Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

See the full poop at “Introducing the Google Chrome OS”, posted this evening. I know I’ve speculated about this in the past (but I can’t seem to find the post…).

I look forward to trying it out on my Asus Eee

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Frankly, I don’t think Unite is going to reinvent anything.

Opera Unite allows you to easily share your data: photos, music, notes and other files. You can even run chat rooms and host entire Web sites with Opera Unite. It puts the power of a Web server in your browser, giving you greater privacy and flexibility than other online services.

Yay, the dream of hosting from home arrives for the common folk!

Here’s my problem with that: My upload speeds are a lot slower than my download speeds. Anything I serve up to folks is going to suffer from very slow transfer rates. And I bet most folks have the same issues in this age of asymmetric connectivity.

Next issue: How about data caps? Internet providers are starting to consider / trial bandwidth caps. Home hosting can definitely run you up against your monthly limit rather quickly.

Let’s not forget that your computer must always be on – and your browser open.

As for me? If I want to share stuff I’ll probably use a service like Dropbox (yes, that’s an affiliate link). I upload it once and anyone can download it from them as fast as their individual connections will go. My cheap internet plan isn’t the limiting factor!

Long story short is that this seemed like a really sweet concept when I first heard about it. But, upon reflection, I’m just not ready to jump on board.

Of course, I’m willing to reconsider if anyone has thoughts to share. For instance, is there a “killer app” that makes Unite a no brainer?

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I’ll start with the mobile experience. One of the main reasons I decided to go with Evernote was the promise and potential of the Windows Mobile client. The WinMo OneNote client is… to be polite… pretty useless (did it improve with ON 2007 by chance?). At first glance the Evernote client seemed a huge improvement – and, early on, received frequent updates.

However, after a year it turns out I never use Evernote on my Windows Mobile phone. Why? Well for starters my dream of managing task lists and checkboxes remains unfulfilled. Can’t even see checkboxes from the WinMo client. Want to fake checkboxes? Well, you can’t edit an existing note from the mobile client either.

Long story short, no gain.

What do I miss the most from OneNote? The free-form aspects of the pages. Everything doesn’t have to be trapped into a single “column” on the page. That capability worked very well for me and how I manage my own tasks and projects – side notes!

How about creating outlines? With OneNote you can hit tab and be in outline mode. Tab and shift-tab to indent and, for me, all very intuitive and easy to use. Evernote? (I had to revisit the Help for this next bit) Ctrl-Shift-B for a bullet list. Shift-M and Shift-Ctrl-M to indent and outdent. After a year I still hardly ever use outlines because I can’t seem to remember the hotkeys!

Want multiple columns of bullet lists in Evernote? Not gonna happen. Painless in OneNote.

Now, I use multiple computers and the free aspect of Evernote is very enticing. Setup a new machine, dump on Evernote, let it sync and “hey presto!” I’m good to go.

Conversely, I only own one license of OneNote so I have to make deliberate and thought-out choices about where I install it…. Now, I suppose I could get a little sketchy with my MSDN subscription and “liberate” an extra OneNote license for “development purposes”… then I’d have two. Otherwise I’m shelling out some serious coin to have ON on more than one machine. Not enticing and definitely a motivator to stick with Evernote.

(Thought: Dropbox would make syncing OneNote files a lot easier than it used to be, right?)

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not bashing Evernote at all. It is a great product with tons of features. The built-in syncing alone is just about priceless and you get it with the free version! The OCR’ing of images is pretty interesting as well. Great for taking whiteboard pictures that are searchable.

Cutting to the chase:

I think the genesis of this post is the fact that after a year I find myself still missing OneNote… Now I just need to decide if that’s a strong enough motivation to switch back. Thoughts?

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Don’t be. If you’re running Firefox, you want to go to the Help menu and hit “Check for Updates…” right now.

Seriously.

Been a while since I gushed about a browser release, but after using it for just 15 minutes I’m still giddy. It flies.

Speed isn’t the only thing going on here, but for me it is the big one for sure. Here’s the rest:

Firefox 3.5  is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

Downloadable fonts and HTML5 are going to be interesting. Someday…

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The free version touts firewall protection, antivirus and proactive security. It seems to do a pretty solid job at keeping an eye on what’s going on with your system and alerting you when things are changing.

The good:

• Non-intrusive
• Non-confusing
• Always updated

I think they’ve hit the right level of pop-ups and warnings with this one. The warnings are clear and typically will give more details and often show how other users have responded (not that those users are always correct…).

If you’re getting too many warnings while installing a new application you can just throw the whole thing into “install” mode and it’ll assume you really know what you’re doing.

The bad:

• Always updating
• [arguably] resource intensive.

While it is great that the firewall and antivirus engines are always keeping current, the downside is that they’re… always updated. If you’re running an older machine, those updates can really slow you down. Especially since it seems to always want to update at boot up.

I’ve been testing on an older Centrino based laptop. Normal operations are just fine, but the impact on the startup times and slowdowns when the updates are going on finally caused me to give up on it today.

Once I get a more powerful / current laptop I’ll give it another shot though. I definitely liked it and the price – free! – is right.

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I tried a few other options and didn’t have much luck, so I asked for suggestions on Twitter. Mark responded:

I’d never heard of this one, but headed over to the JujuEdit page to have a look. I was hooked at the first feature:

Very Large File Support – edit files up to 2GB in size, and browse them instantly with special “Open From Disk” mode.

I downloaded and installed it and tried it with my 2GB file. Works great! And even better, it offers a binary mode which allowed me to spot the bad characters in that particular file.

I’m not sure if this will replace Notepad++ as my freebie of choice, but it definitely will be kept around for those times that I need to work on huge files.

[Addendum]

Just as I finished this article I happened to recall XML Notepad 2007. I’ll need to see how it does with huge XML files next…

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• New rendering engine: Opera Mobile 9.7 uses our Opera Presto 2.2 rendering engine, which gives improved speed, 100/100 on the Acid 3 test, and many new standards support improvements, as you’ll see below
• Improved support for Opera Widgets: Opera Mobile supports Opera Widgets, Opera’s self-contained, cross-device applications built using web standards. Browse to the Opera Widgets homepage using Opera Mobile 9.7 beta and try some out
• Widget Manager: This release also features a new Widget Manager with improved usability and design, which runs independently from the browser
• Opera Mobile 9.7 supports Opera Turbo: This is a simple but effective feature that, when turned on, compresses pages by up to 80%, giving you a faster browsing experience if you are in a low or patchy bandwidth area. It does not use the same compression technology as Opera Mini, but it is similar. You can read more about Opera Turbo on labs.opera.com
• Google Gears support: Gears is an open source project that allows improved web applications with features such as offline storage and worker threads to help tired processors handle number crunching. Read more about it below

Those last two are interesting, especially the idea of Gears on a mobile device. Can’t get a signal but need to review an old email? I haven’t tested it yet, but might have to with Gmail.

In my limited testing so far, the new version does feel noticeably faster than the previous version – and I have yet to try the “turbo” mode.

Definitely worth a shot if you’re looking for a much better browsing experience than what comes from the default pocket IE browser. I just haven’t figured out the best way to compare it to the recently updated Skyfire browser…

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