Google has just introduced a new API for packaged Google Chrome apps that allows them to accept TCP connections.
This new TCP Listen API has landed in developer versions of Chrome, and allow a Chrome application to listen for incoming connection on a specific port, thus allowing it to act as a server.
This new API is currently only available for packaged Chrome apps. These apps are available on the Google Chrome store just like standard web apps, however they are self-contained HTML apps that are entirely downloaded to the users computer and then run locally. This enables them to behave mostly like standard native applications while using Chrome as an application development runtime.
Running a web server in a browser is certainly not a new concept. Opera for instance included a platform called Opera Unite with the release of Opera 10.10 back in 2009. With Opera Unite it was possible to create web-standard based servers that could run inside Opera and give others access to services running on your system. Opera included features such as File Sharing, Media Streaming, Photo Sharing, Messaging and even a Web Server. Unfortunately Opera Software decided to remove this feature among a few others with the release of Opera 12.
You can find out more about this API at the Chrome developer website and you can check out a sample application using this feature on GitHub. Remember, you will need to use the developer channel version of Chrome for these features.
