Hands on with Google’s Chrome Web Store

Google launched the Chrome Web Store yesterday during a press briefing, during which the search giant also demonstrated its upcoming Chrome OS platform. The Web Store allows users to “install” Web applications, making them easily accessible from Chrome’s new tab page.

The Chrome Web Store is part of Google’s effort to turn the Web into a viable computing platform. It is intended to make useful Web tools more discoverable and enable Web application developers to take advantage of conventional commercial software distribution models.

The Chrome Web Store is modeled after popular mobile application stores and offers a similar set of features. It prominently displays featured applications and allows users to browse through available software by category. It supports ratings, reviews, search, and all of the other features that you’d expect to see in an application store.

Chrome applications

I tested about a dozen of the “applications” to get a feel for the user experience. The vast majority of the applications that I tested functioned simply as links to regular webpages—very few offered a truly application-like user experience. The few that were designed to look like native applications often felt like glitzy tech demos and were substantially less functional than the equivalent websites.

One example is Amazon’s Windowshop program, a full-page Flash applet that provides a thumbnail grid for browsing Amazon’s products. The Windowshop user interface borrows heavily from the iPad and looks like it was engineered largely for touchscreen flick-and-tap interaction. I can’t really imagine why anybody would want to use it on a device without a touchscreen. It exposes a lot less information than the regular Amazon website and isn’t as practical for navigation.

During Google’s press briefing, Amazon also demonstrated its upcoming Kindle reader application for the Web. There was a bit of snickering from the audience when the presenter was having difficulty selecting a particular book with the Kindle application’s vastly overwrought coverflow-like book selector. Again, it looked like a ham-handed tablet interface adaption rather than a native desktop application.

In fairness to Amazon, it’s important to note that the Kindle application hasn’t even been made fully public yet and the Windowshop tool is still an early beta. These are still somewhat experimental and aren’t even remotely close to final.

Of the applications that I tested, the one that impressed me the most was the New York Times reader. It’s built with HTML, has smooth animated transitions, a simple and intuitive user interface, and outstanding keyboard accessibility. The right-hand sidebar has a list of categories and the main view displays the stories in the current category. When you select a story, the full content will be displayed. It is configurable and offers several vastly different views, demonstrating the advantages that a Web browser offers for adjustable presentation.

One of the subtle niceties of the New York Times application is the extent to which it respects standard browser functionality. For example, when you resize the window or use the browser’s standard keyboard shortcuts to change the font size, the NYT app will reflow and repaginate everything to accommodate the change. Text selection and copying also worked exactly as expected. If you right-click a headline and use the standard browser context menu to copy the link, it will copy the regular NYT website URL for the article instead of some wonky application-specific URL that can’t be shared. The whole user experience was excellent, far superior to that of the NYT Android application.