Savouring Google Chrome OS

The Chrome OS from Google is one of the most anticipated of software applications that is set to come out this year. Thanks to this great article on Lifehacker, I have finally managed to savour a preliminary version of the Chrome OS.


With an install of VirtualBox, another cool tool which will be covered here soon and a customized packaging of Chrome OS, I had Chrome OS running on a Pentium 4.

In a nutshell, VirtualBox is a free utility from Sun, application that can run one operating system(the guest OS) within another operating system (the host) as if it was an application of the latter operating system.

In my configuration, I had Chrme OS running inside Ubuntu Jaunty. The disadvantage of this type of installation is that the guest OS runs much more slowly. Because of this setback, I could not experience one of the best features of Chrome OS, its speed.

However, I did get to test out Chrome and many of its features.Here are my thoughts:

If you, like me are used to a desktop, with a cool background image that houses many icons inside it, you may initially get disappointed.

As soon as you login into Chrome, you are presented with a familiar utility, a maximised Chrome Browser. You must make a paradigm shift in getting used to the idea that the browser is your desktop and all the applications you'll need are accessible through the browser. These applications include Google docs, Gmail and other Google utilities.

There are also image links to other tools like Facebook and Twitter. In previous posts, we have looked at several cloud operating systems(See Links below.) These are operating systems that reside in remote(possibly distributed) locations and accessible through a browser.

At first glance, Chrome may resemble them. However, unlike the other cloud operating systems we have seen before, Chrome OS uses HTML5, the newest version of the language of the web. While the other cloud operating systems make little use of resources on the local machine, Chrome uses HTML 5 to make use of resources like the memory and processor on the local computer.

Chrome OS is expected to hit netbooks later this year. HTC is working with Google to release a Chrome Tablet.

Below is a promotional video from Google on the philosophy behind Chrome OS>

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HTML5: Its about time

In the last decade, we saw a lot of changes in the web. Here are some of them.

* Laptops and Desktops are more powerful and hard drives have become bigger. Increases in processor speeds is a simple case of Moore's law at work. While the focus has been to keep applications in the cloud there has also been a growing demand to harness the power of the laptop or computer used to access these web applications. Rich internet applications began this trend. Microsoft created a smart client initiative to address this issue.



* While text is the most basic way to spread the word, the web has grown to transmit more audio, video and image data. When Tim Bernes Lee invented HTML, it catered to a more text-centric web. Since then, the changes made to accommodate other types of data have just been hacks. While html does provide an IMAGE tag, there were no primitives to display dynamic images or animation, or play audio or video media. Javascipt provided the means to embed players to stream audio content.

* One breakthrough in improving performance was the ability to use ajax with javascript and CSS so that only parts of a web page needed to be refreshed instead of having a server deliver the a complete web page and then having the browser refresh that page.

* The growth of Wikis, IM clients, shopping carts for online sites, blogs and social networking has revealed shortcomings of HTML.

HTML, the primary language of the internet has remained untouched since 1999. But now, the big browsers have banded together to push a new specification: HTML 5. The browser list includes Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Apple Safari.

How about IE? Well, the short answer is not completely. IE8 supports some of the tags specified in HTML5.

HTML5 is a development, teb years in the making.Here are the its key features.

Video and audio tags and controls
Specifying the the video file to play, width and height of the player, whether or not to display controls, whether or not to loop video will all be done in HTML itself. The specification also specifies how the video player must respond to a mouse or keyboard click or some other event.
It is then up to the browser as to how the media player will be rendered. There is also a similar audio control. No need to download flash.

There is also an embed element to embed external content like an audio or video file in a page.

Dynamic graphics with the canvas Tag
Using this tag, one creates a placeholder or container on the HTML page where one may display dynamic graphics or images.

Standalone sections using the figure element
HTML5 provides the ability to mark off sections with of a page with the figure element.

Create blog post-like functionality with the article element
The ideal place one could use this is on the main page of a blog where you provide a teaser snippet for a post. This is usually the first few lines or the first paragraph of a post with a "Read more" link at the end. Clicking this link would take you to another page in the blog that contains the text for the entire post.

Provide additional data with an Aside element
This is a useful feature to provide additional information on the content of the page.

Enhanced menu options
One of these is the command tag to specify a command button in the menu. Another is a datalist element to show a drop down list. The days of using Javascript to create this functionality may be numbered.

Enhanced text options
One of these is the dialog option when you wish to exhibit a dialog among two or more individuals on a site. Another is a section tags to specify a section in a page.There are also header and footer tags to add headers and footers to sections.

A new element has been thrown in to specify a date-time format.

No more Frames
The frame and frameset tags have been removed in HTML5.

Text formatting moved to CSS
Bold, acronym, center,font and a few such tags have been depreciated. HTML5 mandates that these attributes must be described in the CSS.

Also Read:
Does Internet Explorer 8 support HTML 5? - Stack Overflow

HTML 5, Firefox and Internet Explorer

How HTML5 Will Change the Way You Use the Web - HTML5 - Lifehacker

HTML5 and The Future of the Web

HTML5 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HTML5 Gallery | A showcase of sites using HTML5 markup

HTML 5 Tag Reference

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