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Benefits to web app stores and installing apps:

- Automatic permissions granting. With a normal site, a bunch of prompts could appear; "Allow this website to track your location?" "Allow this website to use notifications?" "Allow this website to use unlimited storage?" "Allow this website to use the file system?" et cetera. With an app, the browser knows when the user installs it that they want those things.

- Discovery and monetization. Both suck for web apps right now. Discovery comes down to reading a tweet about an app, or Googling. Monetization is basically 99% advertising at this point, which isn't tenable for many industries.

- Knowledge that the browser installing the app supports a common set of standards. When I make an app for the Web Store, I know 99% of people are using the latest stable version of Chrome, and the remaining 1% is using a future version. I don't have to do IE6/7/8 hacks, or even worry about it.

Since you're a representative of Mozilla, I would also like to say I hope you guys don't give up on your "open" web store and app dashboard efforts. Eventually in an ideal world, the web app store model will be standardized and future browsers will be able to cross-install apps from each. Although there's nothing stopping Mozilla at this point from supporting .crx apps, Chromium is open source after all.

     Automatic permissions granting

That's an UI problem easily fixable by browsers.

     Discovery and monetization. Both suck 
     for web apps right now

Somehow products like Smugmug, GitHub, Basecamp haven't had this problem. There are easy ways for discovery, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and plain word-of-mouth. There's also an easy way for monetization -- it's called Paypal Websites Standard. I myself discovered this link by coming here, to HN.

That's the beauty of an open web.

     Knowledge that the browser installing 
     the app supports a common set of standards

Easily checkable by other means.

You're basically trying to redefine the problem to fit the solution.

It doesn't work like that - App Stores are only useful for the platform provider, keeping that provider as an intermediary between the developer and his customers, getting a share of the revenue. The Internet changed that and now platform providers (e.g. older like Apple, Microsoft and newer, like Amazon, Google) are now fighting back.

And the situation is exactly as in the old days of IExplorer - when devs developed for IE because they had consistency and it was the most popular browser anyway.

> That's an UI problem easily fixable by browsers.

Not as easily solved as using the app model.

> That's the beauty of an open web.

And that's never going away. But there's a reason devs are all over iOS and Android right now, and not making web apps that are much easier to make cross-platform.

> Easily checkable by other means.

Not as easily, though. Nor as intuitively.

> You're basically trying to redefine the problem to fit the solution.

Me? I'm not working on the Web Store team.

The solution is much-needed and is several years late. Google Maps and Gmail basically launched the web app wave, only for all the innovation to happen in mobile operating systems. It's time to bring those innovations to the browsers and make browsers the preeminent platform once again, which is what the web app and app store model seeks to accomplish.

IMHO, I think the reason for devs liking iOS is because iOS represents a distribution channel for shitty/low-budget apps, with low customers expectations, customers that also have credit cards.

But the gold-rush is going to end at some point, when the Top 50 chart is going to be dominated by the likes of EA Games and Blizzard.

"Devs like it because there's money in it."

Well, yes. It should be the goal of every platform to have a healthy developer ecosystem, so that the largest amount of devs can make some money. Just like in a country's economy, the goal should be to push the average quality of life higher.

People are reporting that it works fine in other browsers, too.

The Chrome store is just a front. Almost everything in it is actually a website, with the thing in the 'store' just being a pretty icon to it. And everything in the store will work just fine on other browsers, to my knowledge.

So while your point is valid, we actually aren't at a time when it's a problem... And I'm not convinced we'll get there. Tech has been changing quickly lately, and multiple browsers are now standards-compliant... That's pretty solid.

It works in FF4.

Here's what excites me about Angry Birds in the Chrome app store. None of this exists yet, but it could:

- If I install it on one computer, it installs on all my computers - Purchase the Screaming Eagle in-app, using Google Checkout - If I beat Level X on one computer, I can resume on level X+1 on another computer (using the same infrastructure as Chrome bookmark sync).

Currently, your game progress is in LocalStorage, but it would be great to have the game database sync'd to my other browsers. Yes, you could "sign-in" to Angry Birds to sync your data, and that option would still exist, but for people who installed through the App Store (where you have to be auth'd to Google anyways) it would be one less step.

Basically, cloud game saves then? It's entirely possible at this point, I'm implementing it in my game.

Uh, you realize that's how the web already works... right?

Zing! Fair point. But "video game" != "the web".

I tend to view HTML5 applications as closer to a traditional desktop application than a web site.

Local storage has some advantages over server-based storage (latency, privacy, etc), while the major disadvantage of local storage is the lack of persistence across multiple devices.

I like the idea of HTML5 app developers being able to use LocalStorage and then seamlessly piggyback on Chrome's existing JSON sync framework. That's a lot less work than managing state on the server, and lets game developers focus more on their core competencies, effectively outsourcing the "webiness" of their app to Google.

By no means do I think this kind of "Chrome App" will replace web apps, but I do believe that in certain genres like video games there are advantages.

Games on Steam do this

If you ignore the installation part, even Steam syncs your progress between computers.

I have no problem with app stores existing. I am yet unsure whether app stores piggybacking on the web is bad for the web or just benign tunneling.

There is a key difference between this and IE's play for control of the web a decade ago. MS was trying to deliver native Windows code over the web and keep people locked in to their OS. Chrome apps are implicitly encouraged to use web standards and couple to Chrome only when necessary. I don't think Google is trying to hijack the web, I think they are just trying to expand its scope.

If I pay for it in the (currently in development) Mozilla app store, that means I can't use it in Chrome. Is this really what we want for the web?

FWIW, this is not the model that the Mozilla "app store" proposes. You will be able to buy apps from any store, and then use them from any browser irrespective of which browser you originally bought it on. Part of Mozilla's OpenWebApps work is to define the auth flows in order to make this possible.

Do you think that apps using NaCl will be more deserving of being treated as something different than a website? As browser technologies get more advanced it becomes increasingly possible to make things that seem more like a traditional desktop application than a webapp. That said, I don't think that we're there yet and most of the offerings (even from Google) in the store seem like nothing more than a link to a page.

Because the ecosystem of web standards is very weak. Because each browser decides which standards to implement and, sometimes, how to do it. Because cross-platform testing web applications is very resource intensive even if you are using automation tools such as Selenium.

You don't have to install it to use it: http://chrome.angrybirds.com/

That one doesn't require Chrome, but it does require Flash!

I'm pretty sure FF4 supports everything that's needed to run a game like this, out of the box.

In Chrome it requires flash to play the sound (same as the plugin version). Everything else works fine without flash.

Why doesn't it just not play any sounds, then, instead of refusing to start the game? (FF4, no flash)

Given HTML5 Audio it makes you wonder whether a Flash requirement isn't partially a FU to Apple.

HTML5 audio sucks right now. It's a known problem (that might even be fixed in Chrome 13), but yeah, it's not ideal at all for the moment.

Further reading: http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2011/03/the-state-of-html5-audi...

That's a rather absurd theory, considering that making the free online version work well on iOS would reduce Apple's income from a very, very popular iOS game.

<audio> isn't meant for short, repetitive clips (which is what games do). There's a new API being built for this need, can't remember the name of it right now.

Firefox has the Audio Data API, Chrome has the Web Audio API.