In August I wrote about Application Shortcuts for Chrome and noted that this new concept had the potential of being useful since I don’t like using standard desktop clients for email due to their lack of full Gmail support (like labels and the archive). Now having taken a further look, I’m not so convinced.
Application shortcuts are created by clicking on the “Page” button and selecting “Create Application Shortcuts…”. If you select to create a shortcut on the desktop, Chrome then creates the Application Shortcut and puts it on the desktop. All this is simple enough, but what it actually does is make a shortcut to Chrome at the current page and passes the --app flag.
I invite you to try this for yourself with something like Gmail and see what you think. When launched, a Chrome window is open without the tab bar or address bar. The confusing part is that internally, it is treated like a normal Chrome process. So cookies are shared with any open tabs in a normal Chrome window. Why would I want that? If this is supposed to be a Gmail App, wouldn’t I want cookies to be separate? What if someone else needs to check their email quick and I have the App open? I get logged off in the App and their session is replaces mine.
The Chromium bug list has a feature request for this, but it hasn’t received much attention.