Chrome has had a brilliant feature that, at various times, has been called “Add to Desktop”, “Add to Taskbar”, and probably other things. Basically, it lets you open up a URL in a separate window that looks like an app, and shows up as a separate app in Windows. Chrome keeps on changing the interface–and just now, when I looked, I couldn’t even find a way to create such a shortcut.
Thanks to Tyler Whitehurst on this thread, I found a solution that works for me–and I’m recording it here so that it’s easy for me to find, and perhaps helpful to someone else sometime.
– Right click on desktop > new > shortcut
– Set location of item to: “{Path to Chrome}” –app=”{URL}”
E.g., my shortcut path is:
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –profile-directory=Default –app=”https://drive.google.com/”
You’re welcome.
Known Unknowns 