Google Chrome tweaks

Mozilla Firefox had initially created an addon for Firefox called Prism which creates a shortcut for any web application like GMail, Google Calendar, Live Mail etc on the desktop. When you double click on it, it will launch a stripped down version of its browser with no navigation controls or toolbars,thereby mimicking an offline application interface.

A similar feature has been built into Google’s Chrome too. Click the button to the left of the of the settings button and select “Create Applications Shortcut”.

This feature, however did not work for me on Windows 2008 x64 Server.But there is a simple workaround for this. On Vista, when we right click the application’s (say GMail) shortcut and view its properties, we can see that in the target option, there is a switch(parameter) after the file path. It has the syntax of the form

%Chrome Install path%  --app=%Address%

For example,for the GMail application, I have

C:\Users\Abhinov\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe  --app=https://mail.google.com/mail

You can make your own applications this way by simply modifying the Chrome shortcuts.