Google Chrome OS First Look

In the end, it hasn't taken that long: Google has just unveiled Chromium a1, the first test version of Chrome, its minimal OS designed to facilitate access to online services like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Documents announced only four months ago.

That said, the work that Google was more about assembling a series of other components, rather than starting from scratch.  Chrome OS is actually a more polished version of the search giant's Chrome browser embedded in an OS that was already freely available: a version of Ubuntu running version 2.6.30 of the Linux kernel.

The logic is pretty simple: at the moment, plenty of computers--netbooks, in particular--are only used to connect to the Internet.  That means surfing the web and sending e-mail, of course, but also streaming music, playing games or even using fully-developed apps like Photoshop Express or Google Documents.

That leaves running these apps and managing windows to the browser itself.  The bookmark toolbar becomes the Start menu and each tab is an item that would normally be on the taskbar, and so on...


In the screengrab above, the Chrome menu groups together links to useful sites.  Next are tabs for GMail and Google Calendar, the first of which also works as a notification area displaying the number of unread mails.  Further right are more traditional tabs allowing you to switch from one webpage to another.

Google thinks that a system like this will allow users to make do without an OS in the traditionam meaning of the term.  All that Linux does is here is control the boot of the machine on which Chrome OS running: as soon as the graphics shell is loaded and the user logged in, Chrome takes over.  X11 might still be there, but Gnome, KDE and other desktop environments are out of the picture.

Is it a good idea?

There are clearly several advantages to this approach.  The first is that having no apps stored and run locally improves security, as well as creating a system that's both faster (under 10 seconds according to Google) and smaller (just 300 MB).  There are no conflicts between different software packages and the user can move from one computer to another and preserve the same documents and settings.

The main drawback, though, is the constant need for an Internet connection. You definitely need to be connected the first time you launch it, and, although some tools do have an offline mode, this usually has fewer features.

For the time being, the source code for Chrome OS is available, and it's possible to assemble the software yourself, if you have Linux and know enough about compiling software.  Some disk images are available online that you can use in a virtual machine, but as none of them are yet official, we suggest you only use a test account for the time being.  Things are certainly going to change a lot, and won't be finalised for several months.  Google is still hesitating, for instance, on some of the user interface basics.

And there are still plenty of things to be ironed out.  When we tried, we didn't manage to get beyond logging into the system, as Chrome OS didn't seem able to authenticate with Google's servers using any Internet connection or environment we tried.

It rems to be seen whether Chrome OS will win over netbook users, or whether they'll prefer to stick with a more traditional OS which will allow them to install locally-run apps.

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