Chrome OS updated with Aura UI, looks more like a traditional desktop

Google is hoping to breathe new life into its browser-based operating system Chrome OS with a visual upgrade that makes it look more like a cross between Windows and OS…

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Well, you know what they say... If your radical vision for how things should work falls flat, just copy what everyone else is already doing...

Funny, Microsoft didn't seem to get the memo..their UI paradigm worked fine for most people and now their pushing a complete dog that nobody wants.

LOL, and thus it begins!! Having tricked Microsoft into misjudging the market and creating a UX that disenfranchises most of its customers, Google prepares to sweep in and steal them all away. AS I PREDICTED NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO. Next step? Windows compatibility/emulator - probably WINE with lots of Google tweaks, beta to be announced a month or so before Win8 goes RTM.

Heh, how true. MS is in an odd sort of purgatory right now - they are trying to make a radical leap to something like what others are doing (Metro), but still have a massive grounding foundation in the windowed UI world that most of their users seem to prefer. They are trying to reinvent themselves in spite of their own continued success. At least when/if Metro bombs, they already have the desktop UI to fall back on.

Oh I see now where this is going... Windows 8 buries standard desktop - Chrome OS is here to fill up the void. Smart thinking.

So now it looks more like a flavor of linux that it rightfully is.

I like it, I won't be using it, but nevertheless.

Interesting, but so wrong. Information is filtered through a few third parties when the facts are in the Chrome wiki.
This isn't a response to a heavier desktop or an admission of a failed model, and it's still web-based. It's just web-based in a smarter way. It's a cleaner iteration of the Chrome source code away from a native OS or toolkit dependent infrastructure and to a third way, called Aura. Aura is a cross-platform windowing toolkit wrapping the native facility, but also providing a single compositor for all WebKit and non-WebKit components in the tree, so that WebGL and CSS3 transformations can be accelarated whether in a web page or in the chrome itself. This means that the desktop you are seeing could very well be HTML5 and WebGL though I don't know that it is.
It's interesting to see the parallel development of Android and Chrome, because they are actually moving closer together in a lot of important ways. Both use GL for rendering, possibly with a shared heritage in BumpTop a company whose mobile 3D platform Google acquired a couple of years ago.
The Chrome story is bigger though, Native Plugin has the potential to do everything that compiled apps do on other platforms. (Though the developer story is lacking.) I'm just waiting for them to make Raspberry PI like device overseas as a PoE to DisplayPort endpoint device and include it with every Google Apps subscription. Boom.