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Google Is Building a Way To Launch Chrome Apps Without Installation
An anonymous reader writes "Google really wants Chrome apps to take off. Not only has the company added rich notifications, in-app payments, and an app launcher into its browser, but now it's developing ephemeral apps that launch by just clicking a link. There are two separate components here. Ephemeral apps (you can enable this under the chrome://flags/#enable-ephemeral-apps flag) let you try a Chrome app before installing it. Linkable ephemeral apps (under the chrome://flags/#enable-linkable-ephemeral-apps flag) meanwhile allow you to launch said apps from hyperlinks."
The truest words ever spoken on the subject were penned by Nicholas Petreley, the IT industry columnist, who opined that:
1) There should not be a "registry" or an :"install" program.
2) Everything needed to run $App should reside in C:\$App.
This of course would enable $App to be copied freely from machine to machine, which is probably why there is a Windows Registry.
Am I the only one thinking that Google are basically making Chrome into another VM? Its "apps" are programs that the Chrome VM can run, JavaScript is the main language you use to code stuff for it, but that can even be compiled into obscured JS which is about as readable as bytecode (or less), the DOM is the mechanism you use to create the UI, etc. Apart from being arguably faster, what are the fundamental differences between what Google wants Chrome to be, and Java?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Alternatively, "chrapps" for short.
If I remember correctly, Microsoft did this years ago, although.... It was the exact opposite: apps would install without launching them.
Since it's Genesis 3:14, representing pi, we can gather that the serpent's original shape was circular. What comes to mind when you think circular? The google chrome logo of course! The fall of humanity was caused by Adam being tempted by chrome to click the devil's ephemeral app link on his apple macbook. The proof is all there.
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I'm as guilty as anyone else, but when MS windows did this it was a major security problem, is this really any different?
Launch a program by clicking a link? Did we not call people retards every time they did this?
It seems like every new platform just repeats the same crap from every previous platform. Vendor bloatware should have been the blatant warning sign.
It still becomes a brick when you have no wi-fi or you don't have an over-priced GSM subscription.
Actually, that's a difference between Chrome Apps and web pages... it's up to the App developer to code for it, but if they do the work Apps can work just fine offline, and the data model[*] is such that changes made offline can almost always be merged seamlessly to the online copy when a data connection becomes available, even if someone else has modified the online copy in the meantime.
[*] I haven't looked at it in detail, but I attended a talk about App development a couple of years ago, in which the presenter explained that all documents are managed as a sequence of changes and that the current version is always constructed by applying the change history. I believe there's also infrastructure for caching snapshots at points in time, so the current version can be constructed from the latest snapshot plus subsequent changes, but the snapshots are only considered caches. This makes for a little more complex development model, but it's gives you arbitrary undo, full document history and is necessary for real-time collaboration.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Want-O-Meter(tm) switched on? Check.
Batteries? Fully charged.
Sensitivity setting? Max!
Reading? Not the faintest fuck of a flicker.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This isn't true at all... I made a "Mirror" app yesterday (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mirror-tds/fapfdhoailemkonegpjdhngmjfpmdjdj) on my Chromebook which works just as well as a "flipped webcam image" offline as it does online.
My other app to graph relationships between objects (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tensity-grapher/keomiemppflejbjkafeaepbdhigggifd) also works offline.
As does Google Docs (Offline), as the calculator, as does a timer, and my calendar, and many of the apps I have installed (I'm frequently offline).
I don't have a GSM subscription (I use wifi), Google Chrome doesn't sell such a subscription (try it with your own laptop, with whatever wifi/service you have), and many apps work without internet connection.
I am a Chrome app developer (a bad one, but whatever), and all of the apps I've made work offline.
Put everything in the cloud! WebOS is the future! HTML5 apps should replace native apps!
Everyone who ever agreed with any of this crap has only themselves to blame. Also, no bitching when they change the layout/functionality/something else you can't control because IT'S NOT YOUR SYSTEM.
I called my brother on this multiple times and now he finally see the "cloud apps" for what they are, a farce!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It was a bad idea for Windows to autoplay CDs and automatically run any attachment sent to you in an e-mail, because it can't sandbox apps in a foolproof way. Chrome can't sandbox webapps in a foolproof way either, so it's a bad idea to be able to run random programs by clicking on a link.
It mostly works the way that you have represented. The majority of your post in on the back-end propagation of updates, which works well, and obviously doesn't work when offline. Generally apps work offline by default (like a saved webpage), unless your app needs to reach to an online site.
Even Linux gets the occasional security update for a privilege escalation issue. I wish them luck if they choose to depend on their sandbox.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Windows allowed the running of applications from Internet Explorer, remember? You even get the option still of running an application or saving it to disk when you click on a link to an executable program. And we've spent what, the better part of 2 decades trying to figure out reliable ways of PREVENTING this! Because it's so commonly abused to get people to run malware and other undesirable software. And now we want to make another attempt at letting people run anything J. Random Blackhat throws their way? Thanks, but no thanks.
So, after the adblocker we now also need the appblocker when browsing.
While niggers in their native setting are still chucking spears at each other and niggers taken out of their native setting are chucking bullets and gang signs at each other. But you're not supposed to notice. That would make you a bad terrible person and we will brand you "racist" to make you a modern heretic
I'm gonna go with another theory: repeatedly using 'nigger' in a sentence to describe dark-skinned people is the likely cause of you being branded a 'racist'.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
and then you can reuse the folder locating code across multiple applications.
And thats what the registry does. You just talk to it, and the system stores the data where it wants, even going so far as to sync it between multiple machines automatically.
And that differs from just using the filesystem interface how?
You seem to want to reinvent the wheel because you're too ignorant to use the existing solution, or just too much of a fanboy to see the forest for the trees.
There's a third option, and also, you lack perspective.
Once upon a time, computer files had formats. Along came UNIX, with the concept that everything's just a file, and parsing the contents is the job of the program. And with libraries, you could feasibly abstract that away, and not have to write it over and over again. This enabled portability in a way that you didn't get with competing mainframe systems, and the modern age of computing was born. There's the perspective. Note that Windows shares this approach to file formats, as does every other modern operating system. While every significant operating system provides a facility for decoding certain types of media data, in every case it's simply a set of userspace libraries.
The third option is that you want to take advantage of the simplicity of the filesystem-based approach. Systems as early as Apollo included the broadly networked filesystem, but there are and have been lots of other systems throughout time. For instance, when the Windows registry was still a new thing, people were using automounted NFS to centralize whole programs including their configuration files.
The truth is that there's benefits to both approaches. GNOME took the Windowslike approach and built a registry of their own, because they agree with you that it's desirable. Everyone else stuck with flat files, and though some of them have been given dimensionality again with XML they remain nominally (even sometimes fully) human-readable.
The real argument against the registry database is that with modern filesystems and networking there's really no good reason to use a special facility. The filesystem is a hierarchical database, and the only reason it was necessary for Windows to invent another one is that at the time, their filesystems were all shit. Today, Microsoft has perfectly adequate and highly-featured filesystems, but the registry persists from the time when they did not, and today it is a pain in the ass that doesn't need to be there. The UNIX way has been proven out, and all the benefits of the Windows registry have been eliminated as UNIX (and Unixlike) systems have gained high-performance filesystems which can handle many small files efficiently and with acceptable or even excellent performance.
TL;DR: The registry came about because Microsoft was bad at both filesystems and networking, and today it is an utterly useless and rubbish concept which actually requires more maintenance at every level, not less.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, they can't. There are exploits that can break out of VMs.