so that every once in a while you’ll be able to get that when you need it, but we don’t want that to be the world you’re living in.”
“We want to make sure you have that option as well. “The analogy I give is that yes, the world is all state of the art and Dolby Atmos home theaters, but every once in a while you do have that old wedding video on a VHS that you need to get to,” says Cyrus Mistry, group product manager for Chrome OS. Google wants to give you access to Windows apps when you really need them, as a hop in and out experience. In an exclusive interview with The Verge, Google is now detailing how and why Windows apps are arriving on Chrome OS.
It’s a collaboration that will see a full version of Windows boot inside Chrome OS, providing businesses the option to run existing desktop apps on Google’s range of lightweight Chromebook devices.
After that date, Google would update the new Lacros browser while Neverware developers could update the operating system for CloudReady, which Chromebook owners can transition to.Google revealed earlier this year that it’s planning to support Windows applications on Chromebooks thanks to a partnership with Parallels.
The idea would be that Chrome OS as it is today would still have an automatic software expiration date.
With Neverware’s CloudReady becoming a part of Chrome OS, my hope is that older Chromebooks and even repurposed laptops, could get updated Chrome OS software and features. The first part of that solution is separating out the Chrome browser from Chrome OS and that’s currently in-flight with the Lacros browser see my explainer here. I still think that this integration can be the second prong of keeping older Chromebooks up to date with security patches and other Chrome OS updates. What might change after CloudReady becomes “an official Chrome OS offering” then is still anyone’s guess at least anyone outside of Google. Over the long term, CloudReady will become an official Chrome OS offering, and existing customers will be upgraded seamlessly as that happens
In the Chromium code repository, he has a shiny new email address.Īs far as which Chrome OS release these integration efforts are using, version 90 appears to be it.ĬloudReady will continue to be available as-is, and we’re committed to supporting and maintaining existing customers. It’s also worth noting that one of the reviewers for these code changes is Nicholas Bishop, who appears on the Neverware team page as a Senior Software Engineer. In the coming weeks, I’d expect the code to be an “internal” repository inside of Google as opposed to an “external” one. That makes sense as a first step as Neverware has managed all of its code on GitLab since 2015.īut you can see by this code change that the code will be subsumed by Google’s internal Chrome OS code management tools for device builds. This particular comment had me researching the two code bases a little more and part of the integration is moving all CloudReady code into Google’s own code repositories. Indeed, the initial code and comments specifically note that some parts of the integration are “hacks” for now: To be clear, this is the first of what will likely be many integration steps. Now, Google is quickly working to integrate Neverware CloudReady into Chrome OS 90 for prototyping. Back in December, news hit that Google acquired Neverware, creator of the Chromium OS-based CloudReady software that can give new life to old laptops and Chromebooks.