What are Chrome apps vs plugins vs extensions and how to develop them

Question

I am trying to understand about Chrome (browser) development. I am very new to this and trying to figure out where to start in order to develop for Chrome Browser.

Just

Answer 1

Just to add on new information since people may continue to hit this question: Chrome has basically deprecated plugins as of March 2017 (Chrome 57). If you go to chrome://plugins now, you won't see anything (you used to see a list of installed plugins with enable-disable links like for extensions).

It seems the reasoning is that the only plugins they actually wanted to allow you to enable/disable are Flash and PDF Viewer, both of which were moved to the Settings menus (if they weren't already there, not sure). The rest are considered to be integral parts of the browser. https://www.ghacks.net/2017/01/29/google-removes-plugin-controls-from-chrome/

Makes things a bit simpler to think about now.