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Chrome OS - first impressions (with screenshots)

Last Thursday, Google offered the world a first peek at its upcoming new operating system Chrome OS (Dutch, English). Perhaps more importantly, it released the code as open source. Even though Chrome OS is not expected to hit the market for another year, within hours someone had built an image that you can run on VMWare or VirtualBox. The image is widely available through p2p-networks, so I decided to give it a spin.

(Of course, since it's a precompiled image, it's impossible to tell whether it has been tampered with. Some malicious hacker may have slipped in a key logger or whatnot. Chrome OS requires you to log in using your Google credentials, so you may want to create a new account to make sure your real account stays safe. That's what I did, anyway.)

I fired up VirtualBox and created a new machine. I gave it 1GB of RAM and told VirtualBox we'd be running Debian, the distro Chrome OS is based on. I pointed VirtualBox to the image, and started the machine.

In Thursday's demo, Chrome OS took 7 seconds to boot. Running on my virtual machine, it needed just under 18 seconds. Here's the login screen:

In Chrome OS, there's no distinction between your local system and the Internet. Chrome OS is essentially Google's web browser Chrome running on a Linux kernel. The applications you're running are all web based and displayed in browser tabs, and your data is stored in the cloud. So I logged in using the Google account I just created.

That took me to a Chrome web browser tab that loaded my pristine Gmail inbox. More interesting however is the Chrome OS logo in the upper left corner of the screen. It's the tab that gives you access to other web applications Google has preinstalled on your system preselected for use in the Chrome OS cloud.

These applications are apparently put on a web page using Google's Short Links service, which is normally part of Google Apps. I suppose that's why I had to sign in again:

Which took me to the actual applications:

Most of the icons I clicked, opened a browser tab to load a familiar website like Gmail, Google Calendar or YouTube. Clicking 'Contacts' however opened a 'panel', a small overlay that loaded my Google contacts and let me chat with them using Google Talk, much the same way Google's IM service works from within Gmail:

I also tried the chess game that Google's Sundar Pichai demoed. It's a Flash game, and you can make it run full screen by pressing F11:

Chrome has Flash 10 installed. Running Chrome OS on a virtual machine is very likely the culprit, but I found that Flash applications consistently made the system become unresponsive. Both the chess game and my unsuccessful attempts at watching a video on YouTube ended in me rebooting the system. This also happened when I tried to use the Calculator application, which just opened an empty panel, no Flash involved.

Surfing the Internet, I stumbled upon one final interesting bit of information: Chrome's user agent string. Unlike the Chromium build I'm running on my regular Ubuntu desktop, it does not identify the OS as Linux, but as 'CrOS'.

The issues I encountered most likely were caused by the VM. But instability aside, running Chrome OS is, frankly, not very interesting (yet).

I'm sure that will change after another year(!) of development, when netbooks become available that are designed to be used with the OS.

But right now, Chrome OS is basically I geeky way to run the Chrome browser and use the web applications you're already familiar with.

The user agent string is cool, though.

Gepost op 21-11-2009 om 23:07 000000000000r en gerubriceerd in Google, Nerd. Volg het commentaar via de RSS 2.0 feed. Reageer, of trackback.

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