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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

And by 'app distribution' they mean 'a link to a website'. -sigh-

Google asked for this, so I can't blame the companies that take advantage of it, but I really wish Chrome apps were just apps that installed in the browser instead. Offline-able preferred.

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But offline is kind of what Google is pushing against with Chrome OS, so seems that would be contrary to their goals.

Except that, given that offline support will be reintroduced into Google Docs sometime this summer and that Chrome Web Apps actually do have offline support, they're doing a pretty bad job of that.

What do you mean by "apps that installed in the browser instead"? Instead of what? Instead of being web-apps?

There are 2 ways to publish on the chrome web store.

1) A link to a website, with the link hidden. Going to the actual website provides the exact same experience.

2) A packaged app that is downloaded and contained within the browser. (It may or may not use a web API for some functionality.)

#1 is basically just a bookmark. There's nothing special about it.

In my mind, there isn't much difference technically the big question is whether users want a different experience. A certain percentage want a more fluid user flow similar to a native / desktop app. This web app seems to accomplish that using Google web toolkit and decent page load times.

The fact that "linked" apps have access to unlimited caching is a huge win for user experience.

Right, but since Chrome's app environment is really just the browser's javascript and rendering environment (perhaps with access to a few special javascript apis) there isn't really anything special about #2 either. In fact, apps that fit into your #1 and #2 bins are the same thing modulo caching.

Apps using browser as runtime environment, they may or may not be web-apps itself. See XULRunner. And http://pencil.evolus.vn for example.

I don't think a XULRunner-like environment has ever been on the Chrome roadmap though. Chrome's been pretty consistent in its intention to expose only v8 + webkit as its extension and app environment, although things like native client are blurring this somewhat.

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