> It was my impression that Chrome is part of a larger effort by Google to > develop cloud computing based on Linux. I had heard, in fact, that > Google was polishing it's own Linux distro, based on Ubuntu, but tying > the user into their cloud services. The Google Linux distro was > supposed to come out late in 2010, but don't set your watch by that. >
They are working on a linux distro and you can download the development version now at http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os. Be aware however that it is extremely locked down, everything happens in the browser. Any changes on the local system are actually removed on restart. > > Although Safari is Unix based, it is proprietary software and they > might have had to buy a license to touch it. By comparison, they could > download all the source code that they wanted for Firefox for free. > Safari is proprietary but 99% of it's functionality is available as the completely open-source webkit project (http://webkit.org/). Webkit is a much newer code base than firefox and accordingly it is much faster and it is much easier to work with from a development standpoint. > > In early editions of chrome that I tried, it behaved suspiciously like > Firefox and one plug in or something that I downloaded for Firefox > worked in Chrome. > Well extensions in both browsers are just HTML and JS. I doubt that an actual firefox extension would work in chrome but many have been ported and are available. > > A Google Linux distro would finally push people like Lexmark into > developing a good set of Linux drivers. The HP software for Linux works > better than the stuff they have for Windows, probably because all they > had to do was release a driver that CUPS could use, and not bundle the > driver with a lot of free but not GPL photo and printing software that > wasn't all that great in order to be sure the user would get value out > of the printer. > I think it will improve driver support for consumer netbook hardware since that's what chrome os is targeted for but I doubt printer drivers (especially business focused lexmark) will change much.
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