When Google Chrome was first released, there were plenty of people who wondered what sort of things people would be able to do with it. Google (News – Alert), being one of the top computing companies in the world, was going to be offering a browser that would almost certainly be top of the line when it came to additional features. One of those features has just been found out in the form of the Packaged Apps functionality. 

The new kinds of packaged apps will actually be able to be downloaded through the Chrome browser alone and then installed on the computer like any other program. The apps will act much like any other Windows program, storing data on the actual harddrive and establishing a shortcut on the desktop if the user so chooses. 

"Packaged apps will no longer be tied to the browser," said Chrome Engineering Manager Erik Kay in a video about Chrome packaged apps. "Rather than running as a tab inside of Chrome, packaged apps can be launched from outside of Chrome, have their own top-level windows, and generally behave like first-class apps on the operating system.The user shouldn’t be aware your app was built with Web technologies."

The way these applications are designed to work is much the same way that HTML5 programs are built to work on any and all browsers. The Packaged Apps contain the HTML5 programming language as well as CSS3 for formatting and effects, and JavaScript for app execution. Despite these programming features that are usually used when talking about Web apps, Chrome’s Packaged Apps truly do behave just as any other installed program. They can also be deleted off of Windows the same way any other applications can be. Of course, while there is an installation process, Kay says that the apps work as a native app but they have the safety of a webpage.

With these kinds of applications becoming more popular, HTML5 looks like it might be branching out away from the Web and onto your desktop.

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