Add an id member to Web App Manifest to uniquely identify a web app

[benfrancis]

Request for Mozilla Position on an Emerging Web Specification

• Specification Title: Web App Manifest
• Specification URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/appmanifest/
• Explainer: https://github.com/philloooo/pwa-unique-id/blob/main/explainer.md
• Discussion: Add a unique identifier for a PWA w3c/manifest#586

Other information

Members of the Google Chrome team have written an explainer with a proposal to add an id member to the Web App Manifest specification in order to uniquely identify a web application, including what should be used as the default identifier when none is provided.

In the accompanying GitHub issue there is a discussion about whether this member is needed, what existing user agents use to identify web apps, how web developers currently use web app manifests, what should identify a web app, how web apps should be updated, what migration would be needed by existing implementations and other ramifications of this proposed change.

[philloooo]

Specification pull request w3c/manifest#988

[annevk]

I had a brief look at this and this extension seems reasonable. If you allow "installing" of web pages using a web manifest, this enables the web manifest to preserve identity while it can change things such as the start URL and such.