Yesterday was an exciting day for Chrome with all of those product announcements. Although I was impressed with the launch of the Chrome notebook, I could not help but wonder; if this ChromeOS is so simple, lightweight and inexpensive why couldn’t Google just make it available as a download like its browser version? That would have been nice wouldn’t it?
If ChromeOS claims to be nothing but the web, why didn’t Google just give us something by the web?
After all, it is just a browser with login functionality therefore couldn’t it have been easily bundled up as a downloadable OS that would allow anyone to simply install it over any netbook or notebook? It only utilizes the cloud and uses your Google account. It is so simple; it would seem like a no brainer for Google. That was really the kind of announcement I was hoping for. A downloadable OS would have made a lot of people much happier.
This would have been a better way to get this beta project up and running rather than going through a long beta program for a notebook. Who knows if I will ever get a notebook to test? Why get stuck with a waiting game, when you can download and run it now?
Don’t get me wrong, it would be cool to have test versions of the Cr-48 Chrome OS notebook but why all that hustle in the first place? What’s the catch? Is Google planning to monetize on Chrome by bundling the OS with cheap notebooks? Am I the only one missing something here?
Anyway, I was at work so I missed some parts of the live event. Did any part of the event give any reasons to why we downloadable Chrome OS model was not mentioned? Some answers would be nice.
Well, if you did not get a chance to view the Chrome event, take a peek at the first 20 minutes below:
Visit YouTube for the rest of the Chrome Event by clicking HERE.
If you are looking for a Chrome Notebook, you can test drive one today by clicking HERE.
Source: YouTube
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very simple reason: people are idiots….
they would have thousands of people downloading it and saying “this is crap, it doesn’t support my **** ”
even when people are told that something isn’t ready for normal use and that there are issues, people still complain.
when the question of a download was raised the response was something to the effect of “are you comfortable compiling?” because people who are capable of compiling are less likely to complain about known issues and jump the gun on forming an opinion on unfinished work.
They did allow you to download it over the web: it’s called the Chrome web browser. The only difference between using a Chrome OS device and using Chrome on your current device is that the Chrome OS device won’t have anything on it except for Chrome. The only innovations inherent to Chrome OS that aren’t available by installing Ubuntu and then adding Chrome are hardware-related (firmware-verified boot path, always-on 3G connection), and thus a download isn’t going to help you. Everything else you might want to do in Chrome OS (download web apps, use offline storage, etc.) you can already do with the Chrome web browser, so why would they bother bundling an iso that’s not going do more than their current browser without special hardware anyway?
Incidentally, if you really want to try Chrome, go to http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os and download and compile the source. After finally tweaking things and getting it to boot into a virtual machine, you’ll say “I could have just launched Chrome hours ago; this is why they didn’t release a copy of Chrome OS.”
Good question–probably because it’s not even a stable OS right now, and since it’s small won’t have the same wide-spectrum driver support Windows and Linux have. It’s kinda like Android–can you run the Desire’s version on a DroidX? No, because each version is custom-tuned to run on that hardware.
On a similar note, I’ve signed up as a beta tester for the new netbooks–if I get one, I’ll be sure to send along my thoughts.