The new Chrome App Launcher: Google's backdoor into the offline world

On Friday, Google gave Windows users something that they’ve been pining for: A Start button. And even better than that, Google’s version keeps you on the desktop and actually opens a pop-up menu full of programs, unlike the nerfed Start button that’s slated to appear in the Windows 8.1 update.

No, Larry Page hasn’t decided to jump into the crowded Windows Start button replacement arena. Instead, Google’s engineers quietly dragged Chrome OS’s App Launcher—the Googlefied equivalent of a Start button—over to Chrome for Windows today. The seemingly simple addition is a major step in Google’s push to bring Web standards to walled gardens.

The Chrome App Launcher is exactly what you’d expect: A taskbar icon that lets you quick-launch Chrome browser apps, such as Gmail, the Play Store, Angry Birds, and yep, even Chrome itself. Simple, right? But the little launcher is a Trojan horse for much bigger ambitions—especially when paired with packaged Chrome apps.

Packaged apps are available now, but since Google has yet to highlight them in the Chrome Web Store, you might not be familiar with them. Packaged apps are programs built on the bones of the Chrome browser. They use traditional Web languages such as HTML5 and CSS, but they run as separate, standalone software that can also be used offline, unlike traditional browsers.

You could consider packaged apps to basically be desktop Web apps, as odd as that sounds.
“For quite some time, we’ve had a dichotomy between Web apps and native apps, and one of the things that sets them apart is the ability [for native apps] to be launched from the desktop and have a degree of persistence and independence from the browser,” says Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research. “The availability of the Chrome App Launcher for Windows helps to further blur the line.”

Hey, who put Chrome OS’s Start button where my Windows Start button used to be? The apps without tiny arrows in their lower-left corner are all packaged apps.

  With the arrival of packaged apps and the Chrome App Launcher, no longer will you need to connect to the Internet, open the Chrome browser, and launch the Web app you want to use. Now, there’s a Web-app Start button right on your taskbar, and the packaged apps don’t even require an Internet connection.

“Clearly, one of the missions of the whole Chrome initiative is to serve as an incentive for people to adopt HTML5 and create cross-platform or Web applications,” says Rubin. “People want to interact with their Web apps as easily as they do with their desktop apps. Having the [Chrome App Launcher] available helps to ease the transition.”

Each packaged app runs as its own instance, not as part of the main Chrome browser, as this look at several packaged apps in the Windows fast-switch interface shows. (Click to enlarge.)

It’s made even easier by the App Launcher’s Chrome tie-in. All your Chrome apps seamlessly travel with you to any Windows PC on which you’ve installed the Chrome App Launcher, even the locally stored package apps (though those take a few moments to download to new installations). Download a Chrome app once, and it’s available anywhere.

What’s more, the Chrome App Launcher lets you pin shortcuts for specific apps to the Windows taskbar or the desktop—mimicking native software functionality even further. It doesn’t matter whether the app is packaged or a Web native, either. Blurring the lines, indeed.

As a Web-focused company, Google gains whenever more people start using the Web more often. But beyond generally coaxing the world to Web services, Google has a direct interest in getting people in front of Google’s Web services. That’s the reason the Chrome App Launcher comes chock full of links to YouTube, Chrome, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Search, and the Chrome Web Store (whose third-party apps often include Google Ads).

”It looks like Google is defining the Chrome platform as what I’d call ‘Web Platform Plus,’” says IDC’s Hilwa.

  More notably, though they may appear as standalone offline programs, packaged apps can work only if you have Chrome installed. Not only are they built on top of the browser, but some of the advanced features being packed into packaged apps—such as in-app payment support or the ability to play nice with Fitbits and iTunes libraries—come courtesy of proprietary Google APIs, not open Web standards.
That’s a price you have to pay for running those apps closer to the metal, so to speak.

“[Packaged apps] provide APIs for accessing device capabilities, which is something that’s been lacking in Web applications for browsers,” IDC analyst Al Hilwa told TechHive earlier this year. “This brings web-app capabilities closer to the level of what some native platforms offer.”

It also means that while the Chrome App Launcher is indeed a force to spur general Web adoption to traditionally offline platforms, packaged apps in particular are inextricably tied to Chrome—which, in turn, makes Google’s browser-centric Chrome OS more appealing, too.

Creating Web app shortcuts with Chrome App Launcher. Hey, you’re not supposed to be able to do that! (Click to enlarge.)

  “It looks like Google is defining the Chrome platform as what I’d call ‘Web Platform Plus,’ and intends for Chrome OS and the Chrome browser to be a ‘platform on a platform’ on any device it is permitted to run on,” Hilwa told PCWorld in a separate interview.

Yes, folks, between the App Launcher and packaged apps, soon every notebook can be a Chromebook, even if it’s not a Chromebook. (The Chrome App Launcher was recently added to the OS X version of Chromium, the open-source version of the browser.)
Rubin sings a similar tune.
“The adoption of HTML5 and Web standards is the larger mission,” he says. “But of course, Google wants Chrome and the implementations of Web technologies that it has bet on to be the means of access. By making available the Chrome rendering engine, Google can integrate the technologies it’s endorsing or helping to develop, like the new Blink browser engine—particularly on Windows or OS X, where it helps further the implementation of those technologies where [Google] can’t control the default browser.”

In other words, the Chrome App Launcher is a way for Google to have its cake and eat it too. Google wants as many people as possible to embrace open Web standards, no doubt at least partially motivated by the desire to bring its services (read: ads) to as many eyeballs as possible. Open standards tend to be used by everyone, after all. But packaged apps bind their users to Chrome specifically, though Chrome is available far and wide and across multiple platforms.

That seems slightly ominous in the wake of Google’s transition from the open Google Talk to the proprietary Hangouts protocol.

But fear not: Chrome isn’t going to devour the desktop and the Web overnight. Google hasn’t even publicly published the Chrome for Windows App Launcher in the Chrome Web Store, and packaged apps are similarly obscured for everyone but developers. You need to have a direct link to find anything. Talk about obscure.
If you’re interested in seeing what the low-key yet portentous hubbub is about, you can download the Chrome App Launcher here. Once that’s done, head to Pocketables for a long list of direct links to Chrome packaged apps. Give some a whirl; it’s so seamless, you’d never even know that you were helping to tear down the wall between the online and the offline. 

Infiltration complete: Google's Chrome app launcher lands on Windows

After months of behind-the-scenes teases, Google appears to have quietly introduced the Chrome App Launcher in the stable version of Chrome for Windows. The Chrome OS feature—ported over to the Chrome for Windows developer channel in February—wasn’t available through a search of the Chrome Web Store or advertised on the site’s front page at this writing, but Windows users can install it now by navigating directly to the Chrome App Launcher page inside Chrome’s app store.

First spotted by Engadget, the new feature is Google’s incursion into the desktop PC, creating a self-sufficient Chrome ecosystem inside Microsoft’s OS. The Chrome App Launcher lets you directly fire up any Chrome Web app or packaged app right from the Windows taskbar—even when Chrome itself isn’t running.

Packaged apps are HTML 5-based standalone desktop apps based on Chrome that don’t look anything like your Web browser. There are no tabs, URL address bars, or bookmarks, but these apps do rely on Chrome’s underlying infrastructure and are installed via the Chrome Web Store.

Play Cut The Rope on your desktop with the Chrome packaged app. It’s still early days for packaged apps, but there are a number you can try out, such as a generic text editor and an IRC client, as well as known quantities like Cut the Rope, the Economist, and Weather Bug. For a list of interesting packaged apps to test see this post from Pocketables.

Like the app launcher, anyone using the stable version of Chrome will have to navigate to each packaged app directly, as they were not discoverable in the Chrome Web Store at this writing.

Google added a packaged apps section to the Chrome Web Store in May for anyone running the dev channel version of Chrome. But that section of the Web store had yet to go live Friday morning, despite the soft launch of the Chrome App Launcher.

The two features go together like peanut butter and jelly, so it’s odd that Google has made the app launch available without the new packaged apps section in the Web Store. Perhaps the search giant plans on officially rolling out the app launcher and the packaged apps section of the Web store later on Friday.

Launch Web sites and packaged apps even when Chrome isn’t running. Actually installing the Chrome App Launcher is a lot easier than it was when we first looked at the new Chrome feature in February. All you have to do now is agree to install the launcher and almost automatically it will show up in your taskbar. Earlier versions required you to install a packaged app first before you could install the app launcher.

So far the Chrome App Launcher is only available for Windows users in official builds of Google’s Web browser. In May, the search giant added the launcher to Chromium for Mac (the open source version of Chrome), while Linux users are still left on the sidelines.

Consumer shift to mobile devices boosts Google's revenue

Aided by consumers’ shift to mobile devices, Google’s second-quarter revenue increased by 19 percent to about $14 billion, the company announced Thursday.

The Internet company generated sales of $14.11 billion for the quarter, which ended June 30. The revenue excludes the commissions and fees that Google pays to other sites that run its ads. Taking those into account, the company’s second-quarter revenue was $11.1 billion.

The company’s second-quarter rise in revenue constitutes a moderate slowdown in revenue gains of 31 percent that Google reported in April, but is up 19 percent compared to the year-ago quarter.

Larry Page
Google also posted net income of $3.23 billion, or $9.54 a share, up roughly 16 percent from $2.79 billion, or $8.42 a share, in the second quarter of 2012. But net income dipped slightly from the $3.35 billion reported in the first quarter of this fiscal year.

Still, it was “a great quarter,” Google CEO Larry Page said in the company’s earnings announcement. “The shift from one screen to multiple screens and mobility creates tremendous opportunity for Google,” he said.
“With more devices, more information, and more activity online than ever, the potential to improve people’s lives even more is immense,” he added.

Google saw more mixed results within its advertising business. Paid clicks, or the clicks on search ads that advertisers pay for, increased approximately 23 percent over 2012’s second quarter.

However, the cost of paid clicks, or the money Google charges when someone clicks on an ad, fell by 6 percent compared to the same period last year.

Google-owned sites generated 68 percent of the company’s total revenue in the quarter, at $8.87 billion, Google reported, representing an 18 percent increase over 2012’s second quarter. Partner sites contributed revenue of $3.19 billion, or 24 percent of total company sales. “Other” revenue from Google was $1.05 billion, representing a 138 percent increase, the company said. It did not provide information about sources for that revenue.

Meanwhile, Google’s Motorola mobile revenue, which includes hardware, was $998 million, representing 7 percent of consolidated revenue for the quarter, the company reported, up from $843 million in the year-ago period.

Google bought Motorola Mobility last year for more than $12 billion; the closely watched Moto X smartphone is expected to launch this summer. 

Google's chances to obtain dotless 'http://search' domain are shrinking

Google's chances of obtaining the "http://search" domain name are shrinking after several committees affiliated with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently warned that dotless domain names could be harmful to the Internet.

Over the weekend, the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) issued the latest advisory about dotless domains, saying, among other things, that application protocols may have trouble processing them. Earlier in the week, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) issued its own warning about dotless domain names.

Google has shown interest in the dotless "http://search" domain in a letter sent to the ICANN board in April, in which it requested permission to expand its application for ".search" to run that generic top-level domain (gTLD) as a dotless domain. The letter was sent by the Charleston Road Registry, which Google owns.

"Google intends to operate a redirect service on the 'dotless' .search domain (http://search/) that, combined with a simple technical standard will allow a consistent query interface across firms that provide search functionality, and will enable users to easily conduct searches with firms that provide the search functionality that they designate as their preference," Google said in the letter.

However, if domains like this were to be used, they would not work as intended by Top Level Domain (TLD) operators in the vast majority of cases, the IAB said in an advisory published last week in which it strongly discouraged the use of these domain types.

In a standard system setup as recommended by the IETF, dotless domain names could be used as shortcuts to hosts within a local administration, the IAB said. They could be used, for example, for an intranet zone.

Users do not expect to be referred to the Internet when they enter a dotless domain, the IAB added.

Because dotless domains will not behave consistently they are potentially confusing for Internet users and can erode the stability of the global DNS, the IAB said.

They also cause security risks. "By attempting to change expected behavior, dotless domains introduce potential security vulnerabilities. These include causing traffic intended for local services to be directed onto the global Internet (and vice-versa), which can enable a number of attacks, including theft of credentials and cookies, cross-site scripting attacks, etc. As a result, the deployment of dotless domains has the potential to cause significant harm to the security of the Internet," according to the IAB.

Therefore, dotless domains should not be used at all. "In summary, the IAB believes that the current IETF recommendations against the use of dotless domains are important to the continued viability and success of the Internet, and strongly recommends that the Internet community strictly adhere to them," it said.

The IAB reached the same conclusion that the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) came to last February. The SSAC's report was one of the sources used for the IAB's advisory.

"Dotless domains will not be universally reachable and the SSAC recommends strongly against their use," the SSAC concluded in its report at the time.

Sending email to dotless domains would be a problem because, for example, standard-compliant mail servers would reject messages to addresses such as user@brand, the SSAC said.

The SSAC also warned of security risks: "For example, until very recently most Certificate Authorities would issue a Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) certificate for any dotless hostname with no validation (under the assumption that such hostnames, by definition, were not globally reachable). If dotless domains are allowed, these historical Certificate Authority Issuance practices pose a significant security risk to the privacy and integrity of HTTPS communications," the SSAC warned.

In its own memo, dated July 13, the IETF concluded that implementations of application protocols can exhibit unexpected behavior in processing dotless domains.

Dotless domains also do not fit "within the rule of least surprise," the IETF said. "The rule of least surprise is a principle which states that it is better to always do the less surprising thing," it said.

The IETF however only looks at technical mechanisms. Whether dotless domains are harmful is a policy matter, the IETF said in the memo.

The memo is also an Internet Draft document that expires in January 2014. Internet Drafts are IETF working documents that are valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or made obsolete by other documents at any time, so they must be seen as a "work in progress," the IETF said.

A Google spokesman reached on Monday did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google's future Office killer now available in Chrome OS dev channel

Google now offers the ability to edit Office documents within Chrome OS, although the new feature is currently far less capable than the document-editing capabilities of Google’s own Google Apps.

 

However, there’s one reason why this is worth checking out: the service is the first time that Google’s QuickOffice has made an appearance.

 

In June of 2012, Google bought QuickOffice, an office suite for Android and iOS, for an undisclosed sum. “Today, consumers, businesses, and schools use Google Apps to get stuff done from anywhere, with anyonem, and on any device,” Google Engineering Director Alan Warren explained then in a company blog. “Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats, and we’ll be working on bringing their powerful technology to our Apps product suite.”

 

That sums it up quite nicely: for now, Google Apps provides the functionality and QuickOffice provides the compatibility aspect. Since the purchase, Google has worked to bring the QuickOffice technology to its other properties, namedly Chrome OS.

 

Over time, analysts have suspected that QuickOffice will become the face of Google Docs. Before the Google I/O developers conference in May, Google sources said that the company has been “dog fooding,” or internally deploying, QuickOffice within a browser.

 

Sundar Pichai, Google’s Chrome chief, said at the launch of the Google Chromebook Pixel. that it would take two to three months to add QuickOffice to the Chrome OS-powered Pixel, but that it would eventually arrive. That time, apparently, is now.

 

Microsoft has already taken aim at what it perceives as compatibility problems with Google Apps, even before Microsoft released Office Mobile for the iPhone.

 

What makes QuickOffice such a threat to Office? If QuickOffice comes close enough to the functionality that Microsoft Office itself offers, users may begin to question why they’re paying hundreds of dollars for dedicated Office suites or for an Office 365 subscription.

 

Google isn’t close at all to this point yet. Not only is QuickOffice available in the unstable “developer” channel of Chrome OS, but the functionality is far behind what even Google Docs offers. It sure looks pretty, though.

 

Compare this QuickOffice screenshot:

Google QuickOfficedocument editing within the Chrome OS Chrome browser.

with the standard Google Apps screenshot:

A standard Google Docs document.

You’ll notice immediately that Google Apps contains many more editing options than the current QuickOffice version, which lacks support for tables and graphs, as well as support for scripts.

 

Users can also view and edit Excel documents within the browser, according to The Next Web, which earlier reported the news, citing developer Francois Beaufort as the original source. So far, PowerPoint compatibility has not been included.

 

To try it yourself, you’ll need to own a Chromebook or Chromebox. Make sure you’re on the dev channel, with version 29.0.1547.2 or later. (Note that the dev channel is considered “unstable,” so odd things could happen if you use it. Then type in “about://flags” (no quotes) into the URL line, which should bring up a long list of options. “Enable document editing” will allow you to edit the documents after a quick restart.

 

Eventually, these changes should come to the main (stable) channel of Chrome, meaning that most users will be able to natively edit Office documents. At that point, if Google increases QuickOffice’s capabilities, look out.