How to get Chromium web apps to work in Win7 Taskbar

[KayDat]

As anyone who uses Chromium and Windows 7 combo would know, web applications/application shortcuts don't really play well with the new Win7 taskbar. That's because Windows 7 uses something called an Application ID (I'm not too familiar with this, I only know about this vaguely) for programs in the taskbar. The latest dev builds of Chromium have implemented Application ID's, but there is still a problem: Even though you may have, say, Gmail pinned to your taskbar, when you load up Gmail, it still creates a new tab. (substitute Gmail for any other web app you may be using)

So, how to fix this? Well it's actually very easy.

1. Create an application shortcut if you haven't already. Have this on your desktop, not your taskbar.
2. Run your web app. A new tab should appear on the taskbar.
3. Right click on the web app tab in the taskbar. A Jump List should appear. Pin the program to the taskbar.
   The icon should change from the web app icon to the default Chromium icon. This is fine.
4. Right click on the pinned tab. Right click on "Chromium 2", and go Properties.. (I'm assuming you already have Chromium pinned on the taskbar. If not, the name would probably just be "Chromium".)
5. The target field should be something like this:
   C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Chromium\Applicati on\chrome.exe
   
   You need to change this to the same as your web app. For Gmail, it would be:
   C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Chromium\Applicati on\chrome.exe --app=https://mail.google.com/mail
   
   You can simply copy-paste this from the Target field in your web app shortcut on your desktop.
6. This step is optional, but prefered. Click on Change Icon to change the icon of the shortcut. To find out where the icon of the web app shortcut is, simply right click the web app icon on your desktop, go Properties, click on Change Icon and grab the file location there.
7. Click on the General tab. Rename this from "Chromium 2" to whatever you want. In my case, it was to Gmail.
8. Click OK to finish.

There you have it! Web apps and Win7 taskbar working happily together! =]

Why does this work? Why didn't it work in the first place?

While I think Google probably implemented Application ID's perfectly fine, there is still a slight problem, and that's with shortcuts/pinning. I think Application ID's are linked in with the shortcut on the taskbar, and when you simply create an application via Chromium, that Application ID isn't linked in. Which is why Windows (yes, Windows, not Chromium) creates a new tab when you load up your web app.
So what you do here is simply create a new shortcut/pinned icon which has the Application ID embedded, and alter the shortcut target/icon details so that when you click on the icon, it loads up your web app, not just Chromium.

[sulasno]

Dual boot WinXP and Win 7 and running Chromium in zip form in both OS;
I don't run web apps but will try

one thing I did notice though; when I pin a shortcut that is on the Desktop to the wonderbar in Win 7, the properties does not change when I change the shortcut (on the Desktop). I have to unpin it and then re-pin it in order for the changes to be reflected

[KayDat]

Well that's easy. It's because pinned items on the taskbar are simply another set of shortcuts. They reside in "C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Inter net Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar". So when you pin a desktop shortcut to the taskbar, Windows makes a copy of that shortcut. When you alter the shortcut on your desktop, Windows wouldn't know to alter the one for the taskbar; you'd have to do it manually. It's like changing a shortcut on the Start Menu, you can't expect Windows to alter every instance of a shortcut on a computer simply because you changed the shortcut in the start menu. I hope that explanation helps. =]