Particularly liked this comment about the distinction between "Document" and "App", and how the Internet is finding it difficult to bridge that gap.
Google talks Chrome OS, HTML5, and the future of software
JS: On the Web, it seems that there's a spectrum of sites that exists between "document" on the one hand, and "application" on the other. Google Maps would be an example of an application, whereas Ars would be an example of a document or document collection with some navigation added on. But you guys put both documents and applications in a browser window, still.
I know you're still refining the user experience, so I guess what I want to know is, are you going to stay within the document/browser paradigm, or are Web applications going to become peers, with their own window and their own specific window chrome. So maybe [a Web app] is like this OS X window, so that the view looks like an application to the user, and not like a "webpage." [I'm essentially talking about moving from a document/browser paradigm to an application/window manager paradigm for a certain class of sites.]
MP: That's a good, insightful comment. It is weird that when you cruise the Web today most of the Web is still a fairly static web of things that fundamentally seem more like documents than they do like applications. Even CNN, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc. are really fairly static pages. And yes it's being served to you dynamically, and there are ads, and whatever, but fundamentally you're reading words off the page and it's not quite like something like Gmail, or Picasa, or even Netflix, where it really does feel like an app. Everything being served to you [on these sites] isn't really static at all—you can reorder lists by dragging things around, and it feels like an application.
So far in Chrome, we haven't really made any distinction between those two things, because the Web doesn't really make any distinction between the two. You can't really tell when you get to a page what the page is supposed to be. But there is a lot of stuff that we're starting to work on in Chrome OS where we're starting to add specific features for things that really are apps.
A good example for Chrome OS is mailto links. Typically, those kick you out of the browser back into your Windows mail program, which, if you're using Gmail, is a complete hassle and annoying. So we're doing a bunch of work now to figure out, how do we make that actually launch Gmail. Or, better yet, if you're actually running Gmail, how do we get it to switch to that tab and open a new compose window, which is what you want it to do. Or in Chrome OS, maybe it should pop up a panel and you start writing in that, so as not to interrupt your flow in the site that you were on.