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The Google Chrome team announced a new beta version today with some significant interface changes. The New Tab page - where users launch most visited sites, Chrome Web apps and bookmarks - now displays one grid of icons that can be rearranged by dragging and dropping. The user navigates between the sections by clicking a narrow bar along the bottom or arrows on either side.

The New Tab page in the current stable release of Chrome displays large click targets as well, but all three sections are on the page, and the other two collapse into narrow strips while one is displayed. The new design is much easier to navigate. It would also work great on a tablet. Just saying.

Google's Chrome OS and Chromebooks have been dinged for lacking some features needed for business but the company is starting to get around to addressing those concerns. On Wednesday, August 10, Google's Rajen Sheth, blogged about a couple of new features for Chromebooks including VPN support, secure Wi-Fi and a tech preview of Citrix Receiver for Chrome OS.

Google has updated the Chrome OS, adding speed, stability and support for a few key Web applications, including Netflix and Amazon's new Kindle Cloud Reader released yesterday. The update also adds support for a Chrome Web Store installation of Citrix Receiver and support for virtual private networking, which will help enterprise and education users access their organizations' software and networks.

The announcement also touts Google Cloud Print, which gets Chromebook users around the lack of printer drivers by sending the document to the cloud for printing from a specialized cloud-ready printer or from another computer. It's a tricky way of saying that you can't print from a Chromebook.

Three months after being promised the feature at Google I/O, owners of Google's Chromebook netbook can now stream movies and television shows from Netflix.

The Samsung Series 5, Acer AC700 and CR-48 Chromebooks can access Netflix, according to a Google Plus post by Chrome OS Community Manager Melissa Daniels.

Web developer and self-proclaimed happiness evangelist François Beaufort has shared new video of a touch interface for Google's Chrome browser currently in development. The video apparently demonstrates the interface running on a desktop computer, with a mouse cursor clicking the elements.

Some of the UI doesn't look much different from the desktop Chrome browser, but the on-screen keyboard and widget buttons are more tablet-friendly. Beaufort sounds disappointed in the pace of development in his Google Plus post sharing the screencast. "This morning, I was wondering if Google Chrome Team worked a little bit more on the Touch UI during my holidays," he writes. "Answer is not so much sadly."

Security researches revealed vulnerabilities in ChromeOS this week at Black Hat, it was reported today by VentureBeat. By exploiting an issue in the pre-installed ScratchPad extension, the researchers were able to gain access to data stored in a user's Google account.

This is particularly noteworthy since Google has cited security as a benefit in using Chrome and has been shifting its own enterprise desktops towards Chrome, Linux and OSX.

The Chromebook is ready for the Web, but is the Web ready for the Chromebook? This is the fundamental question you must ask yourself before deciding to fork over $400 to $500 dollars for one of the new Google Chrome-powered notebook computers, available as of today. The Chromebook, with initial hardware coming from manufacturers like Samsung and Acer, is a vision of the future of computing where everything is done online, in a Web browser. The operating system it runs has no desktop, no way to install apps to a hard drive and no local folders to store all your personal files. It is a Web browser, and just a Web browser.

And it is pure Google.

Google has just begun a two-day long game wherein it will post links to famous places around the web where you can now find a link to get preview access to the company's Chromebook web-only notebooks. The first "clue" (just a link, really) went up minutes ago and sends visitors to an archive of the memo that Tim Berners-Lee first sent out to the world calling for help in creating the WorldWideWeb. There on the page you'll see a big Chrome logo overlay, which when clicked on takes you to a page where you can purchase one of a limited number of Chromebooks.

The Samsung device has WiFi and 3G and sells for $499 through Amazon. It looks like nicer hardware than the press-preview Chromebook that Google sent out late last year, which had a trackpad so bad it was hard to enjoy the device. Will people purchase these preview Chromebooks for $499? I don't know. Will the "game" Google's playing prove compelling to people? I doubt it; it seems that even other Google departments have fallen prey to the old story of the scarce Gmail invites, which has lead other launches to be rationed and gamelike for years, whether that made sense or not for the particular product.

Since Google's official unveiling of the Chrome Web Store six months ago, the company has been on a mission to redefine our perception of what constitutes an operating system, a browser and a program, blurring the lines between each. In Google's world, an OS is a browser and a program - one of those hefty pieces of compiled code we used to download or (gasp!) install from a CD - is now a Web app.

Indeed, even the tiniest, incremental changes point clearly in this direction as word comes that the next version of Google's Chrome browser will give users the ability to kill that final remnant of the fact that they're actually using the Web - the address bar.

Google will begin renting laptop computers for $20 per month, a senior Google executive told Forbes. The laptops will run Google's Chrome OS, a computer operating system that does away with local storage and applications in favor of a Web browser...and only a Web browser. The browser, of course, is Google Chrome. Initially, the $20/month laptop package will only be offered to students, the report states, but it is surely a precursor to Google's greater ambitions, in both educational institutions and the enterprise.