Google Chrome is Google's latest project engaging the world's interest. It started off as a very simple, lightweight and fast web browser for the Windows Operating System, currently up to version 4.0 beta which offers extensions for the first time. The browser also now has a version for the Macintosh and is built on the WebKit rendering engine. Google now has new plans for it's Chrome web browser, to turn it into an operating system to run on low powered netbooks. Some of the code has made it's way onto parts of the internet and has been compiled to work off USB sticks and virtual machines. The idea Google has for this OS is to be a way to push its online services including GMail and Google Calendar instead of running local versions of an application like Microsoft Office Outlook. I've managed to get myself a copy so I'll give you some detail here.
I downloaded this version of Google Chrome from the website www.gdgt.com and am running it inside Sun's free VirtualBox application. This is NOT a final version of the OS so many things are incomplete and will change before it goes into netbooks later this year.
When you first turn on the machine running Google Chrome OS, it boots in about 7-10 seconds and presents you with this login screen. I suspect this screen will change in the future as it's not on center and doesn't really explain what you are meant to do. You have to enter your Google account username and password (so probably your @gmail.com address) into the boxes and press enter to login in to the system.
After you login, you get presented with a web browser, and that's it! The entire operating system resides in this web browser, the file manager and all. At the moment it has very little settings you can actually change, but in the future there will probably be a few more. The very top left has a button to bring up web applications and beside that Google has pinned a few popular Google services (GMail and Google Calendar). The top right contains a battery monitor icon, wifi icon, clock and system menu. Other than those extra additions, it's a web browser!
If we take a look at the applications menu by clicking the Chrome icon in the top left of the screen, Google has the following applications available at the moment: GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Docs, Youtube, PicasaWeb, Hulu, lala, Pandora, Contacts, Calculator, To-do List, Calendar Panel, Books, Chess, Facebook and Twitter. Basically - they're all links to websites which offer particular services, not really applications that run in their own right.
The only ones which work in a special way is the 4th row, Contacts, Calculator, To-Do List and Calendar Panel. They're still web applications and get their data from the internet, but they open in a little panel on the bottom right of the screen, instead of in a tab.
The system menu in the right of the screen (that little arrow) brings up a near identical menu to the tools icon (the spanner), so maybe in the future that functionality won't be duplicated. One command which I haven't found yet, is the shutdown command. There appears no way to shut down the OS yet, maybe it will just hibernate when it's released to market. I don't know yet.
So that's it, Chrome OS. This certainly will not be a replacement for your main desktop computer running Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X, as it only runs web applications, but for that netbook you have just for surfing the web and checking your webmail, Google Chrome OS is probably perfect. More information should be available later this year.
