Progressive Web Apps serve as a good middle ground between native desktop apps and widely popular software frameworks like Electron. PWAs are a godsend for web-first operating systems like Chrome OS, where you won’t find a rich catalog of apps unless you’re assisted by Linux apps. While PWAs are functional and even favored by some, the status bar in the lower left corner screams that it’s a web browser page and not a web app, and distracts from the experience. To solve 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 status bar removal feature is currently Available on Chrome and Edge’s Canary channelsand today you will learn how to activate and use it. You can access this by enabling a Chrome flag. This feature will eventually become available in stable versions of these browsers, hopefully by default. Before we get started, 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 ‘Remove desktop PWAs status bar’. You can quickly access the flag by pasting the address below into Chrome’s address bar.
chrome://flags/#enable-desktop-pwas-remove-status-bar
2. From the dropdown next to the ‘Remove desktop PWAs status bar’ flag, Click ‘Enabled’ and restart the browser.
3. That’s it. Now when you try to refresh or interact with the PWA, you will not see the status bar in the lower left corner. The screenshot below was taken while I was refreshing Spotify and as you can see it doesn’t have the status bar before I enabled the flag.
Experience PWAs Without the Status Bar Interruption
This was our quick guide on how to remove status bar from Google Chrome PWAs. As I mentioned before, you can follow the same steps to get rid of Edge Canary. After removing the status bar, PWA looks more like a native app and less like a website. So what are you waiting for? Give it a try and let us know if it improves your PWA experience in the comments.