How to Use google Chrome as your desktop to pin and access all your important web apps and sites

Google is no longer just a search engine – it now offers a collection of high-quality web apps which are now in competition with software such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well a series of other brilliant web apps and services. A web app is just the same as an app you would have on your smartphone or tablet, but it runs through a web browser such as Firefox or Chrome. What can be a little jarring about this transition into web apps is the fact that you are no longer installing a piece of software onto your computer, nor are you opening up files as you would have done in the traditional way on your computer.  read: How to Organise archived articles,creat and Work with tags in Feedly

Instead, everything is accessed through Chrome, although there is desktop software for Drive, which will locate all of your files into a folder format on your desktop. But as for running something like Google Docs or Sheets, all of this happens within a browser window.

To help ease the transition into making your web browser your new desktop, follow these steps to set up your brand new Chrome-based desktop, offering easy access to all of your most important web apps and sites.

1: Pin items from splash screen: Open a new tab in Chrome to display all your Chrome apps. Right-click one and select ‘Open as Pinned Tab’. Do this for any apps you want to have open every time you start Chrome.

2: Startup pages: From the menu bar, click Chrome>Preferences. Under ‘On Start-up’, check ‘Open a specific page or set of pages’. Then click Set Pages. These pages will automatically open up when you start Chrome.

3: Set up your bookmarks: Add secondary sites to your bookmarks, which you may not want to open on startup but want quick access too. Click and drag the icon next to a site URL into the space below it to create a bookmark.

4: Add sites to splash screen: You can save URLs by dragging and dropping onto your splash screen. Now restart Chrome. All previously opened pinned web apps will open and all saved startup pages will display.