The new Chrome App Launcher: Google’s backdoor into the offline world - austinyouthisesir87

Happening Friday, Google gave Windows users something that they've been pining for: A Start button. And symmetric wagerer than that, Google's reading keeps you on the screen background and actually opens a belt down-up menu whole of programs, unlike the nerfed Start button that's slated to appear in the Windows 8.1 update.

No, Larry Page hasn't decided to jump into the packed Windows Start button replacement stadium. Instead, Google's engineers quietly dragged Chrome OS's App Launcher—the Googlefied eq of a Bug out button—over to Chrome for Windows today. The seemingly bladelike addition is a starring step in Google's push to bring World Wide Web standards to walled gardens.

Big things in little packages

The Chromium-plate App Launcher is exactly what you'd expect: A taskbar icon that lets you quick-launch Chrome browser apps, such equally Gmail, the Play Store, Angry Birds, and yep, even Chromium-plate itself. Simple, right? But the little launcher is a Trojan horse for much bigger ambitions—especially when mated with prepackaged Chrome apps.

Packaged apps are available now, but since Google has yet to highlight them in the Chrome WWW Storage, you might non be familiar with them. Packaged apps are programs built on the bones of the Chromium-plate browser. They use traditional Network languages such as HTML5 and CSS, but they run as separate, standalone software that can too be used offline, unlike traditional browsers.

You could consider packaged apps to basically be desktop WWW apps, as odd as that sounds.

"For quite some metre, we've had a dichotomy between Entanglement apps and indigene apps, and one of the things that sets them apart is the ability [for native apps] to represent launched from the background and have a degree of persistence and independency from the browser," says Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Search. "The availability of the Chromium-plate App Catapult for Windows helps to further confuse the line."

Hey, who put Chrome Bone's Start button where my Windows Set about button used to atomic number 4? The apps without tiny arrows in their lower-left corner are all prepacked apps.

With the arriver of prepacked apps and the Chrome App Catapult, zero longer will you need to connect to the Internet, open the Chromium-plate browser, and found the Web app you want to use. Today, there's a Web-app Start button right your taskbar, and the packaged apps don't even require an Internet connection.

"Clearly, indefinite of the missions of the whole Chrome initiative is to serve As an incentive for masses to embrace HTML5 and make over frustrate-platform or Web applications," says Rubin. "People want to interact with their Web apps as easy as they do with their desktop apps. Having the [Chrome App Launcher] gettable helps to relieve the transition."

Each packaged app runs as its own illustration, non as part of the principal Chrome browser, as this look at several packaged apps in the Windows fast-switch interface shows. (Click to enlarge.)

It's made even easier by the App Catapult's Chrome ti. All your Chrome apps seamlessly travel with you to any Windows PC on which you've installed the Chrome App Launcher, even the locally stored box apps (though those take a few moments to download to unexampled installations). Download a Chrome app once, and it's available anyplace.

What's more, the Chromium-plate App Launcher lets you pin shortcuts for unique apps to the Windows taskbar or the screen background—mimicking native software program functionality even further. It doesn't matter whether the app is prepacked operating theater a Web native, either. Blurring the lines, so.

Google gains

As a Web-focused company, Google gains whenever more people start using the Vane more often. But beyond generally blarney the humankind to Web services, Google has a direct interest in getting people in front of Google's Web services. That's the reason the Chrome App Catapult comes chock chockablock of links to YouTube, Chromium-plate, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Search, and the Chrome Network Store (whose third-party apps often include Google Ads).

More notably, though they Crataegus oxycantha appear as standalone offline programs, packaged apps can work only if you throw Chromium-plate installed. Not only are they built along top of the browser, but some of the forward-looking features being packed into prepacked apps—much as in-app payment support or the ability to play nice with Fitbits and iTunes libraries—make out courtesy of proprietary Google APIs, not open Web standards.

That's a price you have to invite out running those apps closer to the aluminiferous, so to speak.

"[Prepacked apps] allow for APIs for accessing device capabilities, which is something that's been lacking in Web applications for browsers," IDC analyst Al Hilwa told TechHive earlier this yr. "This brings network-app capabilities closer to the level of what some native platforms offer."

It also means that patc the Chromium-plate App Catapult is so a pull off to spur general Web espousal to traditionally offline platforms, packaged apps in particular are inextricably tied to Chrome—which, in turn, makes Google's web browser-centric Chrome OS more importunate, too.

Creating Web app shortcuts with Chromium-plate App Catapult. Hey, you'rhenium not supposed to beryllium able to bash that! (Clink to enlarge.)

"It looks like Google is defining the Chrome platform A what I'd scream 'Web Chopine Plus,' and intends for Chrome OS and the Chrome browser to be a 'platform on a platform' happening any twist it is permitted to keep going," Hilwa told PCWorld in a separate interview.

Yes, folks, between the App Launcher and packaged apps, soon every notebook can be a Chromebook, even if it's not a Chromebook. (The Chrome App Launcher was recently added to the OS X version of Atomic number 24, the spread ou-source version of the browser.)

Rubin sings a similar tune.

"The adoption of HTML5 and Web standards is the larger mission," helium says. "Merely of course, Google wants Chrome and the implementations of Web technologies that it has depend on to be the way of approach. By making gettable the Chromium-plate interpretation engine, Google can integrate the technologies it's endorsing or portion to develop, care the revolutionary Flash browser engine—especially on Windows or Atomic number 76 X, where it helps further the implementation of those technologies where [Google] posterior't command the default web browser."

Put differently, the Chrome App Launcher is a way for Google to have its cake and eat it too. Google wants as many people as realistic to embrace open Web standards, no doubt at least partially motivated by the desire to bring its services (read: ads) to as many eyeballs as possible. Open standards tend to beryllium utilized by everyone, subsequently all. But packaged apps bind their users to Chromium-plate specifically, though Chrome is available far and near and across quaternary platforms.

That seems slimly ominous in the wake of Google's transition from the unfold Google Speak up to the proprietary Hangouts protocol.

Bringing the Web to the desktop

But fear not: Chrome isn't going to consume the desktop and the Web all-night. Google hasn't even publicly publicised the Chrome for Windows App Catapult in the Chrome Web Store, and packaged apps are likewise obscured for everyone but developers. You need to have a direct link to receive anything. Talk about obscure.

If you're involved in seeing what the low-key yet significant hubbub is about, you fire download the Chrome App Catapult here. Once that's done, head to Pocketables for a long list of direct links to Chrome packaged apps. Cave in some a whirl; IT's so seamless, you'd never even know that you were helping to dismantle the wall between the online and the offline.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/452983/the-new-chrome-app-launcher-googles-backdoor-into-the-offline-world.html

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