Oct 16, 2018 Yes, it’s weird, but it’s an easy way for Microsoft to grow its app store on Windows. Support for installable PWAs has been available since Chrome 67 on Chrome OS, and is coming to macOS and Linux with Chrome 72. If you’re a Mac or Linux user, you can test this feature today by enabling the #enable-desktop-pwas flag. Offering more than 100 shades of professional quality cosmetics for All Ages, All Races, and All Genders. File recovery for mac. Enjoy free shipping and returns on all orders.

The latest developer channel release of Google Chrome for Mac houses a number of flags that change the way ‘Hosted Apps’ are handled.

We saw in December how Google plans to make Hosted Apps a consistent part of the Chrome OS and Windows experience using new ‘window frames’ housing navigation controls and URL information.

Oct 16, 2018 Yes, it’s weird, but it’s an easy way for Microsoft to grow its app store on Windows. Support for installable PWAs has been available since Chrome 67 on Chrome OS, and is coming to macOS and Linux with Chrome 72. If you’re a Mac or Linux user, you can test this feature today by enabling the #enable-desktop-pwas flag.
May 27, 2016 Although leading Web browsers now share most of the same features, important differences remain. Erik Eckel explores whether Google Chrome or Apple's Safari best serves Mac.

Running these web-based applications, glorified bookmarks that are now listed under ‘Websites’ on the Chrome Web Store, alongside offline savvy Chrome Apps on OS X is harder than on other desktop operating systems (Mac builds of Chrome don’t use the Aura UI framework).

But Chrome is tackling the experiential differential. Three changes in the latest Chrome Dev Channel release make using Hosted Apps on OS X easier, two in the form of flags, and one by default:

‘Hosted App Shims’ — app launchers for Spotlight, Launchpad, Dock
‘On Quit Notification’ — stops Hosted Apps closing when Chrome is quit
Navigation controls in menu bar — back, forward and reload options

Before we take a closer look at each change in turn, remember that (as with all experimental features) what’s listed below is subject to change and is not guaranteed to filter down to stable channels.

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Hosted App Shims

Chrome Apps can be launched from pretty much anywhere on OS X. They appear in the Chrome App Launcher, Spotlight, Launchpad and Finder, and lodge a separate entry in the Dock like a regular native Mac app.

When set to run in their own window, Hosted Apps (like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, etc.) currently behave differently. Their launchers appear in the Chrome App Launcher only and are not listed as separate or pinnable entries in the Dock.

The new “mac app shim” flag in the latest Chrome Dev builds fixes these issues in one swoop. It gifts newly installed url apps — note the ‘newly installed’ bit; it doesn’t yet affect those already installed — their own independent app shortcut, icon and OS presence.

That means you can switch between open apps in the Dock and launch them from Spotlight, Launchpad, Alfred, and so on.

Navigation Controls

Navigating Hosted Apps set to run in their own window is easier in the latest dev build. Basic navigation controls are now listed in the menu bar. These are History > back, forward and View > Reload.

Background Mode Notification

In current builds you can quit Chrome and all Hosted Apps at the same time. But say you’re midway through working in Pixlr Editor or a Word Online document – that wouldn’t be ideal.

With the ‘Display a notification when quitting Chrome if hosted apps are currently running’ flag enabled in the latest Chrome for Mac Dev builds you get a warning prompt when attempting to close the browser with apps in the background .

This warning prompt is already in use for Chrome Apps.

Chrome App Integration on OS X Is Nothing New

Google began trialling Finder integration for Chrome Apps on OS X last year and more recently added the ability to open Google Drive files from the website directly in local apps, with all changes made being synced back to the cloud.

Hosted Apps — or “websites” as Google now calls them — remain glorified bookmarks, even with this new set of system integration. But don’t count them out entirely.

Google’s working on new initiatives, like Service Workers, to offer powerful new features to “websites”. While largely targeted to mobile use cases (i.e., a website can run offline and update in the background, like an app can), expect to reap benefits on the desktop side, too.

For some Web-based services, it’s far more appropriate to use the term “app” than “site” because they do things, rather than just presenting static information. And in fact, most such sites — like Google Docs, Trello, and Strava, to name a few I use — have a dedicated app in iOS.

Chrome Site As App Mac 2017

But such apps usually aren’t written for the Mac. Before the focus on iOS apps, that was understandable, but now it’s downright odd. If you’re a company with a Web app that has millions of desktop users, wouldn’t you want to provide a native experience rather than competing with every other tab in a Web browser? Apparently not, but from the user perspective, if you use a particular Web app all the time, aren’t you tired of hunting it down in your browser’s tabs or bookmarks?

That’s the point of a site-specific browser on the Mac — to free a Web app from the Web browser, and turn it into something that looks, walks, and quacks like a native app. And you don’t need any help from a Web app developer to do it.

Mailplane is the best known dedicated site-specific browser for the Mac, providing a native app experience for Gmail and Google Calendar (see “Zen and the Art of Gmail, Part 4: Mailplane,” 16 March 2011). And the now-defunct RocketDocs did the same for Google Docs (see “RocketDocs Brings Coherence to Google Docs,” 8 July 2013).

For years, making your own site-specific browser on the Mac required Fluid, which builds its apps around WebKit. It’s free, although a $4.99 license purchase provides a few extra features, like full-screen mode and per-app cookie storage. But Fluid relies on an old version of WebKit that isn’t compatible with current versions of Google’s Web apps (and perhaps others). If it works for you, great.

The solution I prefer relies instead on Google Chrome, and has the benefit of supporting Chrome extensions within each site-specific browser that you create. Such extensions might include 1Password and LastPass, so you don’t have to copy passwords, or extensions that extend Gmail or Google Docs, for instance. You can install them individually or sign in to Chrome to sync all extensions, settings, and bookmarks over from your main Chrome installation.

Before I get to the best way of making these site-specific browsers, a little history. Chrome includes site-specific browser functionality via a Create Application Shortcut menu item. Unfortunately, Google exposes this capability in only the Windows and Linux versions, not on the Mac. Back in 2010, Bracken King came up with a shell script that made it possible to create Chrome site-specific browsers on the Mac, and Mait Vilbiks then turned it into the AppleScript-based createGcApp that eliminated the need to fuss with permissions and work in Terminal. This worked, but the apps it created were a little funky — notably Keyboard Maestro had trouble differentiating them from Chrome, so it was hard to assign keyboard shortcuts to launch them or work with them in other ways. I don’t recommend either of these solutions. Iphone app battery usage.

Further spelunking around the Internet revealed an updated version of King’s shell script written by Leonard Lin that didn’t suffer problems with Keyboard Maestro and other utilities, but it too required fussing in Terminal. Luckily, you don’t need to mess with it either, because it was turned into the AppleScript-based Make Chrome SSB app (packaged on Github as osx-chrome-ssb-gui-1.0.0.dmg), this time by Github user dmarmor. (This happened in January 2015, which is nice to see, since so little e