During the unveiling of Mac OS X ‘Lion’ (10.7) at last week’s WWDC, Apple talked a little bit about the “Find My Mac” feature, but didn’t go into great detail of how it worked. With a Lion developer beta, however, further information has begun to trickle out, including the discovery of a feature no one saw coming… “Restart to Safari”. Just as it sounds, users of Lion will have the ability to reboot straight to a browser-only environment for some quick Web action.
Even with the beta in the hands of developers, not too much is known about this feature. MacRumors reports that this isn’t a competitor to Google’s Chrome OS, but rather a simple feature that would both allow users to browse the Web in a locked-down and safe environment, and also help trigger the “Find My Mac” feature to allow the user to either discover its location or remotely format the hard drive.
Inside of this locked-down mode, no files or applications on the computer can be accessed. Rather, this is a strict mode that will allow people to either browse the Web in a no-nonsense environment, or act as a safe haven for those who want to allow others to use their laptop for browsing but don’t want the all-too-real repercussions that can come with it. For that bonus alone, this feature is awesome.
Another bonus is that this mode resides on a partition separate from the OS, so that in the event of an OS crash, you’ll still be able to boot into this and at least access the Internet. You won’t be able to fix your computer from here, but this is an initial version; we may see it expanded in the future.
So far, it’s difficult to tell if Apple is planning on this feature being a “big deal”, since its main goal seems to revolve around the Find My Mac feature. If it does prove successful, however, we could see it enhanced in the future – and it will be possible, thanks to Apple being able to update the software on the hidden/spare partition.
To be honest, I am surprised that this feature is just coming to fruition now. With proven technologies such as those brought forth by SplashTop, who’ve been giving users similar Linux-based solutions for a couple of years now, had figured the idea would be a little more prevalent today. Perhaps we’ll see the same sort of feature with Windows 8? I sure hope so.