Lately, Google has been playing up some of its latest cooler features that are to be a part of Chrome on its Chromium Blog. The one announced today was probably the best to have come out yet, background web applications. This feature isn’t exactly new; it’s been around in many of the previous builds of the web browser. However, Google had never quite touched upon it much and no one was very sure on how it could be used. This has been taken care of by Google today; they explained in their blog that this feature would make it possible to keep Chrome apps open and running simultaneously in the background.
The question that many ask is about the need to leave web apps running in the background. There are a couple of reasons why this could be very useful and convenient; first, it would make it possible for the browser to give out real time alerts, chat requests, messages or updates and allow users to get notifications immediately. This could also enable pre-rendering of web pages in the browser which would save a lot of time when browsing the internet. This obviously would need more memory resources while running background apps; however, it appears that they can be coded to optimize performance while minimizing memory requirements, according to Google.
This also means that apps get a push feel to them, similar to what Apple offers in the iPhone and the iPad, the only difference being that those apps don’t quite remain running in the background and the notifications are sent to the device by Apple’s own servers. The effect is almost the same when users leave apps running on the Chrome, since the users will not see the app running but will receive notifications. The users are also given various security options in order to decrease the risk to privacy while using these background apps.
