With Google Wednesday announcing its Chrome Web Store, at its ongoing developers' conference in San Francisco, users will be able to purchase Web apps for their browser, just like they buy apps for their iPhone, and the Android-based and other smartphones.

Along with giving app developers a new platform for selling their software, the Chrome Web Store will also allow content industries like news publications, video producers and musicians to sell web content. Thus far, the absence of such a store has forced these companies to struggle with the online payments of their content.

However, it is still not clear whether the apps purchased via the Chrome Web Store will run only in Google's own Chrome browser or will have a wider expanse beyond Chrome. Google, on its part, has specified near the top of the new web store site that the apps will run in any modern browser.

Specifically, Google's first entry in the FAQ section about the store reads thus: "Because web apps listed in the Chrome Web Store are regular web applications, built with standard web tools, they can be used by anyone using a modern browser that supports these web technologies."

Nonetheless, there are two main areas in which Google's Chrome browser might have a potential leading edge over rival browsers, namely - shortcuts and the features that "installed web apps can also request advanced HTML5 permissions."