Google Chrome OS is designed to run nothing but Web apps, so a lot of OS UI concepts will have to be remapped. Your applications become browser tabs, your browser windows become multiple desktops, and your widgets become overlay panels.

Yes, it feels a little weird. With cloud computing services getting more and more robust, we may have to get used to these browser-based UI concepts by the time Chrome OS becomes available next year.

Originally posted on November 19, 2009 @ 4:03 pm

Google’s recent demo of Chrome OS answered several important questions about how a browser-only OS would operate. One of those questions is how it would handle removable storage. As you can see when the demo unit is attached to a digital camera, using a Web browser as a file browser works pretty well. That should come as no surprise, since Windows has integrated Internet Explorer with its own file manager for the last twelve years.

While it’s fun to see a Microsoft Web app opening a file in Chrome OS, it’s rather telling that the demo game is Flash chess. This demo apparently came a bit too early for the launch of hardcore cloud gaming service OnLive. Let’s hope Web apps and games mature into far more impressive fodder for Chrome OS once it’s released next year.

Originally posted on November 20, 2009 @ 9:46 am

Google gets extreme in its push to get users to the cloud with Google Chrome OS. It’s essentially a browser running on a very slim Linux build — so slim, in fact, that you can’t run any native apps on it. Instead, Google is counting on the HTML 5’s enhanced ability to access client machine resources. [Read more…]

Originally posted on November 19, 2009 @ 3:38 pm