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I am running i3 as a window manager together with Polybar. I need to run Teams for work, but have some issues with the Teams application when running Arch in a VM. Regardless, I would like to run Teams by just starting it as a Chromium application as follows:

chromium --app=https://teams.microsoft.com

This works great. Notifications are delivered through dunst, no mic auto adjust with a Chromium extension. The only thing I am missing now is a way to show a tray icon that shows me any incoming pending messages. Chromium supposedly will show a system tray icon but I do not see it (the system tray itself works fine); I have 'continue to run in background' enabled in Chromium.

Is it somehow possible to let Chromium show a Teams systray icon with some status as the app does?

Ton van den Heuvel
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  • Try to use a [Progressive Web App](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/progressive-web-apps-chromium/). Use Chrome or Edge if Chromium can't do it. See [article1](https://dev.to/andrioid/adding-progressive-web-apps-pwa-to-the-linux-desktop-ik) or [article2](https://www.ampercent.com/install-progressive-web-apps/28167/). – harrymc Nov 10 '21 at 10:22
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    @harrymc, interesting, never heard of Progressive Web Apps. Chrome is a no for me, but I'll check support with Chromium. – Ton van den Heuvel Nov 11 '21 at 09:06

2 Answers2

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No. All chromium --app does is open the web page in chromium. All the page knows is that it is opened in a web browser, and websites can't create systray icons.

Matthew Wozniak
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For real application-like experience you need to use a Progressive Web App (PWA), which are supported by Chromium-based browsers.

In Chromium's hamburger menu, go to More tools → Create Shortcut, and it'll leave an icon on the desktop for the PWA. This creates an application-like icon, that when invoked behaves more like an application than a browser.

For more information see:

harrymc
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  • hey harry, nope, I did not get it to work with Chromium. I got this `.desktop` file, then launch Teams using the `.desktop` file with `gtk-launch`, but alas, no systray icon shows up. – Ton van den Heuvel Nov 15 '21 at 09:39