A couple of years ago, I switched from the Google Reader team to the Chrome team¹. I focused on the WebKit side, working a bunch on layout tests and associated tooling. I became a reviewer, messed around with events and generally scratched my "move down the stack" itch. However, I realized I missed a few things: Spec compliance and tooling are very important, but they don't necessarily trigger that awesome "we've shipped!" feeling (cf. HTML5 being a living document). I also missed having something concrete to put in front of users (or developers).

Those thoughts were beginning to coalesce when, fortuitously, Aaron approached me in the spring of 2011 about joining Chrome's "Apps and Extensions" team. I'd been a fan of Aaron's work since my Greasemonkey days, and the Chrome extension system had impressed me with its solid foundations. After spending some time getting to know life outside of src/third_party/WebKit, I ended up focusing more on the apps side of things, implementing things like inline installation and tweaking app processes.

Historically, apps and extensions were handled by the same team since Chrome apps rose out of the extension system. They share the manifest format, the packaging mechanism, the infrastructure to define their APIs, etc. The lines were further blurred since apps could use extension APIs to affect the rest of the browser.

As we were discussing in the fall of 2011 where extensions and apps were heading, it became apparent that both areas had big enough goals² that having doing them all with one team would result in a lack of focus and/or an unwieldy group with lots of overhead. Instead, there was a (soft) split: Aaron remained as tech lead of extensions, and I took on apps.

We've now had a few months to prototype, iterate, and start to ship code (in the canary channel for now). Erik and I gave an overview of what we've been up to with Chrome apps at last week's Google I/O:

(DailyJS has a very good summary, and the presentation is available as an app in our samples repository.)

It's still the early days for these "evolved" Chrome packaged apps. We're pretty confident about some things, like the app programming model with background pages that receive events. We know we have a bunch of work in other areas like OS integration, bugs and missing features. There are also some things we haven't quite figured out yet (known unknowns if you will), like cross-app communication and embedding (though I'm getting pretty good at waving my hands and saying "web intents").

What makes all this less daunting is that we get to build on the web platform, so we get a lot of things for "free". Chrome apps are an especially good opportunity to play with the web's bleeding edge³ and even the future⁴.

Going back to the impetus for the switch that I described at the start of this post, doing the I/O presentation definitely triggered that "We've launched!" feeling that I was looking for. However, it's still the early days. To extend the "launch" analogy, we've been successful at building sounding rockets, but the long term goal is the moon. We're currently at the orbital launch stage, and hopefully it'll go more like Explorer 1 and less like Vanguard.

I'm planning on blogging more about apps. In the meantime, if your curiosity is piqued, you can watch the presentation, dig around the samples repository, or peruse the docs. If you'd like to get in touch, try the chromium-apps@chromium.org mailing list or #chromium-apps on freenode.

1. Though I have trouble letting go sometimes.
2. The extensions team had its own talk at I/O about their evolution. Highly recommended viewing, since the same factors influenced our thinking about apps.
3. See Eric's The Web Can Do That!? presentation.
4. See Dimitri's and Alex's Web Components presentation. They can be used by apps (and extensions) that add the "experimental" permission.