Google pushing for Web applications to act natively for its Chrome OS
There has been an unexceptional rise in the popularity of web applications, due to the efforts put forward by Google with its chromium project. A lot of this can be acknowledged by the fact that users are now looking for a more diversified experience with real time communication, which can be seen aca replacement for Desktop OS. There has been some substantial work that has been done in that aspect with a Web store for Chrome browser. Although this type of Software as a service model has seen a substantial acceptance, still there are many aspect that make it redundant, like in the case when user does not have internet connection. This is why Google has been moving forward to a more robust model by incorporating "packaged apps"
which primarily live offline and give the
essence of traditional native programs. This new channel is only available to the developer channel in the chrome web store and developers have been implementing this strategy to see if it is feasible enough for a more wider launch. Google has implemented some changes in its chrome browser implementation recently where it added an option in the browser by which users can allow web applications to stay active even after the browser is closed. This would give a native support to the web apps and they won’t have to fully rely on browser for them to operate. Moreover, earlier you had to have the URL if you wanted to download any chrome application from the
Web Store, but now there has been a distinction that has been made between the applications for making it easy for users. The older apps that aren't packaged apps have been moved into a "Websites" category in the store, making it easy to distinguish between native and web applications. Google has been highly forthcoming in helping chrome web developers to leverage upon web tools to create highly intuitive
HTML5 based applications. This
implementation is another way for Google to bring chrome OS to the mainstream for a full time use as it is trying to put its foot in desktop OS market. Internet has changed the way web applications are perceived as most of the code that is involved is allowed to run locally which eases a lot of burden over the resources. With these packaged applications getting implemented, Chrome OS would surely get a huge boost as majority of the functionality would be available offline. Although it won't help the cause of Google, which needs the users to be online 24x7 for their data to its revenue churning advertisement model, Native applications have become the need of the hours for Desktop OS. It is expected that the Search Giant would unveil this new feature in the upcoming Google OS developers' conference in a couple weeks where the company would be putting forward the usability and flexibility of Chrome OS as a dominating OS.