Google will allow PWA apps to handle local files
Recently, Microsoft and Google worked together to improve the UI of PWA (Progressive Web Apps) applications, making PWA applications no different from native applications. Now in order to make PWA applications closer to local applications, Google is working hard to allow PWA to become the default handler for specific extension files, just like local applications. This will mean that double-clicking to open a supported file type will directly open the file in the PWA application.
Google engineer Darwin said:
“The goal for this project is to implement an API that will allow Chrome progressive web apps (PWAs) to ‘handle’ (read) files in the host OS’s file system, in much the same way as a native app would. This dovetails with the larger objective of increasing transparency between web apps and native apps, enabling a more consistent user experience across both per the Progressive Web App (PWA) paradigm.”
Web applications will be able to declare the MIME types they support in their manifest. Every time an application wants to perform a write operation on an opened file, it will ask the user whether to open the permission, and the user will be able to allow or block the registration of the file type. This feature can now be tested under the File Handling API flag of Chrome or Edge.
- Make sure your Google Chrome is up-to-date
- Open chrome://flags
- Locate File Handling API
- Set to Enable using the drop-down menu
- Relaunch Chrome
Via: techtsp
