A common complaint about the Chrome OS user interface looks to be getting addressed. Google’s
François Beaufort pointed out a new experimental feature in Chromium that lets users save a website shortcut to the Chrome App Launcher. The feature can be enabled in the developer channel of Chrome OS, Chromium and in Chrome Canary.
I reverted my Chromebook Pixel from the Stable to Dev channel to check this out and it works as advertised. After typing chrome://flags in my address bar, I enabled the enable-streamlined-hosted-apps option. Now, whenever I want to save a site shortcut to the App Launcher, I simply click the “Create App from this website” option under the Tools menu. Here’s one I created for Amazon, now in the bottom left of my launcher:
Clicking on the new Amazon icon takes me to a new Chrome window for Amazon but it’s more like a standalone browser window — similar to a Chrome app — than a traditional browser tab.
While the Chrome browser still has traditional bookmarks, this potential feature would be a nice addition; and not just for web sites. Web apps that you don’t install through the Chrome Web Store are another good candidate.
This approach certainly isn’t new: I remember using Prism and Fluid to do this in 2007. Since Chrome OS doesn’t have a traditional desktop to store shortcuts for sites and web apps, it will be nice to see the function accomplish the same in the App Launcher.
Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
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