good design that will make the majority of people happy.
-John
johnjansen Thanks John, fully aware of the advantage of that. I tried to keep my initial post fairly concise. I'll stick to "web app" here as this is mostly about apps that people install from a website. e.g. they go to http://www.contoso.com, and then hit the '...' and 'Apps' -> "Install", regardless if the site is a standard webpage, or a proper PWA (with manifest, etc.).
In the case where an app is installed from having already visited the website, I could foresee keeping 'signed-in ness' and a consistent experience for devs, that same-site cookies could be kept, and all others discarded (this may still break SSO); with an option to start a fresh session for privacy focused users.
Personally, even if the user is required to sign-in again, I wouldn't expect that it would cause excessive friction/bounce rate. Even a notification "For your privacy, we keep this new App separate to your other browsing - so you'll have to sign in again".
As you indicated, A/B is the way to go.
- They can't limit it only to that. Edge gives us freedom to install ANY website as an app, not only websites that are kinda a web app, such as Whatsapp web, Spotify web player, Google photos, Outlook etc.
