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About:Flags in Chrome OS

Posted on 28. Dec, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in Chrome OS, Tips

The “about:flags” Chrome Experiments command is something I’ve been paying attention to closely in Chromium builds because it offers a sneak peek into the newest features that are being introduced into the Chrome ecosystem. On the Cr-48, you can also enter in “about:flags” into the Omnibox and get a listing of Experiments.

Here is a list of current Chrome Experiments in Chrome OS. Some of these have appeared in Chromium, so they are easy to classify. Others are specific to an operating system. If you see something as a result of turning one of these on that I’ve missed, don’t forget to point it out!

Click to enlarge

Media Player

This is the way for Chrome OS to run external media that you would receive via email or other means. When I enabled it, opening images would still make them come up in a new tab, but I’m thinking that the idea here is that they can pop up in a panel. This is likely closely related to the file system flag.

Advanced File System

Any operating system is going to need to have some sort of file system, and that is the purpose of the Advanced File System flag. It doesn’t quite work as advertised yet, which is why it’s still a Chrome Experiment. When you enable it, I can see a USB or Flash drive come up in a panel, but I’m unable to navigate through folders, making it impossible to open any files. Yet.

Side Tabs

This changes your UI for the tabbed browsing interface. This is more likely to be used on widescreen monitors, and is not really that intuitive for laptop configurations. Businesses might find this way of organizing tabs to be useful, and we’ve seen that Google wants to do their best to make sure that enterprises want to adopt Chrome OS. More about side tabs is located here.

Remoting

This enables the famed “Chromoting” remote desktop-style interface in Chrome OS. As of right now, it doesn’t appear to do anything more than enable the Cr-48 as a client, with the Chrome browser being the host on my other computer. The understanding now is that this will be different than Citrix’s Receiver products, which is aimed at using enterprise applications like SAP within Chrome OS.

Disable Outdated Plugins

With this option, any plugin that is out of date will automatically be disabled. The issue of plugins having vulnerabilities is an issue on a cloud OS that is supposed to provide for automatic updates. It will be interesting to see whether or not this will become a feature, which would seem to be the best idea to keep users from having to worry about old plugins.

XSS Auditor

This is another safety feature that arrived in Chromium at the same time as the outdated plugins flag. XSS allows for something called cross-site script injection which can put malicious code into your browser and then allow it to move on to other sites. Again, this seems like something that should come standard. You can read more about these two features on my post located here.

Background Webapps

Some web applications are going to require background processes to be running in order for them to work. Thus, this is a feature that may be required in future apps made by developers. It will notify users that there are app processes running via a number near the wrench icon. This is already a feature that is found in Chrome, and you can see a more detailed description of it here.

Click-to-Play

Being able to choose what plugins run on a page is the point of click-to-play. You have the option in the setting menu to determine whether or not you’ll see things on a site that you might deem annoying, especially Flash advertising that starts running video that you then go have to hunt for through a pile of tabs that you have open. Yes, I’ve had this problem you can tell.

We’ll keep you updated when new flags appear in Chrome OS. Stay tuned!

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