Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Tabbed web apps (Issue #841)

> We're discussing in today's TAG virtual f2f session – we're concerned about "desktop only". Most available statistics indicate that the majority of web usage is on mobile devices - e.g. see [this run-down of recent access stats for gov.uk web sites](https://hachyderm.io/@TheRealNooshu/109947378812496228) - indicating 58.26% mobile, 39.82% desktop. Also since the web is [multi-browser, multi-OS and multi-device](https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#multi), we'd like to encourage you to consider mobile and other platforms. We're also concerned about implementation issues across different OSs, @hober will follow up with more details.

This is a fair point. There’s no reason why it couldn’t work on mobile so it doesn’t need to be desktop only, we have just seen more requests for it on desktop, so that is what we implemented first. There would need to be more thought put into the tab UI on mobile, but that would be up to each implementation and I guess it could work the same as browser tabs on mobile.

> We'd like to see more use cases & more discussion of user needs. Even in our short vF2F discussion several different use cases were brought up (Google Maps, microblogging client, Wikipedia etc). We would hate to see a web feature designed for just one thing when it could help meet a lot of different needs. See our relevant https://github.com/w3ctag/design-principles/issues/450.

I’ve fleshed out the use cases a bit in the explainer.

> Also, have you considered the user experience when URLs to this web app are clicked across the OS? (e.g. in a Google Maps PWA, what happens when I click on the pin a friend sent me on Messenger?)

This is related to the launch handler API. I’ve added a section to the explainer about how these two interact (TLDR: the app could handle the links, causing them to open in a new app tab).

> Are you thinking that tabs would only be allowed from the same origin that is the origin of the webapp itself? We're concerned about the user experience of a web app that includes links to other external sites which might then be opened as tabs in the tabbed webapp vs being opened in the user's default browser / browser experience. Equally, saying "you can only open links from the same origin" would be a very different feature, from a user's point of view. What was your intention on this?

This would be up to each implementation, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be different for tabbed apps vs other web apps. For example in Chrome we have the CCT when an app navigates out of scope, so that currently behaves the same with a tabbed app.

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