The Google Chrome OS is very exciting and kind of anticlimactic at the same time. Why is it exciting? Because it's the first serious new OS offering in years. Why is it anticlimactic? Because the Google Chrome browser—all eight versions of it, so far—has been one giant spoiler. The fact is, you almost don't need a Chrome OS machine to see what Chrome OS is all about: Just install the browser on your current laptop, and you can get nearly the same experience. And what you do on your Chrome OS machine will even be replicated on your Chrome browser on any other machine when you sign in. It's all part of Google's idea for the OS that everything lives in the cloud.
Our laptop analyst, Cisco Cheng, will take a look at the hardware in an upcoming article. As a software analyst, however, I was most interested to see what it's like to work with an OS whose entire interface is browser-based. But since the only way this OS differs from the Chrome browser is the way it interacts with the hardware, I'll also consider things like startup time, attached devices, the keyboard, and printing.
Setup The test laptop showed its initial screen sporting the familiar Chrome browser logo within seconds of our opening its clamshell, initiating the very simple four-step setup. Subsequent startups took a mere 14 seconds from power off to login—a great example for the industry. And wake from sleep took less than two seconds. For comaparison, a new 11-inch MacBook Air, which also uses faster solid-state storage instead of a hard drive, takes over half a minute to cold start, and Windows 7 PCs can often take a minute to start. Of course, these aren't apples to apples tests, but they are interesting numbers, if only anecdotal.
To set up Chrome, you first select your language from a dropdown, then your Internet connection. Note this can be Wi-Fi only, which makes sense given that the Cr-48 is a laptop. You'll see the list of all the nearby access points with their strength and a lock if they're secure. Second, you accept the very long license agreement signing over all your data to Google Inc.—just kidding. Sort of. Chances are, however, that if you're worried about the amount of data mining Google is capable of doing across its many services, you won't be setting up a Chrome laptop at all; but that's a topic for another article.
The final two steps are dead simple (not that the others were tough): Sign into your Gmail or other Google account, and take your user picture with the built-in webcam. The camera-shy can skip this photo session.
The first time you complete this process, you'll see the Getting Started page, which schools you on the features of the Cr-48's touchpad, keyboard, and software. The keyboard differs from any computer keyboard to date, and not just because it lacks a Caps Lock key. That has been replaced with a "Quick Search" key, whose icon is a magnifying glass. The key's function, somewhat confusingly, isn't to bring up a search box, however. What it does is switch you to the New Tab page, basically the OS's home page. Here you'll find all your installed Web apps.
There are no F keys per se, but their place has been taken by a row of what amount to function keys that let you navigate back and forward, reload, and switch to full screen. This last option is critical for video watching, gaming, or any app you want to really live in. There are still Alt and Ctrl keys to multiply uses of these non-function keys. Since I have to take tons of screen caps in my job, I was pleased to find that I could still snap screen captures using a Ctrl key combination. The resulting image file goes to the same place as downloaded files (see the Downloading Files section). Right-clicking for options is accomplished by pressing the touchpad down with two fingers, and Mac-style two-finger scrolling is supported—another nice touch (so to speak).
Of course, setup can also involve setting your machine up for others, too. Chrome OS lets you create multiple users, each with their own picture for login. If someone else wants to use your machine temporarily, they can log in as a Guest. When someone does this, all their browsing is in Incognito mode, so they don't have to worry about you snooping around where they were browsing, and they are likewise unable to see your browsing history.
Interface Once again, if you're at all familiar with the Chrome browser, you're familiar with Chrome OS. Since its preview a year ago, the OS has come still closer to the browser. Chrome OS no longer even includes the applications dropdown shown in its first iteration. Just as in the browser, in the OS, a single wrench icon all the way at top right accesses all settings and tools. On the test OS version, this icon is joined by a bug icon for reporting problems, and above that a Wi-Fi signal indicator and a battery-life indicator.
On my test laptop, clicking on the Wi-Fi indicator drops down other access points you can switch to, lets you activate Verizon Wireless service, or disable Wi-Fi or cell service. And as you might expect, clicking on the time lets you change your time zone.
One of the strangest things for me in this OS is that there's nothing along the bottom of the screen to let you switch apps, like Mac's Dock or Windows' Taskbar. The browser tabs are it. Another metaphor shift that will be hard for some users to get used to is that you have no desktop with Chrome OS, just the browser window. You can move tabs around, but not drag them out as on a PC—there's no desktop to which you can drag them.
There are a couple exceptions to the "everything inside the browser" rule, though—persistent smaller windows can float on top of your browsing. We'll see a couple more exceptions in a bit, but one is the Scratchpad, found on the New Tab page. It's really a small notepad window that stays on top in the lower-right corner. It lets you take notes while browsing, and save them for offline viewing and syncs them to your other Chrome devices. Hitting the Plus icon adds a new note, and you even get a mini-editor with some formatting control. It's one of very few actual system utilities included with the OS at this point.
Tab pinning is one feature that has survived since the earlier editions of Chrome OS. Just "right-click" and choose Pin tab, and your site will remain on the tab bar at all times. A pinned tab is smaller, showing just the site icon, and stays to the left of other tabs.
Settings The OS version of Settings looks different from the browsers, and adds a few different options. Instead of the browser's three-tabbed dialog, in the OS you get a full screen with a left panel of sections—System, where you choose time zone, touchpad sensitivity (including whether you want tap to click), language, and whether you want to enable accessibility features.
The number of settings is hardly daunting compared with any other computing platform. In fact, under the System tab, there are just four sections—Date and time, Touchpad, Language, and Accessibility. You can't even see anything about your disks or other hardware.
The differences from the browser's Settings are that you can choose whether to require a password when waking from sleep, and you can manage multiple users—i.e., add and delete them if you're the computer owner. You can also enable or disable guest login or restrict login to specified users.
The same privacy settings the browser uses are available on the Under the Hood settings page. From here you can turn off URL prediction, DNS prefetching, and sending browsing statistics data to Google (on by default on this test machine). Hitting a "Content settings…" button gets you to more detailed options like allowing sites to use your location information and cookie handling.
Downloading Files Chrome OS has no overt file system—meaning you can't browse folders and files on the local hard drive or storage, but that doesn't mean you can't download files from a Web site. When you do so, these go into a Download area, which pops up as a small window at the bottom right side of the screen. The download tray is also accessible by a Ctrl-O keystroke combo. But that will just let you see what's there; you can't open most files from here, aside from images. Though you can open PDFs right in the Chrome browser, I was unable to open those I'd downloaded.
For any downloaded file, what you can do is attach it to an e-mail or use it in a Web app that supports the file type. One disappointment with this was that I couldn't listen to online radio like SOMAfm.com, which uses .pls files that require a player. Sites that stream using Adobe Flash—for example, Pandora—sounded great. And when I did attach files to e-mail, I could only do so one at a time.
App Store The Chrome Web Store not only offers Web applications, but also Chrome customizations like themes and extensions—that is for either the OS Chrome or the browser Chrome, since the face of the OS is the browser. As with Apple's iOS App Store, Google's shows Featured apps, and lists top paid and free downloads. Choices are grouped into nine categories: communication, education, entertainment, family, games, lifestyle, news, productivity, and utilities. When you hover the mouse cursor over an app entry, a tooltip helpfully pops up showing a description and rating for it.
Selecting a category presents a page divided into Featured and Popular entries in the category, with links to show All. The number of entries has grown significantly in just the past couple of days since the store's launch. For example, the communication section had just about a dozen at launch, but today I found 107 items. Neither the Popular section nor the All page shows how many people have installed the app, however. Stay tuned for Jeff Wilson's upcoming piece, Chrome Web Store: The 10 Best Free Extensions.
Nearly everything I saw in the store was listed as free, but some were marked "Uses in-app payments" and a few had actual prices. Usually if an app had a price it was $1.99 or occasionally $2.99, though the Wordico game was listed as $4.99 per year. I could try it free or buy it on the spot. When I chose to install an app, it gained a place on my New Tab page, which is your home screen in Chrome OS. Any app that you install on the Chrome OS machine will also appear on the New Tab page of any Chrome browser on which you sign into and turn on syncing.
I thought I'd found a good example of how a Web app could effectively mimic an installed one with IMO instant messaging, which promised to let me use my IM accounts like AIM and Windows Live Messenger—even for videochatting. Unfortunately, I encountered a server error when trying to make a video or audio call. But one cool thing that using IMO showed me was how Chrome OS remembers your passwords automatically, since you always sign in with your Google account. It also showed me how a Web app other than a Google one like Gmail can actually transfer files you've downloaded to the computer.
Video-chatting in Gmail-based Google Chat worked just fine, though the test hardware's image was a bit sluggish even on fast Internet connections. If you engage in a Google Chat or video chat, the conversation box will stay open and float over other web pages you open—if you pop-out the chat window with the diagonal arrow in its window.
Offline UseGoogle has promise offline functionality for apps, but at this point, even its own Docs office suite was inoperable when I wasn't connected to the Internet. And it's not just apps—I couldn't even log into my user account on the machine if I wasn't connected. So offline functionality clearly needs a lot of work still.
Printing with Google Cloud Print After testing Google Cloud Print using the Chrome browser, I found the process under the OS nearly identical, except that, with Chrome OS, you can print more than just the test page to which the browser (only version 9 beta, by the way) is limited.
A quick refresher for those who didn't read the earlier hands-on with the printing feature: The way it's supposed to work is that you set up a Windows PC running Google Chrome 9 beta and enable Cloud Print in its Options menu. This makes any printer available to the Windows PC available to Cloud Print. Sign in with the same Gmail account in Chrome OS, and those printers should show up when you go to print.
I went to a Gmail e-mail from MLB.com and chose the Print choice from the browser-OS's wrench icon to print the colorful action-packed missive. The job showed up as active in my printer's queue on the Cloud Print management page, but it wasn't forthcoming from my Epson Stylus NX625. But as with my previous tests of Google Cloud Print from the browser, the sheets spat out after a reboot.
One final, if minor, annoyance in printing with the Chrome OS is that the Print dialog prevents you from switching tabs until you close it. Google has been very proud about eliminating this kind of "modal" dialog from Chrome, and I'd suggest applying that philosophy here.
Does Chrome Really Shine? Chrome OS embodies some great ideas—living with all your data in the cloud and having all your devices synced automatically not the least among them. But their time still hasn't yet come, judging by this early attempt. No "cloud aware" printers exist yet, and even Google's own Web-based productivity suite hasn't yet been updated with HTML5 features that will allow them to work offline.
For just Web browsing, a Chrome OS machine is already excellent, as it uses our Editors Choice browser. It's fast and capable, with built-in Flash and PDF viewing. But for anything that involves plugging another device in—say, getting your pictures off your digital camera or music off of an MP3 player, Chrome lacks polish. And the system dialogs are primitive—they make you appreciate the slick interface help and control you get when interacting with a Windows 7 or Snow Leopard dialog.
But Google knows all this and it's been clear that this early version of the OS will be constantly updated, automatically. They've said that the current OS is the worst you will see—it will only get better, faster, and cleaner. The company hopes to reverse the trend of PCs being at their best when new, and then getting slower and more problematic over time. It sounds great. I'll reserve judgment until I see it in practice, however. One thing is certain: given its current limitations, Google will have to offer Chrome OS machines at a very attractive price to entice purchasers beyond those who'll be attracted by its name.
