Last week Google released Chrome 99, which includes plenty of optimizations and improvements to keep the browser machinery well-oiled. One of the new features it picked up introduces the ability to uninstall Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) right from Windows settings, just like you’d do with a native Windows program. While that sure sounds great in theory, it turns out there’s a bit of a catch in just how it works.
Uninstalling a PWA is now easier than ever — just navigate to the apps & features menu in Windows, and they’ll appear alongside all of your other apps, programs, and games. So far, so good — what’s the catch?
Unfortunately, the only PWAs that seem to appear in the Windows settings menu are those that are installed after updating to Chrome 99. In testing, we observed that while the settings screen didn’t initially include our existing web apps, uninstalling and reinstalling Twitter prompted the PWA to finally show up. If you use a whole lot of web apps (as we like to), this behavior could prove to be a significant drawback.
Hopefully this is something Google is able to rectify in future releases, as treating PWAs like regular apps on a system level is just the kind of progress we like to see.
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