Apps User Group. Simplebooklet.com. 13 killer Chrome apps to replace your desktop software. When Tim Berners-Lee invented the first Web browser in 1990, it was just an application made to read HTML pages passively.
Fast-forward to today, and the modern Web browser has become a powerful platform in itself—almost a miniature operating system, capable of running complex JavaScript code and interacting with Flash plug-ins. Indeed, Web pages have evolved into Web apps, to the point where we can do much of our productivity work in a browser window without ever having to invest in traditional desktop software. But how much work can you really do from a browser? Could you replace all of your desktop apps with Chrome extensions, and be none the worse for wear? After testing a bunch of Chrome apps, I found mixed results: Web apps simply aren’t designed to be complete replicas of their desktop counterparts.