Monday, March 7, 2011

What to Expect from the Coming 0.11 Dev Channel Update

According to Trond Wuellner, Google's Product Manager for Chrome OS, we should be seeing a 0.11 update to development channel released this week. So what should we expect to see in this update? Here are a few things gleaned from the issue tracker and my personal test builds of Chromium OS:

  • A window switcher icon will be placed at the very top right corner of the Cr-48 screen. This square box should function much like the "Next Window" button above the 6 and 7 on the Cr-48 keyboard.
  • WiFi ad-hoc support should be working in the first 0.11 builds. WPA/WPA2 Enterprise support is planned for 0.11 but may not be in the first development channel releases.
  • A fair amount of infrastructure work is going on for Chrome OS' Enterprise device policy manager. It's possible we'll see working support for policies in a 0.11 release. Not much use for home users but Network Admins (like me) will love this!
  • Further work on Flash issues looks planned.
The new window switcher icon

And of course the usual bug fixes, performance improvements and minor tweaks will take place. It's important though to point out that things tend to get much less stable as new code and features are introduced with a major dev version change. If you use your Cr-48 for production, you might strongly consider switching back to beta channel so that you stay on 0.10 for now. You can always find out how stable 0.11 is proving to be and decide to switch to it later.

15 comments:

  1. Jay, while I do post my own ramblngs about personal use this is the blog I recommend to people looking for Chrome OS stuff.

    Well here and Duh.org's chromium builds (since hexxeh seems to have gotten fed up with people whining at him on when he'll get back to work.)

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  2. Hmm, I'm not sure I see the point of that window switcher button when we have a hardware button for it. Unless it means that production CrOS notebooks won't be required to have a hardware button.

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  3. Looking forward to it, thanks for the update.

    So, did the dev channel already incorporate the "big" fixes that were just rolled out to the beta channel (in what I think was an R10 release), or will those be coming to the dev channel in the 0.11 release?

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  4. @Cougar: The last dev channel update was 0.10.156.46 which was released a few days later as a beta channel update. So basically yes, dev channel has all the fixes of beta channel right now.

    Jay

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  5. I don't know why you'd need a window switcher icon, since Alt-tab still works besides the hardware button.

    Perhaps it will eventually have a preview of the other windows so you know which one you're switching to ahead of time, instead of having to flip through them all.

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  6. @QSH: My thoughts and hopes exactly. But for now it functions just like pushing the button above the 6 and 7 except that it doesn't actually switch to any open terminal windows which is odd. I've already filed a bug report about that.

    Jay

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  7. OS 0.11.227.0 , browser 10.0.690.0 just landed according to my notification script. :)

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  8. What comment is that in the preview pic? I like the darker grey bar

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  9. Anybody had any catastrophic failure relating to this update? My Cr-48 will no longer load any type of page, website and settings panel alike. Any advice would be great!

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  10. @Casey: Try logging in as the guest user. If the browser works there then the problem is probably with your profile, flip the developer mode switch so that your stateful partition is wiped and see if that helps.

    Jay

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  11. @Casey: Looks like Google is aware of the issue:

    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome-notebook-pilot/5Y4imJHBz-E

    try turning of Web Page Prerendering under about:flags

    Jay

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  12. So maybe this is a dumb question, but I'm dual booting between Ubuntu and ChromeOS (because I need NetBeans) and when it applies the new 0.11 build it reboots and works OK, but once I switch to Ubuntu and then back to ChromeOS the 0.11 is gone and it's just a 0.10 build. Will the update not hold because of the partition??

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  13. @Jay and Casey. I'm pretty confident I had the very same catastrophe because of Web Page Prerendering; turning off WPP ended the madness.

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  14. @Parker: You're setting the old Chrome OS partition to boot. Remember, when Chrome OS updates, it writes the new version to the "off" partition, and then sets that partition as default once the update completes. The partition that you had been manually setting as default to boot back into Chrome OS is now supposed to be the "off" partition. Modify the cgpt command you're using in Ubuntu accordingly, and you should be able to boot into the correct version of Chrome OS.

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  15. Thank you Patrick (and everyone else - tons of great info here). It works great now. I'm slowly getting the hang of all this thanks to all of your comments.

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