Google Chrome alpha review
Google recently set loose a working version of its new Chrome operating system, due for public release in late 2010. Already there is much interest from a large crowd of international developers. Much is promised from Google, which feels sure that it has the right marketing strategy for its network-based operating system. We take a look at Chrome OS to find out what it offers…
What is Google Chrome? It’s really only a web browser that downloads web applications over the internet. Using Google Chrome you can connect to and use YouTube or an online email application. Google docs or similar online office suites can be accessed. Online calendars and photo albums can also be used. Most things that you can do with a real operating system can be done. In an operating system such as Ubuntu or openSUSE, your data is stored on your hard disk, in the Google operating system, everything is stored somewhere out there on the internet. Chrome is not like other operating systems and is being aimed at netbooks. The early netbooks, such as the Eee PC 701, did not arrive with a great deal of RAM or disk space, however, more recent netbooks have something like 64GB or 160GB of disk space and at least 1 or 2GB of RAM. You can install a full version of GNU/Linux into any of these.
Some design goals for the Google Chrome OS user interface include using minimal screen space by combining applications and standard webpages into a single tab rather than separating the two. Google Chrome will follow the Chrome browser’s practice of pushing forward the HTML5 web standard in offline mode.
So how does it work? On top of the GNU/Linux kernel, which is used in so many places around the world in the present day, sit the X-windows and graphics libraries
(see Fig 1, on page 90). Alongside these are the system libraries. Above this there is the Chrome OS and the GNU/Linux window manager that Google has introduced to make things look pretty. There is a strong reliance on GNOME or GTK+ libraries and themes here, and signs of the IceWM or XFCE or LXDE in places. This is a good thing because the present GNOME 2.xx desktop is very stable and reliable. Above this sit the web apps, website and extensions for various functional uses as well as cosmetic effect. The firmware helps to maintain a fast boot time by not probing for hardware. A complete lack of floppy drives on the netbook speed this process along the way and the firmware adds to security by verifying each step in the boot process, and system recovery if it is required. The Linux kernel has been patched to improve boot performance. Userland software has been trimmed to essentials with the inclusion of upstart which can launch services in parallel and re-spawn crashed jobs and defer services in the interests of a shorter boot time. The window manager handles user interaction with multiple client windows, much like other X clients do.
Chrome OS is supposed to be about speed and ease of use. “We want Google Chrome OS to be blazingly fast,” says Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of product management. It should be so fast that it will be able “to boot up like a television,” according to Pichai. If you’re trying to figure out whether or not your television has a boot time, just think of the time it takes for the screen to warm up to fully vibrant colour. That’s how quickly Chrome will go from pressing the power button to ready to check email. About seven seconds. That’s fast. The reader should remember that it will be something like 12 months yet before Chrome OS is finished. You can try it just now, but there’s not much there that you can use in a production environment. If you like the design idea of Google Chrome OS and you want to use it now, you might consider downloading and using Jolicloud from www.jolicloud.com/. This will allow you to achieve a greater understanding of what this kind of software is about. Just a few days after Google released the Chrome OS source code, there is already an openSUSE version out there on the internet – however, it’s claimed that this is a fake version of Chrome OS. It’s in the nature of the open source development framework and the business model that this kind of thing will happen. You should expect to see at least half a dozen different versions of Chrome OS out there in the next 12 months – all of them similar in nature, some offering more of one thing than another. This is a well established way of doing things with open source software. Only organisations like Microsoft and Macintosh shout about fake or knocked off versions of their software.
[...] Google Chrome beta review | Linux User [...]
[...] Google Chrome beta review | Linux User [...]
One question:
Where did you get this “beta” version? AFAIK, Google has only released the Chromium source code so far. I’ve yet to see an official Google release.
Anything out there has been built by enthusiasts like Hexxeh from that source.
Chrome OS is not beta yet — if it even exists. It is pre-alpha at best, though, as I said, I’m not aware of an actual Chrome OS download – only Chromium OS built by third parties (like Dell, etc).
[...] Google Chrome beta review | Linux User [...]
No thanks. I want a real OS, not a gimmick.
I have 2 computers : my “newest” one uses Ubuntu 9.10 and my “old” test-bench has BrowserLinux-Chrome onboard —> a stripped-down PuppyLinux with only the Chrome-browser on it. Actually a Chrome OS “avant-la-lettre”
I just want to say that every Linux distro can be used the same way Chrome OS will be used.
“the claim is that just now the GNU/Linux desktop accounts for 30% or 32% of the netbook market”
That is utter rubbish. Just about everyone I know that purchased a netbook pre-installed with Linux immediately installed a pirated version of Windows. They bought the cheapest netbook they could find, which was Linux, and stole Windows. Linux is claiming these people as users? haha.
Nice write-up! It’s a v.good thing Google have been supporting FOSS & pushing the envelope an’ all, but, I’m not going to put my trust a cloud! …vapourware?
As a netbook user; I would be more interested in Ulteo Linux by Gaël Duval (founder of Linux Mandrake hall of fame), than in any future with the corporate giant Google.
Hi. Seriously, I think Google ChromeOS raises more questions than it actually answers. At this time, I can only wait to test it before making any conclusions about whether it is here to stay at all.
Let’s not forget that the market is suddenly shifting from netbooks to slate or tablet PCs or whatever they are referred to. Will that change the ChromeOS strategy? Only time will tell.
@ David
I bought a Sony VAIO laptop pre-installed with Windows Vista. I have Windows Vista because I had no choice. I deleted it and installed Ubuntu Linux.
Does Microsoft claim me as a user?? After all, I DID pay for the Windows license.
A lot more people use Linux than you think. Ideal system setup would be a dual-boot. Best of both worlds.
I never did understand the popularity of netbooks. After all, even on a linux distro, who in their right mind would want ANY PC with a 1.6 ghz processor with 1 GB system RAM MAXIMUM!?? Thats like saying I want a PC from 25 years ago.. I never did understand their appeal in the first place.
As for a Chrome OS, if we’re talking light and fast, a Gnome look-alike would definitely not be it. Something more like xfce or iceVM would appeal more to users I would think, for Gnome and KDE are known to be considered bloatware in the industry. If your running KDE, you might as well be running Windows on top of a linux kernel, and Gnome isn’t a whole lot better.
Macintosh organization? do you even understand what a license is?
this is a terrible review imo.
Good writeup. Do not believe the desktop useage figures, but I think it is getting there. For cloud we have shared space at dropbox and Ubuntuone and real cloud by buying Amazon S3. With GMail, hotmail, flickr etc, what else do you really need if a wordprocessor and a spreadsheet are also online?
tcoburn has a distorted sense of history. 266MHz was a good x86 processor speed 15 (not 25) years ago. AT buses ran at 66MHZ at best. 64MBytes was a good sized memory then. Windows 95 was the MS OS. Unix was the workstation OS of choice. IBM mainframe services ran CP/CMS and 1 MByte was a good sized environment. Programmers then would have given their right arm for a machine of 1.6GHZ with 1GByte of memory. Today such freely available machines encourage bloat and waste with little to show for it except massive disks full of trash. Desktops (KDE, Gnome, xfce…etc) don’t achieve anything apart from a little organisation and convenience for the Command Line challenged. Netbooks running a Linux OS, without the 160GByte hard disk that windows requires for its page file support and other disk trash, with a moderate size SSD are very energy efficient and robust and can provide a development environment for a thinking programmer as well as a mobile device for internet access and entertainment for the traveller. I often wonder what people do with four processors and powerful graphics cards except games and fastra to provide teraflop compute power using 4KWatts, and needing refrigeration. Parallel computing can work well on some medical imaging programs, but array processors have been tricky to use effectively.
Anyway keep the peace, enjoy!
If you ever read this i like using Linux Kernel with Drivers from a 3 1/2.
I used a 386sx20 msdos6 & 2400baud to a server with Lynx & Pine for a bbs.
$2.95 a month 24/7 unlimited http://www.295.ca here in Canada for dialup:)
Maybe Google at McGill could offer students free dialup for the semestor.
[...] Chrome beta, looking good. [...]
[...] See the article here: Google Chrome beta review | Linux User [...]
I don’t really get it. I booted Chrome OS from the DVD into VirtualBox. I got a chopped down OpenSuse and a Chrome webbrowser. I Put the sound and video right, opened Chrome web browser (now called Chrome OS, for some reason).
I know I can open my gmail and google office in Chrome, but it wasn’t any different to opening it in Firefox.
In the review (issue 85) you show a picture of a web page that is the google applications, I didn’t see that and couldn’t find a way to get it. But it doesn’t make any difference because I can get to them all from the top menu in google, in any browser.
Did I miss something or is this what Chrome OS is, just a browser that does nothing more than any other browser?
Well, one thing more, try this experiment. Open Chrome browser (on any machine), open Firefox (on any machine). Go into youtube on both. You always get much better speeds with Chrome. Makes you wonder if non-Chrome browsers are choked.Can’t say that other web sites are noticably faster to render.
Sorry to the Google people if I’m missing something here, but I really could not see what Chrome OS was other than Chrome with the letters OS at the end of it.
What's your opinion?