Remember the ‘Ephemeral App’ feature Chrome was toying with last year? Well, it hasn’t gone away. In fact, it’s about to get put front and centre in Chrome.
The latest Windows builds of Google Chrome Canary & Chromium add an ‘install’ item to the jump list of ‘Ephemeral Apps’.
Ephemeral Apps are regular Chrome or ‘Hosted’ Apps that can be opened from a web page or link without having to be ‘installed’ locally.
The feature, which is in development and hidden behind flags, will allow, for example:
“…links to Chrome Web Store app detail pages in Google search results [to] launch the app rather than navigate to the detail page.”
Adding an install option to the jump list of such apps on Windows will allow users to quickly ‘keep’ an app trialled should they decide they like it.
There is still some work to be done around the feature as a whole, not least of which is making users aware of any permissions required by an app, but this latest change shows that work is continuing to progress nicely.