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Remember IE6? That was back in the day before tabbed browsers were mainstream. Back then, you either had one website open at a time or had a mess of browser window icons cluttering up your taskbar: one for each site that was open. It sucked. But tabs solved all that. Tabs allowed many MANY sites to be open simultaneously in a single window. Woohoo! Then Google Chrome came out, taking tabbed browsing to a whole new level. Tabs weren’t merely a fixture within the browser window anymore… they WERE the browser window! We could put them where we wanted, when we wanted, in any order we wanted. But lately I’ve been getting a sneaky feeling that Chrome is moving ever so slightly backward toward the archaic IE6 days. When Application Shortcuts were first introduced, I was confused. They were basically bookmarks you could place on your desktop, start menu, and taskbar. What in the world was the point of that? I find it nice to have all my bookmarks in one convenient location: my browser. Worse, application shortcuts launch sites into their own dedicated windows. But wasn’t the whole single-site-per-window thing a major reason why we moved to tabbed browsing in the first place?

Ah, but it turns out there are a few good uses for dedicated browser windows. Very few, I think, but the point is that they’re not entirely useless. For those sites that you’re constantly fiddling with, it does become something of an inconvenience to figure out which browser window contains that specific tab, then opening that window, then going to the tab and conducting your fiddling. The one site where this is true for me is Rdio.com. I use it like any other media player: continuously changing what I’m listening to, adding songs to my queue, etc, etc. And it’s nice knowing that I can instantly bring that window into the foreground by pressing the Windows Logo Key and the number 4. When I’m done, I can use the same shortcut to minimize it again. Very convenient. (Note that that keyboard shortcut is specific to Windows 7.)

With that concession in mind, it still seems to me that Chrome’s application shortcuts hark back to IE6-style browsing in ways that are just silly. For example, there’s a Gmail “web app” listed in the new Chrome web store. Confused about what additional functionality this included, I installed it a few minutes ago. It’s just a bookmark. That’s it. A friggin’ bookmark. A REALLY BIG bookmark that appears in your “new tab” page under “Apps”. The only extra functionality I could discern was the option to open Gmail in a dedicated window instead of in a tab. Well whoop-dee-doo. That’s just like an application shortcut, with the exception that the shortcut is placed in your new tab dialog instead of your taskbar, start menu, and/or desktop. And Gmail isn’t the only “web app” in the store just like that. I really hope there’s more to the Chrome web store than what I’ve found so far because right now I’m pretty underwhelmed.

Chrome’s application shortcuts and web store certainly gives you more options for how you want to use web based applications, which is always a good thing. But I definitely don’t find their utility nearly as compelling as Google seems to find them.