PWA Header Color Change Option

Brass Contributor

Hello, Edge Team! I love the PWA feature on the new Edge, and I have had no problems with it as of yet. It would, however, be great to be able to choose what color the header of the page is. On most sites the color of the header perfectly matches the site theme, but there are a couple sites that I use that have header colors that are not matched as well. One of them is Reddit:

Sam_Bradley_0-1590449113853.png

I understand that anyone that uses Reddit with light mode would have no problem with this, but I would much prefer to have the Reddit orange/red color on the header. This specific header bothers me each time I open the PWA, and having the option to change it would be awesome. Thanks!

8 Replies
Completely agree! It would be particularly amazing if the PWA header colour followed the sites' dark/light themes!

@Sam_Bradley, thanks for the great feedback. Currently, if the site has a manifest file at the root of the domain, we use any color specified there. Since Reddit does not have a manifest, we have to guess. The algorithm we use for that guess is to grab the 3rd most common color from the site's logo. I agree that sometimes that's just the wrong choice. Based on our sampling size, we get it "right" about 80% of the time using this technique. 

 

I really do like the idea of allowing the user to choose this color themselves (again, only if there is no manifest file, because we must honor the site developer). I'm going to put this onto our backlog.

 

-John

@johnjansenany news on this feature? Lately Google Chat has changed the color to white and is driving me crazy, everything is dark on my machine except that caption, it's like a spotlight in my eyes.

@katyusha thanks for asking about this. We have not yet been able to prioritize this one - we had a prototype up and going, but in our experiment, it was confusing for customers and made app developers disappointed because they wanted to control that color themselves. For example, with the Google Chat app, they specify the white color themselves, so we honor that to allow them to control their brand.

 

We do plan on having some solution for this, but we need to do more customer research.

 

-John

@johnjansenyour approach is outrageously wrong. If the page developer chooses pink with white spots, am I supposed to go with that? Having a setting to turn that on/off is the middle ground between user and developer. I can't believe how you favor one side in the total utter disadvantage of the other. What's wrong with you?

This is a completely unnecessary and unexpected response. As I said, we're testing other ways of doing this now - the current solution is not permanent. I am not going to be replying to your questions/comments again.
It's been two years since you rolled this feature out and you still haven't figured out a solution. How temporary is this?! While you're figuring things out the users have to put up with all kind of crazy ideas that go headbutt with visual comfort and sight care.

@katyusha just found this extension that allows you to set the window color as desired for PWAs.

ColorfulPWA - Microsoft Edge Addons