Bye, Chrome app launcher, we hardly knew ye
Chrome's app launcher -- the little app that lets you launch all the Chrome apps you have installed -- is going the way of the dodo.
On Tuesday, Google announced it would retire the app launcher in the summer. First, in a few weeks, the launcher will no longer be enabled when users first install a Chrome app. Users who already have the launcher installed will get a notice telling them the launcher will soon be gone, and in July, it will be automatically removed from users' computers.
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The reasoning behind the move is quite simple: no one really used the launcher.
"The app launcher makes Chrome apps easy to open outside the browser, but we’ve found that users on Windows, Mac, and Linux prefer to launch their apps from within Chrome," Google Chrome Engineering Director Marc Pawliger wrote in a blog post.
The launcher will continue to exist on one platform, however: Google's Chrome OS.
The few users that did in fact use the launcher to find their Chrome apps should switch to launching the apps from Chrome's bookmarks bar or by typing chrome://apps in Chrome's omnibox bar.
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Topics Google
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
