Was skimming the Web last night and stumbled on a page talking about browser benchmarking. The author apparently decided to get best results by running only the Web browser and no window manager or desktop environment.
I was thinking, this would be a quick and easy way to emulate a Chrome OS type experience with any browser that you prefer. I tried this on my openSUSE 11.2 ThinkPad, by doing the following:
- Log out of the desktop environment.
- Go to a console
Ctrl+Alt+F2
- Stop the display manager
sudo /etc/init.d/xdm stop
- At the console, start X with just the browser:
Xorg -ac & DISPLAY=:0 firefox
And there you go — a “Chrome OS” experience with openSUSE and Firefox. 
Probably not news to the X geniuses in the audience, but I found it amusing for a while. I might try running nothing but the browser for a day and see if it’s possible to get all my work done that way.
It’s a bit clunky. Firefox isn’t displaying in the full screen. Could probably tweak it a bit to make it slicker and easier, but I’ll leave that for another day.
Have you figured out a way to export the desktop to the browser? This seems to only launch the browser with X and w/o the overhead of a windows manager. But it doesn’t really seem to provide access to underlying applications, which would be really cool.
Lol. Sounds like having best of both worlds.
i installed Chrome OS on two of my netbooks. the Chrome OS works great and its loading time is very fast too.