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I'm looking to create an exe (and maybe dmg) installer that simply opens an invisible browser window and navigates to a webpage. Preferably using Google Chrome's rendering/javascript engine. The idea is that I have a web app that I need to disguise as a windows program. A bit like the way iTunes loads it's web store. Any tips/advice?

As a additional/separate issue, how complex would it be to package a php & mySQL server into the installer so I can run the app offline?

Thanks a lot!

cronoklee
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    You're not going to be able to use chrome here. Perhaps have a look at WebKit or something like Titanium. – thomasfedb Sep 26 '11 at 14:36
  • @thomasfedb is right, you'll probably want to use the WebKit fork Chrome uses, and not Chrome itself. I would be very careful about the licensing terms there, though. – Romain Sep 26 '11 at 14:39
  • Thanks guys, what about a straight internet explorer solution then? What's the best way to do this? I could possibly look at wrapping the app in Google Chrome Frame later – cronoklee Sep 26 '11 at 14:43

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One popular platform for achieving this is something called Titanium (see http://www.appcelerator.com/), although it is more often used for mobile development. Personally, I found Titanium to be a little clunky. There is an OS X tool called Fluid (http://fluidapp.com/), but that is more aimed at users who want to turn arbitrary websites into apps.

This is somewhat of a non-answer, but I would suggest thinking long and hard about whether you can use Chrome Web Store (https://chrome.google.com/webstore) instead, as that is much more convenient for developers and — I might argue — for users as well. Maybe you can start out that way and then look into more complex solutions later if it turns out you really need it. When that time comes, it is likely that a better and cleaner solution for this has appeared.

Daniel Brockman
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  • Cool Titanium works nicely (although as you say it's extremely heavy!). It's a safari based browser window but it's still webkit so it's as close as Im gonna get I think. Thanks a lot for the help :) – cronoklee Sep 27 '11 at 00:59
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There's no official way to do this at the moment. There's a chromium page on this feature, though.

You might be able to make a custom launcher that will quietly invoke Chrome and your server stack. Here's a list of command line flags you might find useful.

Also see this recently asked question: Can I Create Chrome Application Shortcuts Programmatically from a Web Page?

Community
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Boris Smus
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Have you considered Adobe Air?

It can do just that, and you package it as an exe.

fire
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