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Google Brings Chrome OS User Management To Chrome
An anonymous reader writes "Google is toying with a complete revamp of the user account system in its browser. Google is essentially pulling the user management system from Chrome OS back into Chrome. The company's thinking is likely two-layered. First, it wants users to stay in the browser for as long as possible, and thus it wants the switching process to be part of Chrome as opposed to Windows, Mac, or Linux. Second, if it can teach users to have accounts in Chrome (as well as use incognito and guest modes), the learning curve will have been flattened for when they encounter Chrome OS."
A "Default Profile" dropdown appeared at the top of my dev-m Chrome, along with a ton of rendering bugs.
excuse me while I RTFA to get a clearer picture of the picture clearing it self by picture clearing.
In the room next door I have a DEC VT240 from around 1990 which is capable of displaying text and vector graphics using the ReGIS instruction set. I'm so happy to see that, 24 years later, Google is reviving the graphical dumb terminal. Ah! what carefree times of speed and gracefulness. It's also nice to see that we're not bothering with company-owned servers on the other end, instead hiring out computing power in a time-tested fashion that would have been familiar to contracting with IBM in the '60s. What a wonderful time that was! Flowers in rifles, dirty bare feet, and nobody ever got fired for buying (or dressing) Blue. I hope we don't get into any silly, long, unwinnable wars, though.
I think you're failing to understand the difference between "Chrome OS" (the operating system for Chrome Books) and "Chrome" (the browser).
I don't think it's just your kidneys that got stolen.
Why do I get the feeling that it may somehow open a giant vulnerability on Chrome the browser for every platform?
Too bad Chrome is becoming less of a browser and more of an operating system in itself. The emacs of web browsers if you will.
Not to mention it got unbearably slow since some time ago. For me, every time a website starts to do some DOM operations, it just stops dead in its track, does that, then resumes rendering. Very noticeable when scrolling. So much, that i switched to Safari for the time being. I still run Chrome in the background for the apps (Hangouts, Play Music). I wish they'd just fix it.
Google Chrome has become as bad as IE in terms of hidden settings, or settings that are just not there. In Opera and Firefox, I have no issues accessing numerous networks. I can change network settings on the fly and have different settings for different browsers. With Chrome and IE I need a new browser installation everywhere, because Chrome either uses no settings or IE settings. Being able to set proxies and network settings in an add on browser is an important feature for testing.
On the security side, remembering user passwords and stuffing them into either and unencrypted DB or an Encrypted DB that the user has zero control over is not acceptable. Especially when I don't trust either MS or Google as far as I can spit with my privacy. They have abused that trust far too often for me not to notice these things.
And now they are making a big deal about not adding missing and important functionality (especially for those in the tech crowd that want/need it), but those same broken and missing "features" will now be available for multiple users in the same browser installation in the same log-in. Wow, really?
If they were adding Kiosk features, I'd be impressed. Let admins manage browser settings from a global repository for different users in the same browser installation. That's not what they are doing though. This will however add to their ability to target advertisements and raise rates for advertisers. They will know that the wife is using the browser and pepper her with just the right products, while targeting the husband with his.
Back on the security rant, is not the best option to train people not to share an account? Does Chrome not save individual user settings in their home directory already? I don't know honestly, I have Chrome on my work PC because it's part of our base image. I even launch it on occasion to see if it ever improves, and it doesn't. So I don't really use it or care where it stores settings.
Look, if all you are worried about in a browser is loading pages as fast as possible I'm sure Chrome is great. Loading pages faster than people can read them is a very useless ability for people that need to actually read content. I don't spend all day looking at Google Images, or what ever people are doing where this matters. Quite frankly, I don't know anyone that does either. I'm sure the crowd exists, because that's where all the development from Microsoft and Google is focused.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
BwaHAhahahaHAHAhahahahahahaaa
I don't use Chrome, but as a Firefox user I care deeply about what Chrome does. In today's browser ecosystem, Chrome does it first, then Mozilla rushes to copy, even if it's an utterly stupid and useless idea like this one.
Chrome is basically a preview of where Firefox will be six months to a year from now. Sometimes it takes Firefox longer to copy Chrome, like in the case of the shitty Australis UI. Mozilla was a few years behind on that. But it did eventually happen, as we Firefox users unfortunately found out. Now Firefox looks almost exactly like Chrome.
I really wish that Mozilla stopped just blatantly copying everything Chrome does, and got back to real innovation like they used to do when Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was still a young project.
This is a classic example of a feature designed by an MBA and probably not asked for by a single user in the universe. Why would Google let their sleazy MBAs design features, why would they even have sleazy MBAs working there?
I was surprised how useful Chrome OS is. My wife wanted a small laptop that would boot quickly, so I bought a Chromebook and installed Ubuntu. I left Chrome OS as a dual boot option. It's been several months and she hasn't had any reason to boot Linux yet. Chrome OS does everything she wants to do, and the instant boot is extremely convenient. She had Linux on her desktop, so it's not unfamiliar to her, it's just unnecessary.
Perhaps the shitty choice of names has something to do with that ... (which is the point he's making) or the fact that Google has tried its damnedest to make it as confusing as possible by trying to make it seem as if they are one and the same?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Are three distinct tools that enable Google to lock in product. You read that right, the fact that you can type shit in to your Chromebook or fill in a webform or make a phone call or send an SMS text, are all secondary to the primary purpose of all such devices (both in hardware and in software): to lock in the input device (you) to the zero cost asset you provide for free to Google (your data) for them to profit on. You are not a customer, or a client, or even a user. YOU are PRODUCT. Were you anything else, even basic laptops would still cost over three grand. The paradigm shift between users and product can be measured as right around the time when the arse fell out of the hardware market. That's when retailers became service providers (cheap laptops, then you pay through the nose for software and extended warranties etc), hardware became subsidised and applications as a service got its foothold (think Microsoft Exchange, World of Warcraft, and the rise of Second Life)
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
like firefox with its about:config the settings discussed in TFA have been in chromes chrome://flags for a least 6 months..
its the flags page and you can mess with options such as...:
Enable New Profile Management System
Enable New Avatar Menu
Enable Google Profile Name and icon
It is now the default, apparently.. in Canary.. (the alpha build) but this has been an option for a while now in the regular Chrome builds...... I used it for about a week and wasn't all that fond of it due to it wanting my password.. but maybe it was some option I had enabled that caused that.
Have you tried that recently? I just did it on my wife's Chromebook two different ways. It's slightly EASIER than with a regular computer. I didn't try a third way that should also work.
The file picker dialog has two main folders, called Drive and Downloads. Google Docs has been merged with Google Drive, so tat icon labeled Drive is her Google Docs. I just tried that and it works. One could also do what you'd do on a regular computer - download from Drive and upload via the browser.
If she had Dropbox installed, that would also appear as a folder I think. But really the extremely easy way is to click "Upload" then choose "Drive".
Does this increase googles ability to spy on its users?
>Have you tried that recently?
Not since term ended. It's not that you can't try to do it. It's that it doesn't work when you try it in any of the several ways we tried. Works fine on a normal computer. I'm not wasting more of my life on this. There'll be a new macbook in the house before term starts.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
A new MacBook will certainly get the job done. That is what I use for my school.