Your thoughts on "deploying" a web application to a desktop by wrapping it in a google chrome window?

Question

I have a particular web application that like most others, has to account for different browsers. It's starting to become particularly unwieldy and we've considered just telling users not to use IE so we can be done with it (it's an internal app - we can do this).

When I was setting up a Google Apps account, I noticed that you can provide a link to your users that will essentially "deploy" the Google Applications (Mail, Docs, Calendar, etc.) to a user's machine. It looks like it installs a cut-down version of Chrome to run these web apps inside toolbar-less Chrome windows.

We are now wondering whether it's possible to "deploy" our web app in a similar way. Could we provide an installer that does a similar thing as the Google Apps installer? That is:

• Install Chrome
• Setup a Chrome application shortcut to go to our web app (it's just a shortcut to Chrome with an --app parameter)

Has anyone considered this or better yet, have you done it? Can it even be done?

Update: It seems you may be able to run the standalone installer in silent mode to do step one.

Update 2: Or not.

Answer 1

Adobe's Air is based off webkit (like chrome) and will allow you ship your web application as a windows or mac application. Since it is webkit your site should render very similar to how it does in chrome.

http://www.adobe.com/products/air/?promoid=3tv350_5135L

You should also check out titanium, it does something very similar:

http://www.appcelerator.com/

Answer 2

Use node-webkit. You get same run-time as Chromium and you can disable node if you don't need it.

Create package.json:

{
  "name": "nw-demo",
  "main": "http://example.com/index.html"
}

main: Points to a Url.

App is delivered, cached exactly like in a browser. No need to install browser. Disable location bar. User can click on an icon. You can control the viewport. You can also disable some of the Javascript security sandbox and can get native access (Although you may want to keep your app purely web).

There are good number of tools to support your workflow. Gurnt, Karma-Nodewebkit launcher etc.