Clouds for Google Chrome 8

Google this week rolled out the first development versions of Chrome 8, the latest vein of its development browser. The primary focus for Chrome 8 is on cloud-based services, probably with Google’s Chrome OS imminent release in mind.

Chrome development moves at lightning pace. While the official final release is still on version 6, developers have already wrapped up plans for version 7, which can be expected to be made an official release in the next month or so.

Each version of Chrome focuses on a specific set of features and the theme for version 8 is cloud computing.

Cloud print

Among the changes starting to show up in Chrome 8 are features such as cloud print and better synchronising between computers.

The most interesting among these is the final inclusion of cloud printing, something that Google announced back in April and started using itself internally in June this year.

Cloud print users will be able to print to almost any printer connected to a computer using a Google account. Right now this feature is not yet active but will likely become active over the course of the next few weeks.

Chrome 8 also adding additional web application features including background webapps. With this feature users will be able to have web applications launched at startup and continue running, even after all Chrome windows are closed. This feature is already available for testing in the Chrome labs.

Remote desktop

Also showing up in Google Labs is the new remote desktop support capability. Also known as “chromoting”, the remote support tool allows support staff to access a user’s remote desktop to provide support. Not only that, but Google is promising that the tool will allow remote access to legacy applications on the PC.

For a preview of what Google Labs has in store type “about:labs” into a development version of Google. Chrome.

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