Show notes and talking points:

Android, Chrome OS, JooJoo…What is an operating system? Why do we need them?

If all an OS does is load a browser, is it an OS?

Are we ready yet for browser-centric OS?
—Consumers
—Business/Enterprise

What’s missing in Chrome OS? What are the limits of running everything out of the browser? Who’s it for or not for?

What’s special about Chrome OS?

Will chrome OS get apps?

Why does Google need its own OS

What’s behind Google’s OSes?
–motive: needle Microsoft? jump-start cloud computing? faster Web = more ads?
–What about Android? OS X as a mobile OS? WinMo, Symbian, etc?

Tactics of Chrome OS
–When it’ll arrive: open-source code available now, arriving as a product only preinstalled on Netbooks for holiday season 2010.

–Google will build in technology that make this more than just today’s browser–WebGL, Native Client, O3D, and various HTML5 elements. Mozilla and others are pushing this envelope.

–Google is scoping this narrowly as for Netbooks that are “companion PCs”–perhaps the primary machine but not the only machine. That makes it easier to declare victory, but also makes it a smaller victory. Smart overall.

–The programs run in the browser, not on the underlying Linux OS.

Gordon: What are enterprise users saying to you about this?

What about other lightweight operating systems

Outlook for Windows, OSX, Linux?

Next week, we’re on at noon Pacific time. Topic is biggest stories of the year, with CNET Editor in Chief Scott Ard and Buzz Out Loud daily host Tom Merritt.

Originally posted at Reporters’ Roundtable Podcast

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Originally posted at Relevant Results

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Google is officially obsessed with speed. If real-time search didn’t convince you of that fact, then take note of two new features with speed also at their core: universal search features in Google Suggest and Quick Scroll for Chrome.

Now as you type in Google’s search box, instead of just getting suggestions for your queries from Google Auto-Suggest, you’ll also get the answers. You’ll see the information either above or below the suggested search terms, including any one these 10 universation features: weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, currency and unit conversions.

Google writes, “let’s say you want to visit the capital of Belgium, but you can’t remember what it is. Type ‘capital of belgiu’ in the search box and you’ll immediately find your answer (Brussels) before you’re even done typing. Similarly, you can type, ‘weather brus’ and quickly decide how much warm clothing to bring (a lot!).”

Google Quick Scroll, a new extension for Chrome, is also designed to help you find what you are searching for faster by displaying bits of text at the bottom right-hand side of the page that are relevant to your search. Right now the extension only works on the beta version of Chrome 4, which means it won’t work in Chrome for Mac.

Quick Scroll is meant to be a time-saving utility or, as Google describes it, “a personal assistant who reads webpages before you do and highlights the parts you might want to read. If several sections of the page have useful content, Quick Scroll will show you multiple text excerpts from different portions of the page and you can click on any of them to scroll to that spot.”

Both updates are smart additions that make Google more efficient for searchers. Let us know what you think of them in the comments.

Tags: Google, google chrome, google suggest

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Image Credit: google bot

Bye Bye Google Gears, HTML5 is the future!

Late last month Google announced to the world that it would be retiring the Google Gears platform, which gives you offline access to your Gmail and other popular Google Apps so that it has more of a ‘desktop’ experience, in favor of HTML5’s offline storage capabilities.

Google has said that Gears will continue to be supported for sites that already use it. However, they expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it’s a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers.

Google Goes Minimal

If you have gone to the google home page in the last month (http://www.google.com for those of you that just search from the browser and have forgotten the home page URL) you will notice that if you let the page load, and have your mouse cursor in up where the address bar is. All you see is what is in the image above, and then if you mouse into the page, everything fades in beautifully(With the power of Javascript!!)!

A Very small, but cool feature.

Google gets Real, Real-Time!

Earlier this week Google announced a new service that will offer streaming results for searches, incorporating real-time updates from web pages and social networking partners. It has in fact been implemented and so far it rocks, I discovered yesterday that you can Google someones twitter handle and get 4 or so of their latest tweets, and you can even delve into a larger list of their latest tweets! Great for people who have twitter blocked at work, you can still see what your favorite tweeps are up to! Check it out!

I am very excited to see where this will take us, as Google announced its partners will be Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter. Real-Time Search is exciting, who knows what we will be able to do with all of this information aggregated into Google searches!

Google Chrome for Mac and Linux Announced!

Finally! I was a huge fan of Google Chrome on Windows, just because it was soooooo fast, and everything was so simple and clean, it just made browsing the web a joy. When I got my Macbook pro earlier this year I was saddened that it wasn’t available for mac! But that time has passed. Google Chrome is now Available to download for Macs running OSX 10.5 (Intel only), It’s also available for Linux!

Other exciting features added include the Chrome Extentions Page which has add-ons similar to Firefox! Woo!

ALSO – Google’s Bookmark Sync is now live! Basically what this does is it stores your bookmarks in your Google account, so you can access them on any computer, How awesome is that?? (Although Delicious does pretty much the same thing).

Well guys, that is the update! It probably took you more than 60 seconds, but it sure beats hunting for all that info yourself eh? Hope you enjoyed it! Now you should be all caught up with the new Google stuff (at least for this month )

Leave some comments if you know of any Google news that I missed!

Thanks guys!

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When it comes to lightweight operating systems for a netbook or smartbook (which is basically a netbook that runs an ARM processor — expect to see them early next year), much of the recent buzz has centered around Google’s Chrome OS.

However, if you have a netbook and you want to try something that has a lot of the Web-integration features that Chrome OS promises ASAP, check out Jolicloud. Jolicloud is a Linux-based OS designed specifically for netbooks. The pre-beta is now available and it looks pretty great.

If you watched our Chrome OS hands-on video, you saw that while the components for a lightweight Web-focused OS are there, the developer builds need a lot of work. It isn’t fair to compare something that isn’t scheduled to hit the market for a year against something like Jolicloud, but the goals for each OS are similar.

Check out this video of Jolicloud booting on an Asus Eee PC 901 in just about 15 seconds.

Look and Feel

I’ve only had a chance to play with Jolicloud on a virtual machine (I hope to try it on a netbook sometime this weekend), but I’m impressed with the look and feel. The problem I have with many netbook-specific Linux distributions is that, although the application launcher and desktop might be well-formatted for a small screen, the apps themselves still don’t take advantage of small spaces as well as they should.

Thus far, only Intel’s Moblin project has really addressed the issue of small spaces. Jolicloud was started by Tariq Krim, the founder of Netvibes. This is important because Netvibes has always had a good sense of UI and space allocation.

Jolicloud has a slew of Web and native applications. It can also run Adobe Air apps and play back many types of video.

If you’re interested in giving Jolicloud a try on your netbook or small laptop, you can download the pre-beta for free. You can also create and run Jolicloud from a USB flash drive if you just want to see how it works without necessarily dedicating any hard drive space.

The Future

Jolicloud hopes to have it first full version out in early 2010. From the looks of things, they are really close to an official release.

How Jolicloud will hold up against competitors like Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Intel’s Moblin, and, of course, Google Chrome OS, has yet to be seen — but for users of netbooks, the options for browser-centric, low-profile operating systems are growing.

Tags: Chrome OS, jolicloud, moblin, netbook

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Previously on Fubiz

• The Google Story
• Google Street View
• Google Japan

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With Google Chrome now available on the Mac, there’s more buzz than ever around Google’s speedy, lightweight browser. Now Google in the UK has created a 4 minute introductory video for would-be Chrome users, featuring pin-boards, graffiti, and even some knitting.

We think it’s fantastic; clearly huge amounts of effort went into what could have been another boring introductory video.

What do you think – is this better than a screencast? Let us know in the comments.

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But Google has recently been touting a new capability in Chrome that was once wholly owned by Firefox — browser add-ons. Earlier this week, the company launched official support for add-ons in Chrome which means Firefox fans accustomed to tricking out their browser with dozens of extensions can now do the same with Google’s faster upstart. It also puts these two key players, who would otherwise be considered allies against Microsoft, even more at odds than they were before.

Unfortunately for Google, due to technical shortcomings and some license restrictions, Chrome’s extensions are unlikely to ever match the power and variety of what’s available for Firefox.

On the plus side, Chrome extensions are remarkably easy to build. Using common web tools like HTML and JavaScript, Chrome extensions require no special programming knowledge and development is fast — at a developer event held at Google’s office Wednesday night, Chrome’s developers showed off how easy it is to build a Chrome extension by doing so live onstage in five minutes.

No doubt, that’s very impressive. And you quite simply could not do that with Firefox. But Mozilla is already moving toward an easier-to-build extensions system as well. Mozilla’s JetPack experiment, a Mozilla Labs project that will eventually allow developers to build extensions using simple JavaScript and HTML, is already well on its way to maturity and will be heading to Firefox in the near future.

What’s more important, however, is that despite how easily you can build them, Google’s terms of service for its extensions and its lack (thus far) of low-level tools mean Google Chrome extensions are still playing catch-up with what you’ll find in Firefox.

In fact, if you search through the Chrome extensions gallery looking for the kind of extensions popular with Firefox users, you’ll notice there are very few available and, more importantly, entire categories are absent.

For example, there’s no extension for downloading YouTube movies or any of the many BitTorrent helpers (or full-fledged clients) that exist for Firefox.

It might be that no one has developed such add-ons yet, but even if they did it would most likely run afoul of Google’s Chrome extension guidelines, which outlaw things like copyright infringement, hate speech and any extension to “enable the unauthorized download of streaming content or media.”

You also won’t find any add-ons that selectively block scripts — like Firefox’s NoScript or FlashBlock. As NoScript developer Giorgio Maone points out on his blog, “Chrome is still lacking the required infrastructure for selective script disablement and object blocking.”

That doesn’t just mean that NoScript doesn’t work, it means that the Flash blockers and even the ad blockers you’ll find in the Chrome extension gallery are, as Maone has demonstrated in his post, “ridiculously easy to circumvent.”

Ad blockers are an area where Google must certainly be hesitant. After all, if Chrome were to achieve IE’s market share and support extensions that block ads in a way that won’t be easy to circumvent, it could have a very real, very negative affect on Google’s bottom line.

So if Chrome extensions lack the power of those in Firefox, and Google’s terms restrict what developers can build, what’s left?

Well, Chrome is undeniably faster than Firefox, and even though it’s been only a few days since extensions became official for Windows and Linux (but not Mac) users, Chrome has almost 500 extensions available. Obviously, Chrome is going to be a popular platform to develop for in spite of its restrictions, limitations and its complex connection to the business model of its corporate parent, which may at times run in opposition to the demands of users on the open web.

We look forward to seeing what developers can do to extend Chrome and hope that in the future Google will give developers more access and refrain from censoring apps the company doesn’t like. Otherwise, Chrome extensions will end up looking more like apps in Apple’s tightly controlled App Store and less like the type of hacker-centric creations we’re hoping to see.

See Also:

• Review: Chrome Beta for Mac
• Google Lays the Groundwork for Extensions in Chrome
• Google Chrome Closes in on Firefox With Official Extension Support
• Google Chrome Gets an Extension Manager
• Google Chrome Is Growing Up, Slowly but Surely

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Web Sockets

First up, we have Web Socket support being turned on by default on the developer channel. If you want to be a really cool JS h4x0r you should write a server app using node.js. If you want it to work on older browsers, try out the old favourite shim tale of use Flash to degrade, and Mozilla support should be coming soon and surely IE9 will support it too

Now you can code like this:

Chrome Extensions Beta

Although I curse at the weak support on Chrome Mac (coming by end of week though!), other Chromers can use the new beta extension system pioneered by the awesome Aaron Boodman and team:

Today, we’re really happy to release a beta of extensions that begins to deliver on our initial vision. Extensions are as easy to create as webpages. Users can install and uninstall them quickly without restart, and extensions have a great polished look that fits in with Google Chrome’s minimalist aesthetic. When developers upload an extension it is available to users immediately, with limited restrictions and manual reviews only in a few situations.

On the technical side, we’ve been able to use Google Chrome’s multiprocess architecture to help keep extensions stable and safe. And Chromium’s extensive performance monitoring infrastructure has helped us ensure extensions affect Google Chrome’s speed as little as possible. You can learn more details about the internals of our system in the videos below.

I am excited about the new extension systems of Chrome and Jetpack, and wrote up thoughts on how we are jumping out of the page and into the runtime as Web developers.

rel=”noreferrer” and target=”_blank”

I missed the fact that in Chrome you can opt-in to a new process from a link. This is important as every tab is NOT necessarily in its own process. People assume that is the case (a one to one mapping) but it isn’t (and has interesting security implications):

In many cases, though, Google Chrome needs to keep pages from related tabs in the same process, since they may access each other’s contents using JavaScript code. For example, clicking links that open in a new window will generally cause the new and old pages to share a process.

In practice, web developers may find situations where they would like links to other pages to open in a separate process. As one example, links from messages in your webmail client would be nice to isolate from the webmail client itself. This is easy to achieve now, thanks to new support in WebKit for HTML5′s “noreferrer” link relation.

To cause a link to open in a separate process from your web page, just add rel=”noreferrer” and target=”_blank” as attributes to the tag, and then point it at a URL on a different domain name. For example:

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Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on A busy Chrome week: Extensions, Web Sockets, and more

Originally posted at The Download Blog

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Do you have a geek in your life? Someone who is incredibly hard to buy Christmas presents for that has no idea what they want and a wardrobe full of unwanted/unneeded jumpers? If the answer is yes then read on for Think Vitamin’s top five gifts for geeks.

1: The Mifi

The Mifi comes strongly recommended by our friend and mobile guru Sam Machin.

The Mifi is an “intelligent mobile hotspot” that creates a local “cloud” of high-speed Internet connectivity which can be shared between users and Wi-Fi devices, a maximum of 5, such as laptops, cameras and gaming devices. A big win for train journeys, meetings in the coffee shop and BarCamps.

Available in the US ($299) and Europe (£209) from Amazon

2: Apple Magic Mouse

Multi-Touch in a mouse, how very handy. We have heard great things about the new wireless mouse from Apple. Increase your productivity by “scrolling vertically, horizontally, and diagonally  simply by touching anywhere on the top surface.”

$69/£55 from Apple

3: Dot Grid Book

One for the UX designer in your life. The Dot Grid Book from Behance makes a nice change to your trusty Moleskine. Complete with 50 dotted pages and a semi-hard suede-touch cover it makes a great starting point for your next web project.

$14 direct from Behance

4: Chrome Messenger Bag

Instantly identifiable by the airplane seat-belt buckle strap Chrome bags appear to be the geeks messenger bag of choice. Made in San Fransisco they come in various shapes and sizes and are a perfect fit for laptops as well as leaving ample room for books, clothes and whatever other accessories you might need. They must be cool, they even have a “design manifesto“.

Buy direct from the Chrome website, from $120

5: The Eye-Fi

Who hasn’t got an online photo sharing account? Photos and videos are geek currency these days but who honestly likes the upload process? The Eye-Fi takes away that pain and will automatically upload photos and videos to your computer and to the web.

The Eye-Fi card looks, stores media, and fits into cameras just like a regular SD/SDHC card. On top of that, the Eye-Fi card has built-in Wi-Fi that uses your wireless network to effortlessly transfer photos and videos to your chosen web site, including Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and more.

Check out the options at http://www.eye.fi/

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Google’s thirst for speed is unquenchable, it seems: Google Chrome (now on Mac, too) aims to make web browsing faster, while Google Site Performance helps webmasters speed up their websites. Meanwhile, Google’s SPDY is a plan to make the web itself faster.

Now Google is at it again, launching Speed Tracer, a Google Chrome extension that lets developers track the performance of their apps and make them faster. Speed Tracer’s Sluggishness Graph plots events and helps you to pinpoint what’s slowing down your app.

It’s a developer tool rather than one for general web users, but we’ll all benefit: a faster web is a lot more fun to use.

Tags: google speed tracer

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At long last, Google Chrome for Mac is finally in an official, publicly accessible beta. All we can say is, “It’s about time!” There’s just something extremely ironic about a Web browser based on WebKit (a layout engine that Apple created for its Safari browser in 2002 that didn’t even appear on Windows until 2007) taking 15 months to actually come to the Mac.

Ignoring the fact that Chrome Extensions aren’t supported on the Mac version of Google Chrome right now (although if you manage to get a copy of the extension file, you can actually install them — whatever), the question becomes: How does Google Chrome for Mac stack up against its Windows counterpart? Pretty well, as it turns out.

Look and Feel

As for similarities, the two browsers look virtually the same. The placement of the buttons and menu bars, the way tabs work — everything is uniform from one platform to another. Even the Preferences (called Options in the Windows version) are nearly identical.

The one exception is that Chrome for Windows can do Bookmark synching and install extensions and Chrome for Mac cannot.

Under the Hood

Google Chrome’s Developer Tools setup is equally identical under Windows and Mac. In Mac OS X, the Developer Tools take on the same theme as the rest of the browser (in Windows it uses the default Windows window styles), but the content is the same.

This makes sense, because Developer Tools is virtually identical to Safari’s Web Inspector. And by virtually identical, I mean they are exactly the same.

Differences

Right now, there are very few differences between the two programs, although two stand out.

Extensions — Chrome for Windows supports them, Chrome for Mac does not. Right now this appears to be due more to an imposed restriction rather to any actual technical compatibility issue, but we’ll trust the Chrome developers and hope to see Mac support soon.

If you really can’t wait, check out this tip from grack.com. Note: You’ll need to use either a compatible developer’s build or the latest Chromium for Mac nightly.

Menu Bar — One of the striking features about Chrome for Windows is its utter lack of an application bar (you know, File, Edit, View, etc.). However, in Mac OS X, there is a menu bar across the top of the screen that is always present. In addition, applications offer individual menus when that program is running in the foreground.

To Google’s credit, they decided to adhere to these guidelines, and, in the process, actually give Mac users some features that will be convenient to anyone who uses Safari, Firefox or Camino. This includes the standard File/Edit/View/Window menus, as well as a Bookmarks menu and a History menu.

Yes, you can access your bookmarks and view your history in a browser window from within the actual Chrome application, but these options make it a bit easier for users who are used to using the top Bookmarks menu or who want to see a list of recently closed tabs.

Overall

Mac users: What are your thoughts on Google Chrome for Mac so far?

Tags: chrome mac, Google, google chrome, os x, Windows

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Originally posted at The Download Blog

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Google has made the first betas of its Chrome web browser available for Mac and Linux users, the company announced Tuesday.

Here are the links for Mac and Linux. You should download Chrome and begin using it now. These are still betas and not as stable as a final releases, but everyone who lives and works on the web should experience Chrome first hand.

The reason is simple: Chrome is very, very fast. Sickeningly fast, actually. Faster than every other browser not just in page rendering and JavaScript performance, but as a desktop client software app, as well.

For the past two months, I’ve been using Google Chrome as my primary browser on both of my Macintosh computers, an old Mac Mini and a new iMac. Even though it wasn’t officially available for Mac and Linux, Google posted developers’ builds for early adopters to try out. The company warned that they weren’t fully ready — the easiest way to find them was to run a search for “Google Chrome danger” — but in my tests, I found Chrome to have very few problems. More like quirks, actually.

Even as a test app, it has largely replaced Firefox as my go-to browser. It occupies the top slot in my Mac’s Dock, just below the Finder.

The pre-beta Mac version had problems with some text input fields, like the one in WordPress used for composing blog posts. It also had a few issues with the scrollbar causing the video playback window to go blank on some sites. The pre-beta Linux version had fewer problems, but it did exhibit some strange user interface behaviors.

Now, those problems have been ironed out. The Chrome development team has been very cautious about releasing Mac and Linux versions of the browser that are free of bugs and as stable as possible, which is the reason these betas have taken so long. Feeling the pressure, Google made a public promise to release the betas before the end of the year.

I should point out that you need an Intel Mac and OS X 10.5 or later to run the Mac version. The Linux version of Chrome runs in both Gnome and KDE, and it can be installed with most package managers.

Windows users have had official releases for over a year now, allowing Chrome to capture just over five percent of the browser share. Also on Tuesday, Google released an extensions platform for the non-Mac versions of Chrome. This lack of extensions is the one thing keeping a lot of people from switching to Chrome from Firefox, still the preferred browser of most forward-looking web citizens.

So, now that Chrome is widely available and has extensions (official extensions support for the Mac is coming soon, but the daring can enable them now by jumping through some hoops), should Mozilla, Apple and Opera be worried?

They’re all smart companies, so we’re sure they already are. Besides possessing the sex appeal of the “new shiny,” Chrome delivers where every other browser falls short — the promise of extreme speed.

I’ve been using it for everything. Amazon, news websites and blogs, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, uploading photos to Flickr and Picasa, browsing HD content on Vimeo. Of course, all of the Google apps perform like lightning. Gmail, Google Reader, Calendar, Docs and Wave are all so responsive, they almost don’t feel like web apps. With the exception of YouTube, all of Google’s web apps, and most other web apps, perform with almost zero latency.

This is a big advantage for Google. The speed is thanks to the company’s own V8 JavaScript engine, as well as its work on Webkit, the open source page-rendering engine used by Chrome, Safari and a few other small browsers. As with the other modern (non-IE) browsers, Chrome was designed to get as much performance as possible out of cutting-edge web apps, so you get solid support for HTML5, CSS 3 and all the Ajaxy stuff.

Chrome is totally bare bones, making it lean and ultra-responsive. Tabs slide open and closed, and they’re on the top of the window, reducing clutter. Subtle fades and shading effects are applied to the inactive areas of the browser, helping highlight whatever it is you’re looking at.

Chrome’s “Omnibox” is a revelation. It takes the idea of Firefox’s “Awesomebar,” a combination URL bar and a search box for history and bookmarks, and goes one step further. Chrome does away with all other input fields, so if you need any information at all, there’s one place to ask for it. The Omnibox responds to the characters you’re typing, suggesting sites from your history, your favorites and from Google’s suggested search system. Firefox’s interface does the same thing, but it does it with two input fields (Firefox draws revenue from its separate search box, which defaults to Google) and Firefox doesn’t respond as quickly with suggestion.

There are lots of other things Chrome does. It isolates web apps into their own tabs, so a crashing app doesn’t crash the whole browser. It has themes and private browsing, and a thumbnail view of your favorite sites appears when you open a new tab.

Extensions support will remain a sticking point for many users. For everyday browsing, I found I didn’t really miss my extensions that much. And if I did, Firefox was only a mouse gesture away.

Look at it this way. Browsers are free, and they all have their particular strengths, so you should really have at least two.

Firefox is great. It’s fast enough, safe and full of useful features, like a five-seater Volvo or a sporty VW sedan. But when you just want to rip around as fast as you can, you go for the two-seater Porsche.

See also:

• Google Lays the Groundwork for Extensions in Chrome
• Google Shows Off Chrome Themes With Cool YouTube Hack
• Chrome Hits 3.0, Mac Version Due Later This Year

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It’s only Tuesday, but it appears as if we’re in the midst of Google Week. Yesterday saw the launch of Google real-time search, Google Goggles and even more Wave invites. Today, it’s all about Google Chrome.

Google Chrome for Mac just went live this morning, and now Google is announcing that the Google Chrome Extensions beta is open, too, with more than 300 extensions already available. Mac users, be forewarned, extensions only work for the Windows version of the Chrome browser.

According to Google’s announcement on the release:

“Today, we’re really happy to release a beta of extensions that begins to deliver on our initial vision. Extensions are as easy to create as webpages. Users can install and uninstall them quickly without restart, and extensions have a great polished look that fits in with Google Chrome’s minimalist aesthetic. When developers upload an extension it is available to users immediately, with limited restrictions and manual reviews only in a few situations.”

Today’s release is huge news for existing Chrome users who have been anxiously awaiting a single repository to find and install extensions. While you’ll no doubt notice that the 300 extensions available don’t match the quality and quantity of existing Firefox extensions, the Chrome browser does offer one huge competitive advantage: no restart required for install or uninstall.

Watch this video for an explanation of how to manage and install extensions for Google Chrome:

Tags: Firefox, Google, google chrome, google chrome extensions, google goggles, google real-time search, Google Wave, mac, Windows

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