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What's behind the Google Chrome OS, technologically and from a business perspective? This week on the Roundtable, I discuss the pending operating system with CNET writers Stephen Shankland (Deep Tech) and Gordon Haff (Pervasive Data Center).

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Google introduced two search features Friday that focus on delivering search results without having to visit the search results page.

The weather information at the bottom of the Google Suggest list used to only be found on search results pages.

(Credit: Google)

Universal search features such as weather, time, and flight-tracking information can now be found in the Google Suggest drop-down list of possible results for relevant queries, such as "weather San Francisco." In addition, Google has released an extension for its Chrome browser called Quick Scroll that is essentially Google's take on the Control-F (or Command-F for you other folks) basic search function.

Google has offered image-based answers to simple questions such as "What time is it in New York?" or "How many kilograms are in 2 pounds?" for some time. Of course, you had to click through to the search results page to get that answer. The company apparently felt that was two seconds of your life it was unfairly robbing from you, and so has added those types of results directly in the list of suggestions that appears below the search box on many queries.

Quick Scroll, on the other hand, provides a bit more search horsepower on a given Web page than the old-fashioned "Find" command. Google provided the example of someone wondering whether or not Belgian street vendors sell waffles, searching on that query, and clicking through to a Wikipedia page on waffles. At that point, Quick Scroll will pop up in a small window with your original search query and a link to the text where that information can be found on the page.

These features are all outgrowths of Google's obsession with speed, highlighted by its announcement of real-time search results earlier this week. Ordinary users might not care, but speed junkies are taking over the Web and could very well find something else to do with those spare two seconds: such as conduct another search on Google that brings up (contextual and relevant, of course) ads.

QR Code, a two-dimensional bar code storing addresses and URLs, is a widely used technology in Japan and elsewhere that can be scanned with camera phones equipped with the appropriate reader.

It's likely to gain ground quickly in the U.S. now that Google has sent out a QR code to 100,000 of the most popular companies in its Local Business Center. When those companies display the QR code, customers can use code-scanning applications on their iPhones and other devices to retrieve the firm's individual Google listing.

The only problem is, many of those QR code-reading apps for the iPhone just don't do a good job. That prompted me to sift through more than a dozen QR code readers to find some of the best. I came up with four.

QR Code it up

NeoReader NeoReader is one of the most useful apps in this roundup. The program is simple, it's intuitive, and it does a relatively good job of reading QR codes.

NeoReader is an extremely simple app. When it's open, you need only to point your iPhone's camera at the QR Code, click the scan option, and you're all set. Within a few seconds, the app delivers the unique content directly to your iPhone. It works with QR (obviously), as well as Data Matrix, and Aztec bar codes. To ensure the app is working properly, you can even go to NeoReader's home page and scan the QR Code examples to see if it's returning the right results. But beware that the application works best on iPhones running OS 3.0 or higher. NeoReader is free, so it's worth trying out.

NeoReader lets you view QR Codes for good information.

(Credit: NeoReader)

Optiscan Optiscan's developers say the application is the fastest QR Code scanner in the App Store. That's not necessarily true. But it's certainly quick.

Overall, Optiscan is a really nice QR Code reader. The application is able to capture QR codes on monitors, paper, and other places where you might find the code. Upon scanning a QR code within the app, you can view the company's QR code information. You can also save that data for later, so you don't have to come back to the QR code every time you want to view it. Even better, Optiscan allows you to share QR codes with others. It's a full-featured app that should satisfy most users. It costs $1.99.

Optiscan lets you save QR Codes.

(Credit: Optiscan)

The beta version of Chrome for Mac OS X is available. Google released its browser beta for Linux too.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Two key pieces of Google's effort to make Chrome a more competitive browser fell into place on Tuesday as Google released beta versions of the browser for Mac OS X and Linux.

Tuesday's software release is a version of Chrome that had previously been available only as developer preview software for Mac and Linux machines. "It took longer than we expected, but we hope the wait was worth it," product manager Brian Rakowski said in a blog post.

Macs are widely used, if not as common as Windows machines, and there's been some demand in tech circles for the Mac version of Chrome. Linux, while less widely used among ordinary computer users, has importance of its own: it's the foundation for Chrome OS. That's the browser-based operating system Google hopes will be popular on Netbooks starting next year.

According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta versions are scheduled to graduate to the next level of maturity, "stable," on January 12. Chrome for Windows graduated out of beta almost exactly a year ago.

Google doesn't emphasize product version numbers in the project, instead automatically delivering updates behind the scenes to the browser that take effect when it's restarted. But it does use version milestones to keep track of development internally.

The biggest new feature of Chrome 4.0 is support for extensions, which let people customize the browser. In the Mozilla world, they're called add-ons, and they've been a big part of Firefox's success.

Mac OS X has a mandatory menu bar, so unlike the Windows version, Chrome on the Mac has traditional menus.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Extensions aren't useful, though, unless people can find them. Google on Tuesday also launched a Chrome extensions gallery page.

There are more than 300 extensions available for Chrome, extensions programmers Aaron Boodman and Erik Kay said in a blog post.

However, extensions on the Mac aren't yet available, though they had been for a time in the developer-preview version. "Extensions aren't quite beta-quality on Mac yet, but you will be able to preview them on a developer channel soon," Rakowski said.

Also on the Chrome for Mac to-do list: a bookmark manager, PDF viewing in the browser, bookmark synchronization, 64-bit support, and my personal favorite differentiator of Firefox 3.6 on the Mac, full-screen support.

Chrome now has an extensions gallery.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Why try Chrome?
For those of you new to Chrome, here's a brief version of why it's my default browser on both Windows and, as of about a month ago, Mac OS X. Your preferences and needs may vary, of course, and I still use Firefox every day, too.

• Speed. It's fast to start up, though not quite as snappy as it once was now that it's not so bare-bones, and rivals are making progress. It's also fast loading Web pages and running JavaScript programs on them.

• Tabs. I spawn innumerable new tabs all day long, and when it takes a long time (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer), I get infuriated. I also like the order in which new tabs arrive, a style Firefox is mimicking.

• The omnibox. It's a single bar that merges the utility of an address bar and search bar. I hit Ctrl-L (on Windows) or Command-L (on Mac) to pop my cursor up there, and start typing. One nice--if somewhat obscure--feature is fast site search on some domains, so for example I can type A, M, tab, and up pops an Amazon.com icon; what I type afterward is entered as a search on Amazon. That conveniently gets me straight to the search results so I don't have to see yet another Kindle ad.

• A minimal user interface. When browsing, I like my user interface to step aside and make way for the Web page. Scrolling was a wonderful innovation in computers a few decades ago, but I like to avoid it when I can. Chrome puts tabs in the real estate ordinarily devoted to a program's title bar and shuffles the menu controls off to the right of that tab strip (though the Mac version gets a regular menu bar).

Another potential perk: avant-garde Web technology, including WebGL and O3D for accelerated 3D graphics and Native Client for speeding up Web apps with direct access to a processor, are being built into Chrome. Another such Google project, Gears, is already built into Chrome--though Gears doesn't work on Mac OS X 10.6.

There are things you might miss--the full panoply of Firefox extensions, toolbars from Google or others, print preview. And the "browser not supported" error messages on various Web pages are annoying, though in my experience there's rarely an actual compatibility problem. Overall, I like it.

Is Google spying on me?
If you're worried about what new data Google will be able to harvest on you, I recommend a close read of Google's Chrome privacy page. This doesn't worry me much, but I may be insufficiently paranoid. In my opinion, the biggest thing is that Google stores 2 percent of the data it gathers when people type text into Chrome's combination search and address bar, called the omnibox.

That means Google can see not only what you're searching for (as it would for any Google search), but what Web site addresses you're typing as well. The data is anonymized within 24 hours, Google said.

Also, Chrome has a feature called DNS pre-fetching that tracks down the Internet server addresses on Web pages in anticipation that you'll be clicking links on the page. So Chrome--and Google, too, if you're using Google Public DNS--retrieves this information from the Internet.

Updated at 12:30 p.m. PST and 1:20 p.m.. Added further detail.

(Credit: Google)

Before Wednesday, you could star a map as a favorite on Google Maps online, and you could star one on Google Maps for Mobile, but you could never connect the two.

A small but significant update that Google added to Google Maps for Mobile 3.3 now syncs your starred locations between the map app on your Symbian and Windows phones, and your online account.

To start your syncing, press Menu and then Starred Items. You'll need to log into your account from the Starred Items screen to start syncing favorite maps. If you're upgrading from a previous version of the maps app, you'll be asked if you'd like to sync your favorites. Say yes.

Then, you're able to mark your favorite places in one location and have it surface in the other, as long as you remain logged in. This type of syncing is ideal for quickly locating that dinner spot you're headed to, or for pulling up driving directions to or from a starred location. Sure, it might make you lazy, but it'll also keep you from wasting precious time first looking up a location and then seeking directions or a phone number.

You can download Google Maps for Mobile by pointing your mobile browser to m.google.com/maps.

Word from the LA Times is that Google plans to phase out its Gears plug-in in favor of HTML5 when it comes to augmenting browser abilities. The precise details of its enthusiasm for the plug-in aren't clear yet, but the general trajectory is no surprise.

Google, along with Mozilla, Opera, Apple, and some other allies, has been agitating for features that can make browsers and the Web into a more powerful foundation for Web sites and Web applications. Gears was an early Google effort in this area.

But Gears emerged in 2007--back before Google released a browser of its own, before the World Wide Web Consortium had put its full weight behind HTML5, before HTML5 had gotten the traction it now enjoys as an official standard in the making, and before Microsoft took interest in contributing to that standard.

It's clear things are different now, and HTML5 is solving the same problems Gears set out to fix, and a healthy cooperation is under way for future Web standards work.

Linus Upson, Google's engineering director for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS, confirmed Tuesday that Gears will be supported but isn't an active area of development.

"This isn't an area we've been investing a lot in the last year since we launched Chrome. We're very focused on making HTML5 as successful a standard as possible," Upson said. "Gears applications will run well for the foreseeable future," though, he added.

Browsers including Safari and Chrome are picking up HTML5 versions of Gears features now, he said, and Web applications will follow suit. "I would think over course of next year or so you'll see many more applications take advantage of those abilities," he said.

Perhaps the most notable Gears feature is the ability to store data on a PC so a Web application could work even when disconnected from the network--Gmail and Google Docs being the biggest examples. But that's solved by the local database work in HTML5 that's now arriving in browsers. HTML5 also provides for interfaces with files for better uploading geolocation to let a Web site make use of a person's location.

Various HTML5 elements are just beginning to arrive in Web browsers, and widely used browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 don't have any support at all. But the difficulties of getting people to install Gears or other plug-ins means that built-in browser support probably will reach more people sooner than Gears.

Google has given plenty of signals it's happy to direct Gears energy into HTML5. It proudly demonstrated offline Gmail using HTML5 storage last May at its Google I/O conference, for example. And regarding its O3D and Native Client plug-ins, which accelerate 3D and regular computing processes in a browser, Google developers have argued such technology should be built into the browser, not handled as a separate plug-in.

Google's official position, quoted in the LA Times, is as follows: "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their Web sites...We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers."

It was clear from talks at Google I/O that Google sees as a proving ground to try to advance Web technologies and counts it as a victory when Gears technology arrives in HTML5. Now the only real question in my mind is whether the pace of HTML5 development in the standards world will satisfy Google.

Upson said Google will continue adding features into Chrome and its Chrome OS, even if that means deviating from standards at times.

"Ideally for all these things (such as Native Client and O3D) we'd like to get them into standards," Upson said. "At the end of the day, we can't control the pace of the Internet Explorer developer team at Microsoft (or developer teams) at Mozilla and Apple. We all have a shared incentive to not fragment the Web, but there always will be seams that aren't smooth."

Updated at 5:14 p.m. PST with comment from Google.

The present interface for developers to upload their Chrome extensions.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google has opened up its gallery for developers to share Chrome extensions, a step that soon should make it easier for people to customize the open-source browser.

Aaron Boodman, a leader of the Chrome extensions effort, announced the move on a mailing list posting Monday, and programmer and "gallery master" Lei Zheng shared details in a blog post.

So far, only uploads are permitted. Google plans to let some testers use the gallery to download extensions, too "in the next few days," Zheng said. "We are making the upload flow available early to make sure that developers have the time to publish their extensions ahead of our full launch."

Extensions, a major asset of the Firefox browser and the headline feature of the upcoming Chrome 4 beta, let people modify the browser more to their liking. With them, the browser itself doesn't have to be bogged down with numerous features and configuration options that most people don't want.

One feature of Google's system is that add-ons are automatically updated on Chrome users' computers once the developer uploads a new version.

For developers, the extensions gallery comes with a set of terms and conditions.

One nugget in the legalese: expect Google to use a rating system, as it does for other sites including Android applications and YouTube videos. It's all part of Google's philosophy of using user data to help automatically manage its Web properties in a way that, the company hopes, will be helpful to those who use its sites.

According to the terms and conditions: "The gallery will allow users to rate products. Along with other factors, product ratings may be used to determine the placement of products on the gallery with higher rated products generally given better placement, subject to Google's right to change placement at Google's sole discretion. For new developers without product history, Google may use or publish performance measurements such as uninstall rates to identify or remove products that are not meeting acceptable standards, as determined by Google."

With most computers threatened by attacks coming through Web applications, it's no surprise that security would be a key piece of Chrome OS, Google's browser-based operating system that stores data in the cloud.

In this video, Google security engineer Will Drewry explains how Chrome OS separates user data from root or system data, which makes the system more secure and easier to re-install the operating system.

(Credit: Google)

Google showed off its new lightweight operating system designed for Netbooks and cloud computing on Thursday. As anticipated, it will rely on many of the same security features and concepts used by the Chrome browser.

"The browser is the operating system. We've expanded the browser to add operating system functionality," Caesar Sengupta, a group product manager at Google, said in an interview.

Chrome OS uses a combination of operating system-level protections and exploit mitigation techniques to limit the attack surface, or amount of code that can be targeted in an attack, and to reduce the likelihood of an attack being successful. "The biggest security impact is that all applications run within the browser," Sengupta said.

Chrome relies heavily on sandboxing, keeping different processes and applications in separate partitions. This limits the interaction between applications and the OS kernel.

For example, with conventional operating systems, if an application crashes, it can crash or otherwise affect other programs that are running, Sengupta said. "But if everything is sandboxed, that becomes more difficult to do," he added.

Many systems are compromised by deceptive attacks, such as when a user opens an innocent-looking PowerPoint file which unleashes a virus or other malware that can get access to everything on the computer.

With Chrome, "applications can't just download any binary and run it," Sengupta said.

Chrome has a verified boot process that uses cryptography to ensure that the Linux kernel, the nonvolatile system memory, and the partition table are not tampered with when the system starts up, according to a security overview of Chrome. (Google security engineer Will Drewry explains the security concepts of Chrome OS in a video on YouTube.)

"Right now, on your conventional operating system, any kind of process can run, which makes it difficult to predict what any process will do," Sengupta said. "On Chrome, because the whole operating system is essentially signed by Google, there is a lot we can do to make it secure."

If an application manages somehow to break out of the browser sandbox, to get through the kernel hardening and processing infrastructure, and manages to change something on the operating system, the changes will be detected the next time the user boots up the machine. "As soon as it detects something is different and not signed by Google, it will warn the user and try to clean itself again," Sengupta said.

Cleaning up is easier than with a standard operating system, too, because the system data is separated from the user data, which includes user preferences, system settings, and a local cache of data stored on the Google servers in the cloud, he said.

All user data stored by the operating system, browser, and any plug-ins are encrypted and users cannot access each others' data on a shared device, according to the Chrome OS security page.

Meanwhile, Chrome will automatically update to get the most recent software and patches for the operating system, just like the Chrome browser updates in the background while users are online, Sengupta said. Users will not run the risk of having their system get infected or compromised before they can install updates, as happens with Windows and other software.

In addition, the antiphishing technology found in the Chrome browser will protect Chrome OS users from inadvertently visiting malicious Web sites, he said.

Google is publishing detailed design documents on Chrome OS, which will allow security experts to scour the code for weaknesses over the next year before the operating system is released to the public, according to Sengupta.

There are some security and networking technologies that are supported in other operating systems that Google is passing on, at least for now.

Google will keep an eye on biometric authentication technologies, but believes that the cost/reliability trade-off is not where it needs to be just yet, according to the security overview for Chrome OS. Smart cards and USB crypto tokens are "interesting technology, but we don't want our users to have to keep track of a physically distinct item just to use their devices," the overview concludes.

Google is likewise not interested in Bluetooth, a wireless protocol widely used in laptops and handheld devices, for authentication. "Bluetooth adds a whole new software stack to our login/screenlocker code that could potentially be buggy, and the security of the pairing protocol has been criticized in the past," the security overview says.

Updated November 24to clarify that Bluetooth is not being considered for authentication.

(Credit: Google)

One of the highlights of Android 2.0 has been the Google Maps Navigation app that delivers voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation on your phone for free. Until now, only Motorola Droid owners could take advantage of this sweet perk, but times they are a-changing.

On Monday, Google announced that its navigation app is now available for devices running Android 1.6 and higher, including the T-Mobile G1 and T-Mobile MyTouch 3G. While still in beta, the app provides voice-guided directions between two points, traffic information, and business searches.

This release also includes a new Layers feature that lets you overlay more information on the map, such as transit lines and Wikipedia articles about places, but it does not support the "Navigate to" voice command feature found on Android 2.0, so you'll have to input all your destinations using your phone's keyboard.

Google Maps Navigation for Android 1.6 is now available for download from the Android Market. Unlike other navigation apps or location-based services from the likes of TomTom, Garmin, and TeleNav, you don't have to pay a one-time fee or monthly subscription to use Google Maps Navigation. All you need is a data connection and you're good to go.