In Google Chrome/Chromium browser one of a useful feature is application mode. It allows run the browser with simplifying UI without toolbar with predefined URL. Moreover, you can run the browser with a separate profile. These two features allow creating “web app”.

For example, let’s create “web app” for google.com.

First of all, create new app dirs:

mkdir -p Google.app/Contents/MacOS

Then we need create macos app manifest, vim Google.app/Contents/Info.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
<string>App</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Then create shell script to run browser, vim Google.app/Contents/MacOS/App:

#!/bin/sh
exec /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --app="https://google.com/" --user-data-dir="$HOME/Library/google-app/Profile" "$@"

Not to forgot to make it executable:

chmod a+x Google.app/Contents/MacOS/App

That’s all! Now you can run you Google.app:

open Google.app

And as a bonus, you can set an icon for it, for example like this.

P.S. There are other command line switches for Google Chrome.