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Add to home screen / Install

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by Jonathan

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Following question asked by petitechisa 7/31/21, 3:24 PM answered but not solved, by jscher2000 - Support Volunteer, then archived.

"Don't like PWA, please bring back 'add to homescreen' bookmarking/shortcut option."

I have the exact same problem as the poster, but only in last month or so. "Shortcut" doesn't open in normal browser (what's a PWA?) and page doesn't have a menu/URL bar, so useless. Normal app either gives "Add to Home Screen" or "Install" option, but both result in PWA (I guess), not a shortcut which opens in app. i. e. menu option irrelevant. Not happy (Just been reading a GitHub stream on the subject - deliberate Mozilla choice! Nobody likes PWA, get rid!!!)

Following question asked by petitechisa 7/31/21, 3:24 PM answered but not solved, by jscher2000 - Support Volunteer, then archived. "Don't like PWA, please bring back 'add to homescreen' bookmarking/shortcut option." I have the exact same problem as the poster, but only in last month or so. "Shortcut" doesn't open in normal browser (what's a PWA?) and page doesn't have a menu/URL bar, so useless. Normal app either gives "Add to Home Screen" or "Install" option, but both result in PWA (I guess), not a shortcut which opens in app. i. e. menu option irrelevant. Not happy (Just been reading a GitHub stream on the subject - deliberate Mozilla choice! Nobody likes PWA, get rid!!!)

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Hi

Thank you for your feedback.Hi,

The people who answer questions here, for the most part, are other users volunteering their time (like me), not Mozilla employees or developers. If you want to leave feedback for developers, you can go to this link. Your feedback gets collected by a team of people who read it and gather data about the most common issues.

You can also file a bug report or feature request. See File a bug report or feature request for Mozilla products for details.

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A solution to get "Add to home screen" back:

In modern Firefox on Android, sites which are configured to be a "progressive web app" will not display an "Add to home Screen" menu item. These sites display an "Install" menu item instead. One downside of a progressive web app is that the resulting link is just to the site home page, not to any carefully crafted deep link URL you might have provided.

A cheeky workaround you can use to get the old "Add to Home Screen" menu item back is to turn on the Android airplane mode, then refresh the page you want to use. The page will not be found, but this reinstates the menu item. Use it, then disable airplane mode again.