Shortcuts on the home screen behave inconsistently

[b3web]

b3web last edited by

Hello,

I observed a behavior which I cannot explain. It is related to Opera shortcuts on the home screen (sometimes also named "start page")

• Close all running applications on the smartphone device in order to start from a clean, defined state

• Open Opera Browser on Android

• Navigate to edition.cnn.com

• When the page is loaded, add a shortcut to the home screen

• Close the cnn tab

• In a new tab, navigate to finance.yahoo.com

• When the page is loaded, add a shortcut to the home screen

• Close all tabs and close Opera browser

• Result: two new shortcuts should have been created on the home screen

• Tap the cnn shortcut on the home screen

• Result: Opera Browser opens and displays the cnn page in a new tab. That's fine and behaves as expected.

• View all running applications. Result: only one instance of Opera browser is listed. That's fine.

• Tap the yahoo finance shortcut on the home screen

• Result: Opera browser doesn't open with a new tab. Instead, it seems that a new application is started (without any tabs).

• View all running applications. Result: two different applications are running: one Opera browser (which was started when tapping the cnn shortcut) and one "Yahoo Finance" app, but it is unclear which kind of application that is.

I would have expected that the yahoo finance web site would also be opened in Opera browser, in a new tab. This would have the advantage that I can toggle between the tabs. Having two apps doesn't allow me to easily switch tabs.
It is unclear why a new application is started.

Same behavior applies to other websites: sometimes they open as new tab in Opera browser, sometimes as "new application".

Some more details:
Version of Android: 8.1.0
Phone model and manufacturer: Motorola, Moto G5 Plus
Your version of Opera for Android: 62.3.3146.57763
If ad-blocker is enabled or not: enabled (but I disabled it for testing)
If data savings is enabled or not: enabled

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Bernd

[leocg]

leocg Moderator Volunteer @b3web last edited by

@b3web Same behavior in Chrome, I guess it has to with PWA.

[b3web]

b3web @leocg last edited by

@leocg Thanks for your quick reply. It seems that this is really related to PWA (which I never heard of before). So it looks like this behavior cannot be changed.
However, it is not working correctly, as I just discovered. I created a shortcut on the home page for this page: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN?p=AMZN&.tsrc=fin-srch
When I tap the shortcut, not the yahoo finance website with Amazon stock information is opened, but the yahoo finance start page. Is that a bug in Opera browser or is this also related to PWA?

[leocg]

leocg Moderator Volunteer @b3web last edited by

@b3web Test in other browsers to see if the behavior is the same.

[b3web]

b3web @leocg last edited by

@leocg You are right. Same behavior with Chrome, so it must be PWA related.

Thanks for your support.