In an effort to further diminish Edge's role as "the browser you use to install Chrome," Google has published a Chrome installer application to the Microsoft Store. Install that app, and it'll download and install Chrome for you.

Chrome itself is not a Store app. While Microsoft has developed a system, "Centennial," for packaging existing Windows applications and distributing them through the Store—a convenient capability, as it provides centralized upgrading and clean uninstallation—Google is not using that for Chrome. The Chrome that gets installed is the regular version of Chrome that you'd get if you downloaded it directly from Google.

For most Windows users, the distinction doesn't matter a great deal. While we'd like more apps to be available through the Store—if for no other reason than to get the simplified updating and uninstallation—virtually every Windows user already runs a number of non-Store applications anyway. The exception is Microsoft's locked-down Windows 10 S. Windows 10 S can only install and run Store apps. As such, 10 S can't make use of this Chrome installer; while the installer itself can be, uh, installed, it's not able to install the non-Store version of Chrome.

Google hasn't developed a Store-packaged version of Chrome, and it's not clear that it has any particular interest in doing so. A Centennialized version of Chrome would make Windows 10 S a more viable operating system, in turn reducing the appeal of Google's Chrome OS. This would make Chrome for the Store good for Microsoft and good for Windows users, but not obviously beneficial to Google.

There's some speculation that the company couldn't, even if it wanted to, because some interpretations of the Store's rules for applications say that Store applications must use the system-provided components for rendering Web content. It's not clear how strictly Microsoft enforces these rules, however, as the Store does contain many Centennial versions of apps built using the Electron framework. The Electron framework uses Chromium (the open source core of Chrome) to host desktop applications written using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. While these Electron apps aren't full browsers, they can, at least to an extent, display some Web content. They do so with the Chrome/Chromium rendering engine, not the system-provided Edge engine.

One company that has promised to provide a Centennial version of one of its desktop applications is Apple. At Microsoft's Build conference in May this year, we learned that iTunes was going to be brought to the Store. Originally, the intent was to bring it to the Store this year. The bad news is that this isn't going to happen; last week, Apple told Mary Jo Foley that it needs "a little more time to get it right," and it won't ship this year. But it's still in the pipeline, so we'd expect it to land some time next year.

Update: The app has been removed by Microsoft, with Redmond claiming that it violates store policies.