Hello, my name is Aaron, and I will be your question answerer for today.
- Anything that works in Chrome can be an app. Flash apps are OK (one of the demo apps at the keynote, Plants vs Zombies, was a flash app)
- We haven't finalized exactly how payments will work. We know it has to be good, because it needs to be better than what you could do yourself.
- The web apps in the store will most likely work with Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc, because those are pretty modern browsers that implement most of HTML5. But the tight integration with Chrome (the "install" experience) is Chrome-only, at least for now.
I don't understand the last point: if I can only purchase and install them from Chrome, how do I run them in another browser? Just point the non-Chrome browser at the (un-DRMed?) local install after purchasing/installing with Chrome?
Apps are essentially a metadata wrapper around a URL^. The payment authorization is done server-to-server. Thus you could buy an app in Firefox and authorization would still work fine, the UX just won't be as nice.
^ We are also considering supporting fully packaged apps that are completely offline, like Chrome extensions are today -- these won't work in other browsers because they don't understand our package format.
Using bundled packages for offline support is entirely the wrong strategy. The coupling is too tight even before you start trying to use the same format for multiple browsers.
You should just copy Apple and just make it easy to save web pages as local apps, though you might want to explicitly offer with an infobar when there's a manifest available. What they already look for is all you need:
<html manifest="..."> and window.applicationCache
<meta name="application-name"> and <meta name="application-url">
<link rel="icon" sizes="..."> or <link rel="apple-touch-icon">
The capability model for requesting extra permissions is terrific, but it should have been done using <meta> or <link> tags -- reusing their bundle format for extensions was a terrible idea, especially since they're going to have to implement all the DOM-based stuff anyway.
I think they would just post their app as "free" in the store and handle payments themselves. Or support both payment systems if the distribution is worth it to them.
Will there be support for one login to multiple apps? Would be useful to essentially have a Chrome Apps login that then provides auto-login/off for the other apps installed on Chrome
Gears was the alpha implementation of the work that went on in WHATWG. All the Gears APIs (except for WorkerPool) were refactored significantly and integrated into the spec that became HTML5.
- Anything that works in Chrome can be an app. Flash apps are OK (one of the demo apps at the keynote, Plants vs Zombies, was a flash app)
- We haven't finalized exactly how payments will work. We know it has to be good, because it needs to be better than what you could do yourself.
- The web apps in the store will most likely work with Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc, because those are pretty modern browsers that implement most of HTML5. But the tight integration with Chrome (the "install" experience) is Chrome-only, at least for now.