Hello.

I am Paul Kinlan.

A Developer Advocate for Chrome and the Open Web at Google.

I love the web. The web should allow anyone to access any experience that they need without the need for native install or content walled garden.

Web app launcher as a browser_action

Paul Kinlan

In a previous post, I demonstrated how to create a custom App Launcher using the Management API and Override Pages framework. However, this approach didn't allow users to retain their custom NTP and utilize webstore apps concurrently. Thus, I developed "Quick Launch," a browser action extension that addresses this issue. The extension reuses much of the NTP tutorial's code but utilizes the 'browser_action' in the manifest, enabling a popup.html to display installed apps upon clicking the extension's icon. The popup.html dynamically generates a list of installed apps using the Management API and displays them with their icons. The source code is available on GitHub.

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