Edge Chromium's URL bar randomly appear inside web app

[outtamahway]

I installed Netflix site as an app because for some reasons it runs better than its native app and everything work out for a while but after a few months or sometimes weeks Edge Chromium's URL bar randomly appear inside the app which is very frustration because it prevents the player from going into full screen mode while watching movies or TV Show and also it doesn't look good either. Also Worth noting that it doesn't appear all the time, It's only appeared once I'm searching or watching the show. I usually fix this by uninstall the apps and reinstall them back and it'd usually be working. But in heavy case I have to completely uninstall edge itself and reinstall it back just to fix one minor problem and after a few months, the problem is coming back again. It's a very weird behavior I try searching for solution but no one seems to have the problem except me.

Edge Version 84.0.522.40 (Official build) (64-bit)

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@outtamahway 

Hi there, you are welcome to the Microsoft Edge Insider Hub!
The bar you are talking about is not the address bar but is a bar that appears when you are on a different website from the website that you have installed as an app, that bar shows the name of the different website you are in.
I would recommend you to visit this conversation where I have given a solution to this problem which also appears on Amazon Prime Video with more details.

[#3]

It does not work for netflix since you can't access clean url www.netflix.com always redirects you to /browse if logged in or /uk /us or whatever your country is if logged out. In order for the url bar to stop appearing you need to have that exact url installed as an app, in netflix case they have www.netflix.com/browse for browsing or www.netflix.com/watch for watching, since you can't access the netflix site without the extension on url it is impossible to avoid the address bar. Unless Microsoft adds a feature to enable installed app url edit or Netflix decides to make www.netflix.com accessible for everyone regardless of the region(which will never happen) we are scr*wed.

[#4]

@Hrcorl 

As you did not understand my earlier post or my earlier post was not clear, I am showing you a reply which was given by Microsoft Engineer @johnjansen who replied to this conversation which is related to Netflix and describes the same issue you are facing. The reply is as follows:

This has to do with the scope of the PWA. You'll notice that when you clicked to install the PWA you were probably on a screen like netflix.com/browse. But when you are in the PWA and click to watch a video, that redirects to netflix.com/watch, which is technically 'out of scope' for the PWA and causes that black bar across the top to show up. 

The easiest workaround should be to simply log out of netflix in the browser so the URL is back to just the netflix.com url and install from there. That way the scope is the entire domain rather than just /browse.

-John

---

[#5]

Sorry, I did and it does not solve an issue at least for non US citizens I suppose. Here in europe on login screen my url goes www.netflix.com/uk

After logging in, each and every other instance of url is not built upon /uk, rather the universal one www.netflix.com/browse so the url bar appears everywhere because of the missing /uk part of the url

In that said I cannot access any universal domain that would work on the entire netflix experience, meaning I cannot access pure www.netflix.com url without redirection to /uk or /browse depends of being or not being logged in.

[#6]

@Hrcorl thank you for that new wrinkle on the scenario. I wasn't aware that you could not navigate to just netflix.com, but are always redirected to /uk. If that is true even though you are not logged in, then that definitely increases the priority of this issue. 

-John

[#7]

I have successfully resolved this issue by installing TunnelBear, they offer 500mb free VPN and are Netflix compatible, after connecting to USA VPN I've logged out of the account and successfully landed on www.netflix.com installed it as an app, disconnected from the VPN and logged in. Now the bar no longer appears. Unfortunately until a better solution is presented this is one method that proves to be working. Hope it helps someone.

[#8]

Thanks @Hrcorl for the help your method works as I also got the same scenario as you also thank to @TheShaunSaw for the explanation now I know how this whole thing works. Maybe in the future we can have the ability to install app by manually typing the URL address in, instead of limited to on site visit.

[#9]

@outtamahway I was going to suggest a VPN solution, but I don't want to suggest that all of our customers have to do that :-). I'm glad you were willing to and that it worked for you; we are brainstorming different ways to solve this problem so that all of our users stay safe, know what domain they are on, and are able to enjoy sites like Netflix as "apps".

-John

[#10]

Hello @johnjansen 

Well at least there could be a way to edit a pwa's url. This way we could put only the root url

[#11]

@johnjansen This could be a workaround on some sites but some other sites like deezer is having /us as their default homepage so even after using the vpn, it won't prevent the site from redirect to /us and like @Hrcorl suggested each and every other instance of url is not built upon /us which make the bar appears everywhere because of the missing /us part of the url. But as long as Netflix works, I'd say I'm satisfy now but I hope to see more better and permanent solution in the future 🙂

[#12]

I'm in Canada so I get redirected to a subdomain of Netlflix so as mentioned, the solution to Amazon Prime doesn't work.

This is relatively recent, been using Netflix as an edge app for a while now and this only started happening with the May 2020 update(?). Installing a VPN really isn't a solution for this, hopefully this can be resolved.

[#13]

@Hrcorl Same here (Japan), and pretty much everywhere else outside the USA.

For myself, I solved it using a VPN (which others have suggested).

I have a top tier paid one, but there are plenty of free ones (including Opera's browser's built-in one) which should work for this "one time setting".

I agree with others though, into that shouldn't be something to recommend to just "everyone", and that this is an issue because "Netflix" is pretty much the first web anyone is going to try installing as an App (since it works so much better than the Native Windows App...).

Daniel

[#14]

@TheShaunSaw we have a similar problem but found no solution for this.

We install the pages as app without a webapp.manifest because we need Get-Params for app installation like:

https://appserver.mydomain.de/my_app/main?station=VIRTUAL1&workstation=PC-MYCOMPUTER

In Google Chrome this works just fine, but in Edge Chromium the AppInfo bar is displayed every time we are on a different page. Is there a way to manually disable this bar?

[#15]

@PJohn88 

In that case, I am tagging @johnjansen, Microsoft Engineer working on Microsoft Edge.

[#16]

@TheShaunSaw  thanks for the tag. @PJohn88 we have addressed this issue in Edge 86+ and are looking to possibly push that change to Edge 85.

We did not make a change for all cases, but we did for directory access, such as netflix.com/us and netflix.com/watch and netflix.com/es no longer show the URL bar. 

-John

[#17]

@TheShaunSaw Thank you for your suggestion, but it doesn't work for https://music.apple.com/. It redirects me to https://music.apple.com/us/browse regardless whether I have logged in or not. Do you have a solution for such condition?

[#18]

I'm using Edge 86 and behavior changes in every minor update. For my current version (86.0.622.38) the url bar doesn't show up for https://music.apple.com/us/browse but does for https://music.apple.com/library/songs. In the previous version (still 86 I suppose) both of them looked fine.

[#19]

@AkazaRenn interesting. I'm not able to repro this in 86.0.622.38. Can you give me exact repro steps? There is an interesting complication to this code path, so it could be caused by a number of things.

[#20]

@Hrcorl Just switch to google chrome where you can just do this: 

1. ine tab1 open the apps tab: chrome://apps/

2. in tab2, open the site you want to turn into a tab

3. from tab2 highlight, copy, the most common part of the url

4. drag to tab1, drop it when the cursor gets the + sign

5. right click it, set open as window, and also create shortcuts.

bam done.

You can't do this in Edge, because while it does have the `chrome://apps/` url, Edges version of this page is not drop sensitive. So the only way you can add "pwa apps" to edge is via the provided controls the url if the site exposes all the right meta tags and files.

honestly @johnjansen you should just mimic how google chrome behaves with `chrome://apps/`.