Able to reproduce the issue on chrome reported version# 70.03538.77, # 70.03538.102 and on latest chrome# 72.0.3608.4 using Windows-10, Mac 10.12.6 and Ubuntu 17.10. As this issue is seen from M-64(from introduction of #enable-desktop-pwas flag). Hence considering this issue as Non-Regression and marking it as Untriaged.

Thanks!

 

This is still an open design question, one idea we've had is to only show it for out of scope links.

Why not, even if for this kind of things, I prefer always or never.

If we consider that only the scope of the PWA is trustworthy, the UA could show a dialog to inform the user (because there is a side effect: the link will be open in chrome) and ask for his permission.

Consider the webapp manifest spec

https://www.w3.org/TR/appmanifest/#navigation-scope

> If the application context's active document's URL is not within scope of the application context's manifest, the user agent SHOULD show a prominent UI element indicating the document URL, or at least its origin, including whether it is served over a secure connection. This UI SHOULD differ from any UI used when the document URL is within scope, in order to make it obvious that the user is navigating off scope.

Interrupting the user before they browse to an out of scope link seems unnecessarily heavy-handed, and particularly annoying if sites like Reddit or Google Search become PWAs.

The spec in this case is referring to the steady state (the "active document URL"), not any additional pre-navigation UX like the URL tooltip or a prompt prior to navigation.