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Running Deeper

The browser itself, apart from filling the screen, sports a status panel in the top right which shows network connection status, time, battery level and has a small drop down menu for other, more browser oriented functions. The browser can still be full-screened by pressing F11, which removes all the tabs and other navigation elements and lets the use free up some precious vertical pixels for viewing the page.

Notifications and other windows that pop up either appear as GTK dialogues or as "moles" which push up onto the display from the bottom border, also making the most of compact netbook displays. Chromium OS is very similar, in some ways, to Moblin, but where Moblin tries to bring a Linux desktop to the small confines of a netbook display, Chromium OS focusses on the browser and web applications, leading somewhat surprisingly to a more approachable and familiar interface than Moblin's Zones.

At the developers command line, top shows what is running inside Chromium OS On the current versions of Chromium OS it is possible to bring up an even more familiar, at least to Linux users, terminal, by pressing Ctrl-Alt-T. From there it is possible to run commands such as top to see what processes are running on Chromium OS (Memory information is also available with the "about:memory" URL in the browser). It is reasonable to expect that this command will disappear from Chrome OS when it arrives on devices and Google apply the various security measures they are planning to ensure that a Chrome OS based system is more resilient to malware. On top of the Chrome security model which runs each tab and each plug-in in the browser as a separate sandboxed process, Chromium OS will feature the ability to automatically re-image a system, restoring it to a known good installation of the operating system. This is designed to try and limit malware by not giving it a stable environment in which it can lay down its roots.

Examination of the current Chromium OS reveals some oddities. For example, although the OpenJDK 6 runtime is installed, it appears the Java applets do not currently run in the browser. It appears to be possible to add Ubuntu or Debian repositories to a Chromium OS system too, but it's likely that this is merely an artefact of the current development process. Other things currently missing from Chromium OS are an ability to handle local or networked printers (print options exist in the browser but merely render a PDF file in the writable part of the file system) and USB memory stick support (a file browser appears, but seems to be unable to actually do anything with the content).

Overall, the experience, running on an actual netbook, is smooth and fairly slick. A quick trial with some average consumers had them asking when they could have a machine with Chrome OS on, as they already spent most of their time using online applications such as Facebook and Twitter, and couldn't see a downside to not being able to run say Microsoft Office; the popularity of casual Flash games also meant they thought that they would not lose out when it came to entertainment. Whether that initial reaction will be maintained when Google bring Chrome OS to market at the end of 2010 is going to depend on more than just the operating system. But Google have started well and are set to solidify the concept of a "Browser appliance" into a marketable device.

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