Google has announced a very big decision regarding Chrome extensions today. They are planning to kill chrome apps for operating systems like Windows, Linux, and Mac in the upcoming year 2018. Though google chrome extensions will not be affected along with themes with this change. And also Chrome applications will continue the long-running legacy to be a part of chrome os.
Basically, there are two types of apps that actually runs on google browser.
The first one is the type of apps which are known as Hosted apps which contain a single manifest file which is limited by restrictions of web pages security.
And the second type is Packaged apps which were first available in the month of September in the year 2013. These packaged apps have features which are very similar to the desktop apps and have the ability to interact with the local storage.
The company has decided to remove chrome app launcher from its own browser in this year in the month of July on these platforms Windows, Linux and Mac. Also in the year 2015, December google removed the notification center from chrome itself. And now this giant company is planning to do the same directly to the applications too.
Google explains about this saying “For a while there were certain experiences the web couldn’t provide, such as working offline, sending notifications, and connecting to hardware. We launched Chrome apps three years ago to bridge this gap. Since then, we’ve worked with the web standards community to enable an increasing number of these use cases on the web. Developers can use powerful new APIs such as service worker and web push to build robust Progressive Web Apps that work across multiple browsers.
When Google was asked why it is choosing to start deprecating Chrome apps then the reply was “We wanted to wait until a lot of the Chrome Apps functionality was brought to the web,” a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat. “We know there are still gaps on the web platform and that all of Apps functionality hasn’t been replicated, but we’re working on it and want to collaborate with developers and other browsers to identify what are the most important APIs we could be adding”.
Continuing with the explanation they said “Today, approximately 1 percent of users on Windows, Mac, and Linux actively use Chrome packaged apps and most hosted apps are already implemented as regular web apps. Chrome on Windows, Mac, and Linux will, therefore, be removing support for packaged and hosted apps over the next two years”.
Google New Apps will not be available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users, by the year 2018 but the existing apps can be used. The only way to get Google’s new apps from 2018 is to use Chrome OS.
