Google Cloud Print Coming for Google Chrome OS

by Clint Boulton

An alternative to the localized Microsoft Windows desktop operating system, Google’s Chrome OS is a Web-based operating system that boots up computers in a fraction of the time it takes to start most of today’s PCs. And it’s open source!

When you go Web, you’re freed from restrictions of the localized desktop. Take printing, for example. Printers are legion and so are the drivers, the specialized pieces of software to help the PC tell the printer to print something. Google Cloud Print aims to help Chrome OS netbooks talk to printers sans drivers.

Here’s how it looks, as described in the slide above. Following are full descriptions of how all of the components work in Cloud Print.

Heres a description of the Cloud Print service.

Chrome OS is a Web-based OS with Chrome browser as the front end. Obviously, any print solution for such an OS would have to support any app and Cloud Print purports to. Also, Google is developing a Web UI that apps can use to allow the user to select the printer and appropriate print options.

Google Cloud Print will enable printing from “cloud-aware” printers as well as legacy printers.

Legacy printers won’t be left behind. Google will use a proxy to print to legacy printers via Google Cloud Print. The proxy takes care of registering the printer with Google Cloud Print and awaiting print jobs from the service. When a job arrives, it submits the print job to the printer using the PC operating system’s print stack and sends job status back to the printer.

Google notes that Google Chrome browser on Chrome OS is a native app that uses Google Cloud Print and common print dialog.

We mentioned the printing proxy software earlier. This slide and the next show the sequence of calls made by a cloud print proxy to: register a printer and its attributes with Google Cloud Print, update this printer data, list all current printers registered for a given user, and delete a printer from the list of registered printers.

See the full interface reference and other documentation on Google Code here.