sliqua-jcooter wrote:
From what I understand, and it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, the key difference between Chrome "apps" and webpages is that apps get access to the API that controls GUI elements of the frame/tab in question.
Because of the architecture of Chrome, each tab/site runs it's own process, so they're able to provide those kinds of APIs over JavaScript without running into security issues.
This is more or less correct. Google Chrome apps are just web apps written in HTML5 that take advantage of new features like canvas, video, SVG, WebGL, and a bunch of new APIs that can be accessed through JavaScript for everything from geolocation to offline storage to web workers for a sort of multithreading.