A working Chromium on Snow Leopard and Chrome Desktop Notifications are interesting, but let’s be honest, the real Chrome-related information everyone wants to know about is Chrome OS. And today there is news, as it looks like the OS may have just revealed itself, if only slightly, to the world.
No, we’re not talking about those big icon screenshots, instead, this reveal is buried in code commits.
As you can see in this directory, there are a few mentions of “chromeos.” A few days ago, a “brettw” with a @chromium.org address wrote the following:
Move the compact navigation bar to the chromeos directory.
Generalize the chromeos rules so we don’t have to list every file in the exclusions.
Seeing as Chromium, while open source, is still very much a Google project, an @chromium.org email address would seem to suggest that this is a Google employee. A quick scan of what he’s been working on reveals that it’s all Chrome, all the time. A quick Google Search reveals him to be Brett Wilson, who is a software engineer at Google, and you can see him in action at Google I/O here.
Just prior to that message, Wilson described the “compact navigation bar” in a bit more detail:
Bugfixes and enhancements to the compact nav bar and the status area.
This makes the compact navigation bar off by default at the request of Nicolas.
It can be enabled with –compact-nav on the command line. It also adds
different tab opening options when this feature is enabled. They are accessible
from the app menu in the status area. The buttons now extend to the top of the
screen for easier clicking.The status area is enabled whether or not the compact navigation bar is. I
fixed the background so it will appear unselected when the window loses focus,
and I fixed the time formatting to make the minutes always 2 digits.The Chrome button is now hooked up and just opens a tab to a placeholder page.
There’s some interesting stuff in there. It would seem that Chrome OS may feature some kind of compact navigation bar that has various tab-opening options (including clicking on the “Chrome button”). It would appear that there’s an app menu of some kind in something known as the “status area” which apparently contains the current time.
Now, certainly this stuff could be related to a new version of Chrome being worked on and not Chrome OS. But remember the latest update above (”Move the compact navigation bar to the chromeos directory”) and then take a look at the one that came right before it:
Add a first attempt at a compact location bar and a status bar. The status bar
contains a clock, an application menu, and a non-working battery indicator.
The compact location bar can be toggled by COMPACT_NAV_BAR in browser_window_gtk.cc
So this status bar apparently has a clock, and application menu, and a battery indicator. Certainly, that all reeks of Chrome OS rather than Chrome, the web browser. I’m just speculating here, but it seems reasonable to assume that this status bar may be the name of the main upper dock for Chrome OS.
It’s hard to know for sure, and it’s even harder to try to dig through the Chromium.org directories for more information, given all the code names and nested directories. Here’s a bit more of what I dug up:
This page talks about cookies as they are related to Chrome OS. Of note:
[Chrome OS] Adds support for injecting Corp cookies at startup
To support single-sign-on for Chrome OS, we need a way to inject cookies into Chrome.
Eventually, I want to replace this pipe-reading with an appropriate usage of DBus, but Chrome OS isn’t there yet.
So yes, it would appear that work is well underway on Chrome OS, but it “isn’t there yet.”
Update: As commenter Daniel Gasienica points out, Chris Messina did some digging of his own yesterday and seems to have found an area on Google’s servers where Chrome OS could be getting developed. Right now you get a “403 Forbidden”, meaning something is there.
[thanks Sai]
[photo: Warner Brothers]
I also like snooping around svn/cvs logs – it often times tells you lots about product roadmaps
Sorry,Useless article. Looks silly. What the hype about?
> So yes, it would appear that work is well underway on Chrome OS, but it “isn’t there yet.”
no shit, Sherlock.
Good digging Siegler.
wow, this is “ChromeRumors.com” now. This site used to be mostly about new tech companies and developments in the industry. Now it’s about this kind of stuff, iPhone apps, and Twitter outages.
…yeah I know stop reading if I don’t like it… I get it.
What are you talking about? This is the kind of stuff I’m interested in…
Interesting post. Maybe rumors, but hope Google Chrome OS is something special than other OS and sure it would make a new revolution
Chris Messina (@chrismessina) found this:
«Guessing that http://code.google.com/p/c-os/ is where ChromeOS is being developed. It redirects to http://code.goo.../p/chromium-os/
»
http://twitter....atus/3674628722
Still waiting…
Hope that one day we can finally open it without 403 forbidden infomation.
yep, 403s, but interesting. thx.
I hadn’t seen the ChromeOS in their source control directly. That’s *very* interesting.
It makes loads of sense, and I could not be surprised in the least if they solved the OpenID UX problem by just moving the identity selector into the browser, as they did in Android:
http://www.flic...cho/3093284072/
Thanks for this post MG, interesting insights indeed… and your image choice is getting better as well
I agree great image.
I hope ChromeOs is better than Jolicloud which was ubuntu netbook remix with a few cloud apps. The cloud apps were nothing more than firefox pointed at a website without navigation buttons.
OK my view on what Chrome OS will be….
A web browser.
Yep that is, IMHO the GUI will just be a web browser linking to google apps
I suppose the real question is whether I will be able to run WoW or EVE: Online in Chrome OS…
There is already an answer to that: NO… its kinda as simple as that. Maybe there will be a android market place integration, or maybe some general repository, but nothing more.
If they are smart they will make the OS and the browser container one and the same thing.
If you can do everything via web apps (and with Gears for offline support and hardware access why not) why do you need a traditional OS at all?
at which point the browser chrome goes away and you just need a launcher (dock, start button, sidebar, whatever) and every window that opens is simply an HTML pane
Just want to put this out there. Tightly integrating the OS with the browser got M$ into bunches of trouble because it was then so hard to remove the browser. If Google’s idea of doing ‘OS’ better is to copy something Microsoft tried 10 years ago, I’ll be very disappointed, and I’m not in the habit of being disappointed by Google.
What I expect is substantiall more than that.
Yes, but what google is doing is very different. Google is not as much tightening the relationship, but removing the OS all together. The only program it will run is the browser. So they are not combining the OS and browser. They are basically creating a browser that doesn’t need an OS to run.
Since you said “let’s be honest”, let’s be brutally honest. We don’t need another OS. Between Windows, OSX and Ubuntu, what are you missing?
You would probably say you need a really slim OS. Why? Disk space and memory are already cheap and the storage space provided today is vastly larger than what we were accustomed to just a couple of years ago.
Lastly, there are already “slim” versions of Windows out there, and even Ubuntu runs off of a CD.
Google OS. It is just ANOTHER OS that will take control away from you – the end user – and give it to Google. Just ask any self-respecting geek if they run Google Toolbar. You think they want an even larger version of THAT?
The Google OS will be completely different than any OS we are used to. Whether we will like the change, or never use it… That is the question. Google hopes to revolutionize the OS. It is not going to be “another OS”.
Nothing is going on in chromium-os@GoogleCode.
They just reserved the name.
All of the development has to be behind closed walls because of classified internal information running around the change lists.
Just like they had with Chrome. We will not be able to see the SVN repository from the time before the public release.
This is just a place holder, no work is being done there, other than WIKIs, at most.
I found the “single-sign-on for chrome OS” bit interesting. Integrate OS login and browser login using OpenID and no more entering passwords! Well, sort of. Would make me more paranoid about leaving the comp unattended though.
http://code.goo...com/u/jrobbins/
This developer owns google code projects for chromeos and c-os
http://code.goo...com/p/chromeos/
chromeos is an empty project (possibly a place holder for the real project)
http://code.google.com/p/c-os/
The c-os project redirects to:
http://code.goo...ium-os/?redir=1
Which is forbidden on servers outside google…
The chromium-os project is where Chrome Os ids being developed….
http://chromium...lecode.com/svn/
Strange!
All this news are interesting but seem to indicate that there is a lot of work to be done to get this ready for release.
More Chrome OS hints?
http://build.ch...4/changelog.xml
We just need a password…
https://chromiu...lecode.com/svn/
brettw/password?
jrobbins/password?
hi
I’ve just installed mercurial on my win xp and tried this command:
hg clone https://chromiu...lecode.com/svn/ chromeos
and I’ve got:
http authorization required
realm: Google Code Subversion Repository
and question for user and password
sooo definitely there is something there
ps: sorry for my engilsh
I just hope they release an beta or alpha Version this year