Friday, January 14, 2011

Hidden Chrome OS Screensaver

Chrome OS has a pretty cool screensaver on the filesystem that's not enabled right now. You can see what it looks like though by copying the text below and pasting it into the omnibox (as if you were typing in another website). Hit the fullscreen button (box with two diagonal arrows, where the F4 key would be) to see what it'd look like as a screensaver.

file:///usr/share/chromeos-assets/screensavers/screensaver.htm

so why hasn't Google enabled the screensaver in Chrome OS yet? Well, pressing CTRL+ALT+T and then typing "top" in the shell shows us why. The Chrome browser is eating up 100% CPU time just rendering the screensaver! That'll kill your 8 hour battery pretty quick. As cool as this screensaver is, I doubt we ever see it live. Everything we've seen in the Cr-48 shows Google is much more concerned with performance (battery and CPU) than it is with looking pretty. Turning off the screen saves both screen and battery life.

Posted by at

6 comments:

  1. AJanuary 14, 2011 at 10:35 AM

    cool. nice find!

    ReplyDelete
  2. DanielJanuary 18, 2011 at 5:09 PM

    I think this feature has been removed from at least dev 0.10.142.3 because I'm getting web page not found error:

    "Error 6 (net::ERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND): The file or directory could not be found."

    ReplyDelete
  3. Adam SJanuary 18, 2011 at 8:02 PM

    that is SO cool. maybe if you or another dev. analyzes how Windows writes their screensavers then someone could rewrite it for the CR-48 without using so much mem. time.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousJanuary 27, 2011 at 11:36 PM

    Sadly not working anymore...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Brent YagerMarch 11, 2011 at 6:13 PM

    Anyway to screenshot or save it and send the file to me?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Brent YagerMarch 11, 2011 at 6:25 PM

    It is down and out for now but someone posted it here for safekeeping :)

    http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/cr48/screensaver.htm

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)