Google has been committed to improving the PWA experience on Chrome. Last month, the company replaced some of the Android apps on the Play Store for Chrome OS users with their Progressive Web App (PWA) counterparts.
Now, Google has rolled out a new update for Chrome Canary users that brings the ability to launch PWAs at startup on Windows. The feature was first spotted by Techdows and is currently hidden behind a flag. If you are using Google Chrome Canary then you can follow the steps below to enable the feature.
- Launch Google Chrome Canary and type "chrome://flags" into the address bar.
- Type “Desktop PWAs run on OS login” in the search bar.
- Click on the drop-down menu and select Enabled.
- Relaunch the web browser.
This should enable the feature on your web browser. You can try it out by going to a website that supports PWA and clicking the "Install" option on the address bar. In the install app dialog box, check “Start app when you sign in to your computer” option and click install. This will install the app and will launch it the next time you turn on your PC.
It is not clear how users can remove the app from startup as Google has not given an option to uncheck the “Start app when you sign in to your computer” option. Currently, the only way to do it is by uninstalling the PWA and installing it back again without the option selected. You can, however, open the startup folder and manually remove PWAs. To do this, press Windows+R to open Run and enter "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup" to open the startup folder and delete the shortcut.