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Comment by rhizome | Hacker News Reader

Your pique is noted, but as more anecdata I use Chrome Apps for Soundcloud and Mixcloud, where it's nice to have a Chrome window that won't collect tabs and have a recognizable icon. I have dozens of tabs open in each of several Chrome windows and it can be a pain to find the one I want. Insert complaint about not being able to switch to a tab from Chrome Task Manager.

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I was specifically disputing the claims that Chrome Apps are "one of the best things that happened to Linux desktops in a long time" and that they're noticeably more secure.

Taking Soundcloud as an example, Clementine (and probably most media players) can stream it just fine. Having a Chrome App is nice, but it isn't providing anything that isn't already available. I'd even say the Chrome App is a step backwards, because with Clementine I don't need a separate app for every music service.

Streaming means parsing a bunch of untrusted data. What if ffmpeg/gstreamer/Clementine has a security issue? It happened before.

With a Chrome App, it sits in a (really strong) sandbox and would need to escape the sandbox first.

With a native app, it's game over.

The idea being that I should install Clementine to listen to Soundcloud, instead of Chrome, which is already installed? This is the only thing I would use Clementine for, since it doesn't support multiple genres per track so it's out as a music library.

You can do that with regular web apps - just create a desktop shortcut in the Chrome menu ("More").

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