Access Chrome Web Apps From A Different Start Page

We love some of the new apps in the Chrome web store, but a few are without obvious URLs and are seemingly only available from Chrome’s new tab page. To get an app’s special URL, though, just add it as a bookmark.

Apps like TweetDeck are exclusive to the Chrome web store and can’t be accessed by typing in a normal URL (like http://www.tweetdeck.com). In fact, when you access the web app from Chrome’s new tab page, the URL bar is empty:

However, if you add it as a bookmark, then right-click that bookmark and hit Edit, you’ll find that there is, in fact, a special URL for those webapps:

Thus, you can access them just like any other webapp with that URL. It isn’t usually something easy to remember, but if you don’t like Chrome’s new tab page and want to use your own, custom one (like the very popular myfav.es), you can paste that link into your own start page and do away with Chrome’s altogether. It’s a simple trick, but one we didn’t think to try when first testing out these webapps, so we thought it was worth sharing.