Google Gives Chrome Web Store A Welcome New Lick Of Paint

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
chrome web store

Looks like Google this morning rolled out a brand new design for its Chrome Web Store, and it’s a major improvement.

The updated Web app marketplace, first released in December 2010, is all about the software, now boasting large squares with attractive app visuals.

On mouse-over, users get a bit more information about the apps, and a one-click install option.

Also worth noting: the menu is now entirely on the left-hand side and is fixed even when scrolling, and Extensions and Themes are no longer highlighted as different sections but rather just navigational items at the end of the list. Also gone is any mention of ‘paid apps’.

When you click a category or an ‘app collection’, you get a more visually pleasing overview of popular Web applications than was the case before, and the app detail pages have also been redesigned featuring a summary, screenshots and videos to promote the app, and tabs you can open to get more details or reviews about the software. There’s also the obligatory +1 button, of course.

Wikipedia has a screenshot that shows how it looked before, if you want to compare.

(Thanks to Saif AL Essai for the heads up)




Product: Google Chrome
Website: google.com
Company Google

Google Chrome is an based on the open source web browser Chromium which is based on Webkit. It was accidentally announced prematurely on September 1, 2008 and slated for release the following day. It premiered originally on Windows only, with Mac OS and Linux versions released in early 2010. Features include: Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it A...

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