Apple’s new operating system, Mac OS X Lion, will come with a bunch of new features and user interface tweaks. Most of them can be found on the company’s website and seen in the official promotion video for the new OS.
One feature that hasn’t had a lot of attention yet is the so-called “Restart to Safari” option. This feature can be found on Lion’s new user lock screen and allows the user to restart their Mac and boot directly into Safari. The Mac then functions as a direct window to the Internet and nothing else, since nothing else has been booted.
If you start your Mac into this web-only mode, you won’t need to log in with a user account. This means that all the user’s data is safe and can’t be accessed and used (including your Safari history and bookmarks). Your Mac basically turns into a web browser.
We’ve seen this kind of approach to an operating system with Google’s Chrome OS, which will run on Chromebooks and is actually nothing other than an advanced version of Google Chrome. Google’s vision behind this approach to computing is the complete move into the cloud where the cloud (or the Internet) is your OS.
Apple clearly isn’t trying to compete with Google’s Chrome OS (at least not yet), otherwise they wouldn’t have announced Mac OS X Lion as the operating system it is. This new “Restart to Safari” feature is more of a rescue feature, as Apple announced it as a part of the also new “Find my Mac” feature. According to this post in the MacRumors comments, this feature’s whole purpose is to get potential thieves to use Safari to connect to the Internet, so that the Mac can be localised and found.
But it’s also really useful if someone asks you to use your Mac to just “check emails real quick.” Don’t we all hate that?
Aricle and Photo Via MacRumors
