Chrome, Operating System | featured news

Macintosh, Windows, or Google? Search engine giant Google finally unveiled the first "Chromebook" notebooks at the Google I/O conference on Wednesday, laptop computers from manufacturing giants Samsung and Acer that use Google's Chrome operating system and will go on sale in June.

How long does a Chrome notebook battery last? Eighteen days, in the case of my test model. Sad. I know that this is a beta product, but that is a major fail, even in beta. This is the cloud-computing dream, the Microsoft headache that could challenge the ecosystem from Dell to Firefox.

Google said it plans to launch a store for online applications that run in its Chrome Web browser and operating system, the Internet giant's latest push to encourage developers to build software that runs online.

The developers behind Google Chrome OS, the forthcoming cloud-enabled operating system from the internet giant, have explained how they are dealing with a key need for any computer - how well it plays with the printer.

Google today unveiled more details of Chrome OS, a lightweight, browser-based operating system for netbooks. With a strong focus on speed, the Chrome OS promises nearly instant boot times of about 7 seconds for users to login to their computers.

Ahead of its press event to talk about the new Chrome OS Google has just posted the source code for Chrome OS on the Chromium site. As you can see in the file structure, Google is doing the same thing it does with Chrome, which is based off of Chromium, the open-source component.

Google's Chrome OS project, first announced in July, will become available for download within a week, we've heard from a reliable source. Google previously said to expect an early version of the OS in the fall.

What can we expect? Driver support will likely be a weak point.

...but What About the Other Web Browsers?