What are Chrome apps vs plugins vs extensions and how to develop them

Question

I am trying to understand about Chrome (browser) development. I am very new to this and trying to figure out where to start in order to develop for Chrome Browser.

Just have a couple of questions:

• What is the difference between Chrome Browser apps vs. plugins vs. extensions (not sure, if this question make sense. But, hope you got what I am asking for)
• What kind of applications can I develop for Chrome Browser
• What technologies do I need to learn in order to develop for Chrome Browser.

Answer 1

To answer your first question this explains the differences between apps and extensions (I think there's no better way to explain their nature): https://developers.google.com/chrome/web-store/articles/apps_vs_extensions

What do you mean with "what kind of apps"? You can develop both hosted and packaged apps if is that what you intended, give a look at this: https://developers.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/index

Anyway the easiest way to start would be by building an extension, how-tos and good documentation makes it good to start with:

http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted.html

Answer 2

Just to add to the above answer which was missing difference between Plugin and Extension is:

Plugin is a third-party library that is plugged-in to the browser and allows for being embedded on a webpage. It affects only the web page that is using the plugin.

Extensions change the browser UI, add menus or change overall look of the browser and can process each page that gets loaded.

So to sum it up - plugins add functionality and extra features to a particular webpage while extensions add functionality and features to the whole browser and change the behavior of the browser.

Answer 3

Just to add on new information since people may continue to hit this question: Chrome has basically deprecated plugins as of March 2017 (Chrome 57). If you go to chrome://plugins now, you won't see anything (you used to see a list of installed plugins with enable-disable links like for extensions).

It seems the reasoning is that the only plugins they actually wanted to allow you to enable/disable are Flash and PDF Viewer, both of which were moved to the Settings menus (if they weren't already there, not sure). The rest are considered to be integral parts of the browser. https://www.ghacks.net/2017/01/29/google-removes-plugin-controls-from-chrome/

Makes things a bit simpler to think about now.