But just because there are no native desktop apps doesn’t mean there won’t be an app launcher. The latest pre-release builds of Google Chrome, compiled by Hexxeh, includes an app launcher that you can open up with the click of a button to launch web apps.

Don’t feel like installing a pre-release copy of Chrome OS just to check it out? No problem. The desktop Chrome browser for Windows packs many of the exact same features that you’ll find in the Chrome-based operating system. And Download Squad’s Lee Mathews notes that you can add a command line switch to Chrome for Windows to add a program launcher. Changing this switch will replace the new tab page with the app launcher.

If you’re worried that this means you won’t be able to load bookmarks, don’t worry. You can still just type into the Omnibox at the top of the app launcher to search your bookmarks or page history. Or you can enter a new URL in the box to open a web site.

chrome app launcher

Via liliputing.com

The Chrome Source reports that, though the demo shows input via a mouse and keyboard, the device is capable of touch as they also showed a tablet running some variation of Linux that had capacitive input.

With an integrated webcam and a $200 price tag, the device is likely to turn a lot of heads; especially when you have the likes of Apple and HP selling similar, higher end devices for three times that. Tentative early adopters could decide to try something like this rather than go right for the expensive option.

There are no hard details on the business edition yet. It is said to feature “more management muscle” (according to a Google software engineer) and a hell of a lot more security. Some Chrome OS netbooks could actually pack a hardware switch that allows you to toggle security functions and run in developer mode.

When not in dev mode, Business Edition Chromebooks will probably be considerably more limited than their civvy cousins. That’s about all we know for now, but stay tuned-this story will be developing for a while.

google-chrome-sai-chart

While Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has lost the most share since Chrome’s launch, Google has hurt Mozilla’s Firefox, too: Without Chrome, most of those gains probably would have been Firefox’s.

According to Web analytics firm Statcounter, Google Chrome represents about 7% of the market, up from 4% last September, when Chrome turned one year old. Firefox comes in at 31%, or roughly flat from last September. IE is about 55% of the market, down from 58% last September, according to Statcounter. We’ve seen similar growth on Business Insider: Chrome now represents 11% of visits, according to Google Analytics.

Chrome is one of the many ways Google is trying to kill Microsoft. We’ll see another one this year when Google begins shipping Chrome OS, an operating system based on the Chrome browser that could potentially threaten Microsoft’s Windows cash cow.

Google Chrome OS would be a cloud based operating system that would run pretty much from inside a web browser.

Since Google does not plan to bundle any application with the operating system itself, they are aiming to have online editions of most of the routing stuff.

Google already has an online office suite in the form of Google Docs. They also have storage on it. Google Picasa Web is an online storage for photos and videos. Picnik pretty much satisfies the need to have a functional image editor on Chrome OS.

Via, techwhack

acer-netbook-chrome-os

When Google announces it was working on an operating system for netbooks and other devices, the company said netbooks with Chrome OS would start shipping in late 2010. But it looks like Acer may be fast-tracking its first Chrome OS netbook for a mid-2010 launch.

We already knew that Acer was working on a machine with Google’s operating system. Now Digitimes reports that it could ship by the middle of the year. It’s not clear whether this means that Google plans to push up its launch date for Chrome OS or if Acer plans to release a machine running beta software.

This isn’t Acer’s first foray into a Googlecentric netbook. The company also offers a mini-laptop that dual boots Google’s Android operating system and Windows 7. But Android is an OS designed for smartphones (and increasingly for low power tablets), while Chrome is specifically designed for devices with larger screens and faster processors.

If you can’t wait for Acer and other netbook makers to start preloading machines with Chrome OS, you can download pre-release builds of Chromium OS today. Chromium is the open source, beta version of Chrome OS. It’s still a work in progress and under heavy development. But it already supports a pretty wide range of netbook hardware.

Via, liliputing

The latest Hexxeh build of Chromium OS, includes a nice surprise for anyone looking to squeeze a little HD video playback out of their mini-laptop: support for the NVIDIA ION chipset.
It now supports hardware acceleration through an NVIDIA Ion chipset and should get both basic support as well as added performance in those areas that can use the faster-than-usual graphics. Battery life has also increased and is matched by proper support for automatic updates.
The specialized Chromium build can boot entirely off of USB and needs a 2GB or larger flash drive if it isn’t installed on a computer’s own hard drive. It’s not said if the improvements made to Flow will be rolled into the main Chromium OS branch. Google is unlikely to add Ion support into Chrome OS itself as it already has strict requirements for which hardware will work with the platform, although it may still get GPU support as it software has referenced NVIDIA Tegra processors.

Via netbookchoice

Codenamed Flow (I’ll assume because of the epic Vanilla Ice line “Flow like a harpoon, daily and nightly“), the new version adds loads of new functionality. The automatic update feature which was recently beta tested is now baked-in, more hardware is supported (including full NVidia ION acceleration), battery life is improved, webcams are now supported, and numerous bugs have been squashed.

Perhaps the biggest addition is the customizable menu, where you can now add, delete, and organize your favorite web-based applications. It’s a significant step toward making the Chromium OS feel like a real desktop replacement.

Right now, Flow is only available as an image file for writing to a physical drive (the download link is at the bottom of this page).

If you want to test it in VMWare, give Hexxeh a few more days — he’ll no doubt have a prepackaged VM you can play with very soon.

Samsung’s Chrome OS running netbook will have 3G built-in, Wi-Fi, 64GB hard drive (SSD?), and will offer 12-hour of battery life. Speculations suggest that Samsung would be using Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor and it’s also possible that Intel’s new Pine Trail platform would be used.

Last year, Acer claimed that it will be the first PC maker which will come out with Chrome OS based netbook. And now, Samsung has announced these plans. It’s quite possible that both launches would take place simultaneously when Google announces its Chrome OS.

Via, techtree.com

Instead, Chrome OS will be certified to run on specific hardware, which at the very least will need either an x86 or ARM CPU and a solid-state drive (SSD) for storage.

Most SSDs are faster than hard drives, which enables Google to squeeze the boot time as low as possible. SSDs are also much more expensive, but that’s mitigated by the fact that Chrome OS is designed to operate in as little storage space as possible – we think you might be able to buy a Chrome OS netbook with just 1GB of storage.

Boot speed

Chrome OS is the fastest-booting Linux distro around, excluding ones that fire up the kernel and nothing else. Even the super-light xPUD is slower. Part of this is due to its focus on netbooks, which don’t have optical drives or older hardware such as serial ports. Chrome OS doesn’t bother checking if the majority of devices exist.

Another key to its speed is that Google has written its own BIOS, which is the part of the system you see before Linux loads. BIOSes have been obsolete for some years now, but the need for backwards compatibility keeps them in place.

Google has no interest in this, so a Chrome OS device is geared towards getting control to Linux as soon as possible.

User interface

We don’t like having to type the “OS” in Chrome OS every time, but it’s necessary because Google’s web browser is just called Chrome, and it’s set the web browser world on fire with its incredible speed, powerful features and slimline design. Chrome already has more than 40 million users worldwide, and that’s growing fast.

Chrome ui

Chrome OS is little more than a full-screen version of the Chrome browser. Everything you interact with is done via a tab in that web browser, so there’s no way to move windows around, no way to maximise or minimise stuff, no (obvious) way to install more software and, crucially, no way to break things through customisation.

The reason we put “obvious” in there is simple: Linux is Linux and a determined user can find their way to a command line and thus to freedom, but by default Chrome OS is locked-down tighter than tight.

Programs

Chrome OS comes with a wide range of Linux programs, but only the ones that work out of sight and are needed to make the system run. There’s no Firefox, no OpenOffice.org, no Gnome, KDE, Gimp or any of the other Linux software we’re used to.

Instead, there’s the Chrome web browser and Google’s online services. Want to type documents? Use Google Documents in Chrome. Email? Gmail. Chat with friends? Google Talk. Share photos? Watch videos? Organise your diary? Picasa Web, YouTube and Google Calendar.

Google wants you to do everything online using your browser and using its services.

Storage

The problem of working with everything online is that internet access isn’t as pervasive as some might need, and no one wants to find their files are hard to reach or, worse, unavailable.

Google is tackling this using its Gears technology. This enables web apps to run offline in a local database, then automatically be resynchronised with the online version when the connection resumes.

Data is cached locally in case the user needs to do something without the internet – and everything is also stored online so that if the user breaks their netbook, they can get another one, sign in to Google and pick up where they left off.

Future

Chrome OS is about a year away from release, so what we have today is likely to change a lot. But we don’t think we’ll see too many alterations in the user interface area – Chrome evolves independently of Chrome OS, and the rest of the UI experience is what Google has now in Gmail and more. So, why is Chrome OS not launching now?

Google wants to certify hardware, which means it needs its partners to be ready or the roll-out will be messy. We think it’ll focus on pushing down boot speed even further, then polishing the boot experience so it’s as smooth as possible.

After the initial release late next year, we expect to see work going into bringing Chrome OS and Google Android closer together.

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As a respin of its standard desktop distro, Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) is fairly hardware agnostic – it prefers to have an Atom CPU and an SSD, but neither of those are required.

In fact, largely thanks to the appeal of the Ubuntu brand name, UNR has probably received more widespread testing than any other netbook distro and so works well on virtually everything out there. There are even special versions of UNR available for Dell Mini netbooks, but generally you can run it on whatever you like.

Boot speed

While UNR is more lightweight than standard Ubuntu, it’s also nothing like as streamlined as Chrome OS or even Moblin. That means slower boot speeds: 30 seconds is normal at the moment, although work is under way to make Ubuntu 10.04 boot much faster.

If you want to try the faster boot speed now and don’t mind risking a little system instability, run these three commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa
ubuntu-boot/ppa sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

User interface

Although UNR’s interface is far from a standard KDE or Gnome desktop, it does use the same menu structure – Accessories, Games, Graphics, Internet etc. But rather than have these hidden away under a conventional edge-aligned menu structure, they’re all visible from the home screen of UNR – just select the section you want and its icons take up most of the screen on the right.

Ubuntu ui

So, the UI is nice and simple to find your way around, but it’s not perfect: most apps are forced to run in full-screen, with exceptions made for things like Gimp or calculators that rely on fixed UI sizes.

Unlike web pages, many desktop Linux programs just don’t look so good at high resolutions, so even though UNR is able to run on any Intel-compatible device you please, don’t expect it to shine on a 20-inch monitor.

Programs

UNR is Ubuntu, albeit with a fancy front-end. As a result, you can open up the Software Centre (introduced in Ubuntu 9.10) and install just about anything you can think of, courtesy of Debian’s software repository.

Ubuntu is toying with the idea of Ubuntu on ARM; Karmic is the second Ubuntu release to ship with an ARM version available. That said, it’s designed for specific ARM hardware that few people own.

Over time, we think this ARM port will mature into a full product, front-ended by UNR. If you do find yourself using UNR on ARM, note that the software selection is more limited than for the traditional Intel architecture.

Storage

UNR is designed like any other traditional Linux distro – when you use OOo, your files are saved on your local storage device. Many netbooks ship with hard drives, since they offer the most bang for your buck; don’t be surprised if you see UNR shipping on netbooks with 160GB hard disk space!

The exception to this (new in UNR Karmic) is Ubuntu One, a service from Canonical that enables you to sync files online then share them with others. Don’t get your hopes up, though: Ubuntu One is still under construction, and we’re not sure how well it works under heavy load.

Future

No matter how fast Chrome OS might be, it’ll never be more than just a web browser unless Google executes a gigantic U-turn. This leaves the way wide open for full-fat (albeit with glossy front-end) distros that make your netbook into a true desktop replacement, and that’s where UNR shines.

It’s also enormously beneficial that Chrome OS is based on Ubuntu, because it means that the Ubuntu team can backport any patches from Google as they need to.

Via, techradar.com