CHROME OS A BOOTABLE ONLINE BROSWER

After a second (or is it third?) round of possible Chrome OS images captured by the ever-popular A.Nonymous Tipster on his trusty-but-low-res digital camera, speculation around Google's ethereal OS is bound to keep heating up. I located a reference to Chrome OS in the Chromium source code's switches file yesterday, and today I was intrigued to find not just a few lines in a file but an entire directory. Nestled in the 204 branch is a chromeos folder which only contains a couple of files at this point. They do provide a couple interesting insights, however:

• The status bar contains a clock, an application menu, and a non-working battery indicator.
• Some information about the single sign-on cookie: "To support single-sign-on for Chrome OS, we need a way to inject cookies into Chrome. In the case of session cookies, putting them into Chrome's cookie jar DB doesn't work. This CL adds a command line flag that tells chrome the name of a Unix pipe to open, from which it can read said cookies."
• 

It sure sounds as though the Chrome browser for Chrome OS has an integrated application dock - rather than a floating one as we've seen in the various leaks. The fact that common system tray residents like the clock and battery indicator are also mentioned goes against the tiny detached panel in the lower right corner. So far, then, what we've got is a bootable browser. While technically the browser won't be the OS - it'll be sitting on top of a minimalistic Linux base after all - it will be pretty much the only thing you see once Chrome OS has booted. Two more somewhat noteworthy items:

• A 'compact nav bar' option is being added to the browser. There's not a heck of a lot to look at here yet, but here are the back, forward, and Chrome buttons (PNG, straight from Chromium.org):
• The browser can now recognize and report Chrome OS on about:version. That means this thing is real, right?
• A domain name is ready and waiting:

CHROMIUM-OS.ORG NAME SERVERS

Name Server	IP	Location
ns1.google.com	216.239.32.10	Mountain View, CA, US
ns2.google.com	216.239.34.10	Mountain View, CA, US
ns3.google.com	216.239.36.10	Mountain View, CA, US
ns4.google.com	216.239.38.10	Mountain View, CA, US

That's today's update. You may now speculate wildly in the comments.