Google Integrates Chrome Apps into OS X Finder

Finder with chrome apps

Users of Chrome Canary, an experimental version of Google’s browser, can now associate Mac files with supporting Chrome apps in the OS X Finder (via GigaOM). As a result, users can now open a basic text file with a Chrome app like Text, Caret or Simple Text instead of opening it with the native OS X TextEdit. The source sees Google’s new integration as “a strategy to take over your desktop”.

The new feature was shared on Friday by Google evangelist,François Beaufort on his Google+ page, where he explains how to enable the function on a Mac computer with Chrome Canary installed: “All you need is to enable the experimental chrome://flags/#enable-apps-file-associations flag and restart your browser.”

According to one of the Google developers working on this project, it is much harder on Windows because “Windows thinks all Chrome apps are called ‘Google Chrome’ and won’t let us change the name or icon”, or associate a file type with multiple Chrome apps at the same time. “We’re still working on it” he says. As features get refined and tested in Chrome Canary, they eventually make their way up to the standard Google Chrome browser.

Since the file associations feature is still in a very early stage, it is still unknown when it will make its way to the regular version of Google Chrome.

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