Progressive Web Apps are a good middle ground between native desktop apps and popular software frameworks like Electron. PWAs are a godsend for web-focused operating systems like Chrome OS, where you won’t find a rich catalog of apps unless you get help from Linux apps. While PWAs are functional and are even preferred by some, the status bar in the lower left corner screams that this is a web browser page and not a web application, which takes away the experience. To fix this, Google Chrome and even Chromium-based Edge are working on a feature that removes the status bar.
Remove status bar from Google Chrome PWAs
The functionality to remove the status bar is currently available in the Canary channels of Chrome and Edge, and today you will learn how to activate and use it. You can access it by enabling a Chrome flag. This feature should eventually become available, hopefully by default, in the stable version of these browsers. Before we begin, here’s how the status bar looks at its current state:
Steps to Hide Address Bar from Google Chrome PWAs
1. Open Google Chrome Canary and visit chrome://flags. Once you are here, search for “Desktop PWAs remove status bar”. You can quickly access the flag by pasting the following address into Chrome’s address bar.
chrome://flags/#enable-desktop-pwas-remove-status-bar
2. In the drop-down menu next to the “Desktop PWAs remove status bar” flag, click on ‘Enabled’ and restart the browser.
3. And that’s it. When you try to refresh or interact with the PWA now, you won’t see the status bar in the lower left corner. The following screenshot was taken while I was refreshing Spotify and as you can see it doesn’t have the status bar like the previous one before I enabled the flag.
Experience PWAs without status bar interruptions
This was our quick guide on how you can remove the PWA status bar from Google Chrome. As I mentioned earlier, you can follow the same steps to get rid of it from Edge Canary. After removing the status bar, the PWA looks more like a native app than a website. So what are you waiting for? Try it out and let us know if it improved your PWA experience in the comments.
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