In Chrome OS every application is a web application!

Content source: TechCrunch

We focus on three things. Speed. Simplicity. Security.
We want Chrome OS to be blazingly fast, basically instant-on. Chrome (the browser) on Chrome OS is going to be much faster.

In Chrome OS every application is a web application. There are no native applications. That gives us simplicity. It’s just a browser with a few modifications. And all data is Chrome OS is in the cloud. This is key, we want all of personal computing to work this way. If you lose your machine, you just get a new one, and it works. With security, because everything is a web app, we can do different things. No system is ever fully secure. With Chrome OS no user install binaries, so we can see bad things easier. We run completely inside the browser security model.
——–DEMO———
It takes about 7 seconds to to go the log-in screen. And another 3 seconds to log in to your application. And we’re working to make that faster.

Should be no surprise that it looks like Chrome the browser. We are opening up the project a year ahead of release right now. A lot of the UI will change in that time. But many of the core concepts here will carry over into the final product.
It looks like Chrome but it has application tabs. (#-Link-Snipped-#.) And there is an App Menu. The UI will change a bit, but we want to give you a way to find your favorite applications. Panels are pesistent lightweight windows that never move. Buddy lists and chat are great for this. Or a notepad. And media pops up in little windows.
Demo of a chess game being played within the browser. And you can allow it to take over the full screen so you don’t realize you’re in the browser.
And we want you to be able to read books in Chrome OS. And YouTube videos look great. And there is an all view mode (and the YouTube video is still playing. You can drag and drop tabs. “It just works.”

What happens if you plug in a camera? It simply opens a window with the camera’s files. I can pull any picture and open it in a new browser window.
Microsoft Office launched a killer-app for Chrome OS (laughs). So if you get an Excel doc, it will open in Office online.
People have many types of files with computers right? They need to get in them. Like PDFs, but these work instantly in the browser too.
———–Time for #-Link-Snipped-# to go under the hood of Chrome OS—————–
MP: Excited about the tech under the hood. All the code is out in the open now, you can go check it out.
We want this to feel much more like a television than a computer. All Chrome OS devices will be based on solid-state storage.

One of the reasons computers boot so slowly today is that they’re still looking for things like floppy drives. Does anyone use those anymore? No. We cut out a lot of the startup processes. And we open the browser immediately. And we have something called Verified Boot – Chrome OS auto-updates itself with all the security patches. Everytime you boot we double check that you’re running what you should be running. If something fails the cryptographic system check, we reboot to get a clean image. Basically this is system recovery.
Current OSes allow apps to have the same power as you. They can modify files, etc. This means a rogue app can do bad things. In Chrome OS all the apps are web apps, with a different security model. All apps are treated as if they are hostile at a system level. A web app can change files on your hard disk, etc.
And we have security sandboxing – same thing we do in Chrome. Every tab run in Chrome OS is locked down and different from other tabs.

The File System: It’s always auto-updated. There are a few areas of the hard disk. The root partition is read-only. This is locked down, which is unusual in OSes today. User data is always encrypted. This is key for safety of your data. So important if you lose your machine.
All user data is synced with the cloud at all times. If you lose your machine, it’s not really gone.

———Back to #-Link-Snipped-#——-
This is all about offering a choice for users.
We’re not going to go into too much detail about going to market today. We’re working on the software right now, but we are also working with manufacturers on the hardware level. For example, we only support solid-state drives and certain types of WiFi cards.

You cannot download and install Chrome on any machine. You will have to buy a new one.

End of next year. Before the holiday season.
While netbooks are popular, but some have usability issues. We want to make slightly larger netbooks with full sized keyboards and big trackpads.
Again, the code is all open source now. The Linux kernal, Unbuntu, Moblin have all been important to what we’re doing now. We can’t wait to see what people do with our code now.


If you are a developer and have the right type of netbook (and a screwdriver) you can get Chrome OS running today.