It’s downright astounding how much difference a decade can make. In May 2011, Google’s defiantly minimalist new computing platform—a little something the company called Chrome OS—shipped to consumers for the first time, on laptops from Samsung and Acer. That was the culmination of a journey that began when Google unveiled Chrome OS in the summer of 2009 and continued with an experimental prototype called the Cr-48 in December 2010. It’s easy to forget now, but Chrome OS got its name because at the beginning, it was quite literally the Chrome operating system . The earliest versions of Chrome OS revolved entirely around the browser, with a deliberate omission of any traditional operating system elements. And boy, were those early versions jarring to use. When you signed into the original Chrome OS system on the decidedly understated CR-48 laptop, which was provided to a small pool of journalists and testers, all you were greeted with was a full-screen Chrome browser window. There was no desktop, no taskbar, and not much of anything else in sight. Heck, you couldn’t even close the browser window, as there was nothing beneath it. It was “quite a different type of computing environment,” as I put it in my own first impressions , and it felt “very foreign” to use. In 2010, Google’s experimental CR-48 was the first Chromebook—but you couldn’t buy it. [Photo: courtesy of Google] Unusual as the arrangement may have seemed, you’d better believe it was that way by design. In its initial introduction of Chrome OS, Google described the software as “a natural extension of Google Chrome”—with an interface that was “minimal to stay out of your way.” The Chromebook was meant to be a pure, unadulterated window to the web—no apps, no distractions, and no typical computing hassles to slow your tab-based wandering down. Power up a Chromebook today, and you’d hardly even know it’s an evolution of the same platform
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Chrome OS did lots of growing up in its first decade—and there’s more to come