http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/353458/goog ... s-unveiled

So Google have revealed a few details about their upcoming operating system:




Just to break up the text a little, there's pics in the link




So, thoughts?

Will it be too restrictive to be useful? Worried about losing your USB stick?

Or do you think Google couldn't be any more evil if it was ran by this man:

A little too sparse.

Until we get reliable and constant Intenet connections and roaming costs are reduced, it isn't going to be mainstream.

I think, for the next few years, hybrid is going to be the answer. Cloud computing is fine, but when I'm a week without an Internet connection, all the cloud reliability in the world isn't going to help me.

Services like Microsoft Mesh, Apple MobileMe etc. are a much better solution at the moment, where the information is on the cloud, but synced to every device you have and any changes made locally are synced back up to the cloud, when there is an Internet connection again.

Yes, Chrome + Gears goes some way to sort this out, but a web browser can't replace some local applications.

Web Mail? I'll take Apple Mail or Outlook every time.

Twitter? I use TweetDeck on every device I have, running constantly on my desktop. I only use the website a couple of times a week for "maintenance" tasks.

The same for chat clients, I want chat clients, not web pages of chat...

Chrome is interesting, but I think it is going to be niche for a while. It certainly won't make inroads into corporations. They will more likely go with thin clients running an RDP client than Chrome, at least in the current climate. RDP is easier to tie down and control than Chrome + RDP client in a window.

I think as Simon Aughton says, it is just a way to get ad revenue for Google, impressions on the Google websites.

the chances of me having it are zero and falling.
No internet connection = paper weight

+1 and +1 for Dave too.

Unlike water and electricity, which floweth from the various outlets in the house, the shoddy nature of 3G support and the fragmented, and somewhat costly, WiFi hotspots out there, mean that in this country at least, this is going to be a curiosity.

Top 10 Google Chrome OS talking points

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.c ... d=3206886&

Google Chrome OS: first look video

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.c ... d=3206885&

Haven't got looking at these myself yet...

I think it's a great idea, but like most others are saying, not until internet coverage is a bit better. It's definitely going to be the future though.

For many but certainly not all people, all they really want is a browser and the ability to play local media. Many people only use webmail and online calender, which is far easier than trying to sync a fat client across a number of devices. Fat clients offer no advantage except off-line access, and you get that with Google anyway.

For me personally, most of the time all I want from a netbook is web access. As long as I can use Logmein, I can fix customer's problems while I'm in the car. Decent Java performance is the key thing there, and I imagine Chrome would be just fine.

On site is a different matter. I need to be able to run things like the Avaya admin software, which is Windows only. Therefore, I will always need a Windows laptop. I find this rather annoying because I'd much prefer a browser interface, but such is life.

Would I buy one? It depends on the package. If I could get a better data rate with a Chrome netbook than Windows, then yes. It does not seem unlikely that there will be mobile network partnerships, so favourable contracts are a real possibility. I'd probably rather have a Chrome netbook than an iPhone.

I'd add speed and ease of use to the equation. Fat clients offer a lot more flexibility, speed and ease of use, compared to most online services. I have Google Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, MobileMe, company Exchange e-mail and my own domain.

They all have web interfaces, but they are all more difficult to use and slower to respond than working with a local client.

Look at the on-line Office suites, none of them offer the flexibility, speed or ease of use that a local client gives. The add-ins are also lacking for the likes of GoogleDocs at the moment, unless you can show me JetReports for GoogleDocs.


Java performance is browser agnostic, it is down to the Java RTE that is installed and how well optimised it is for the hardware you have.

Apart from forums, I don't use a web browser for much, certainly no apps. I haven't found one that was as good or better than using a local app.

I'm sure, as the technology ripens, that it will improve. Like Chrome OS, web apps are going to come at some point, but they aren't there yet.


Agreed. And I think that businesses are going to switch more and more to either Citrix XenDesktop, with thin clients or locally hosted web apps over the next few years. Until they really embrace the cloud for everything is still a way away.

Convincing companies to host the information they are legally responsible for on servers they have no control over, in an unknown country, with unknown data protection laws? Most aren't going to go for it, in the current climate. The laws need to change, national boundaries need to become less of an obstacle.

My experience is completely different. Fat clients are vastly slower, more difficult to use and less flexible than Gmail.

I have 800MB of emails on my Gmail account, which is synced with Mail on my home computer. A Gmail search totally blows away Outlook and Mail both in terms of speed and reliability. A search that takes Google less than 0.2 seconds takes my desktop about 20 seconds, and Mail fails to reliably find everything unless you have indexing enabled. Mail takes nearly a minute to open and thrashes your drive, where as Gmail takes less than half a second. Mail doesn't offer any control over my account, whereas the Gmail portal offers total control.

As for Outlook and Exchange, the amount of cursing it makes me do probably exceeds any other product I use. I have just a few hundred emails on my work PC, but it still takes forever to search them and I can't tag anything to make it easier. Folders are all very well, but labels are far more powerful.

As for ease of use, I find the Gmail client far more friendly than Outlook or Mail. I love the use of labels, and the fact I can log on absolutely anywhere totally destroys any benefits to me of a fat client. The only reason I sync it to Mail is in case Google go bust or I get cut off!

Dependable access to fast Internet has the ability to totally change the way we depend on local storage. Hard drives fail and USB drives get lost. In Lord Google I do trust.

1.Take Ubuntu
2.Strip out everything useful
3.Strip out almost all hardware support
4.F*ck the boot sequence over
5.Kill all filesystem permissions
6.Enforce recode in hardware support for a limited subset of hardware that enforces people to use only what you sell
7.Label it ChromeOS
8.Epic failure.

My washing machine does laundry far better than my laptop, despite running a crippled OS.

Sometimes all you really want is a clean pair of pants.

I have around 4GB of mail locally, here. My work exchange is only since July, but is around 1.2GB. Searching isn't something I do often, I just go to the folder where the email is stored and open it. Switching folders is much quicker on the local client than having to wait for the Internet to transmit the new view...

Just opened Google Mail, it took 10 seconds to list the emails in my folder (2 of them), switching to a folder with 200 emails from my old company loaded in about 1/10 of a second...


I find it the other way round, I've never found labels useful and much prefer folders. Searching? I think I've performed one search of my email in the last 2 years...


I can log on from anywhere as well. My iPhone has my emails, my WindowsMobile has my emails, my company laptop has my emails, my home machine has my emails and my iMac has my emails. If I don't have my laptop, WM or my iPhone with me, I can connect securely over a web browser and access the emails.

I find MobileMe's webmail is much better than GoogleMail, but still not a patch on fat client. OWA is also better than GoogleMail, but still not up to the experience of using Outlook or Mail, for speed.


Yep, hard drives fail, that's why I have multiple back-ups (on-site and offsite) and cloud backups of all of my data -



The cloud has a lot of promise, long term, but we aren't generally in a position to switch. It is immature, it is unreliable and there are a lot of legal questions about national boundaries and ownership of data, that will stop big businesses switching quickly. For the private individual, it is less of a problem.

I think, for the time being, a hybrid-cloud is the practical solution, with the data stored locally and synced to the cloud. If the cloud goes down, you can still work, if your machine craps out, you can work on-line with another machine, or quickly sync everything back down to a new machine. If you are working at home and at work, you can automatically sync the documents and carry on working when you get home and the data is stored in multiple locations.

In the long run, the cloud will make more sense and take over from local fat clients, but HTML isn't the answer.

Edit: I'm downloading ChromeOS at the moment and will give it a whirl in Fusion (gdgt.com have created a VMWare package)...

it seems to me like linux with all the fun stuff hidden away and no access to local storage, who on earth would want that?

It is currently limited to a very low resolution (800x600), which is pretty much unusable with any modern website - I wouldn't want to use a display with less than 1050 vertical pixels.

It boots fairly quickly, around 12 seconds, but actually running, it is incredibly sluggish - a full Ubuntu installation is quicker under VMWare Fusion 3.0, as is running under Ubuntu. It also seems to randomly have problems with the keyboard - the Ctrl key seemed to get stuck on at one point, it was very frustrating not being able to type in URLs or search text...

For the speed, Ubuntu was running with 512MB RAM, 1 core (2.24Ghz), I gave ChromeOS 2 cores and 768MB RAM and it crawls in comparison....

Edit: BTW, you need to set up the virtual machine to use a bridged network, not the default (for VMWare fusion) NAT. That must be done before the first boot! I booted NAT first, then reset it to bridged and rebooted, but it still couldn't find a network connection.

Also, on my machine, leaving the network adapter to "automatic" didn't work, I had to manually select the wired ethernet port - the WLAN is deactivated on the machine anyway, so it shouldn't make any difference...

I had to create the virtual environment 4 times before it finally worked with the network adapter - reconfiguring the VM after Chrome has booted for the first time doesn't work, as Chrome doesn't seem to redetect the hardware on reboot, it just tries to carry on where it left off...