When Chrome was first introduced, one of the neat little features was the ability to use the browser to directly launch web apps from your computer’s desktop. This feature was called “Application Shortcuts” and can be accessed from the Page menu.
At first—and for a long time after that—I didn’t see the point. For example, launching Gmail in such a way still results in launching an instance of the browser, and if you are a cookie fanatic, you’ve noticed that the app window shares its session with other launched windows.
Today decided to take a second look at Application Shortcuts when I noticed the menu option mission from Google Chrome on Ubuntu, and surprisingly discovered they might actually be useful. With the example of Gmail, there is no native desktop application for Gmail so my options are either to use a web browser or some other desktop email client like Evolution, which I hate using since it ties me down to a single computer. Running Gmail as an application through Chrome surpasses this barrier and gives me more flexibility with my web browsing.
Getting to the entire point of this post though: Application Shortcuts are now available for the Linux build of Chromium. When I noticed this feature was missing I hopped onto IRC channel #chromium and asked about it. A nice developer promptly responded saying it was added to the SVN trunk a couple days ago. Sure enough, I ran updates and there it was. So, I tried it out. It’s not the best thing in the world, but Gmail is a lot better ran as a chromium application.
[...] http://jpiche.com/2009/08/google-chromes-application-shortcuts-now-for-linux/ [...]