Google’s Chrome OS has come a long way from it’s humble beginnings just a year ago when it was first announced. Ever since then, momentum has picked up; a look at the latest mock ups reveals that the operating system is more ‘ready’ than it has ever been.

Today Techcrunch revealed a series of images that they discovered on the Chromium OS development forums which show Google’s upcoming operating system’s latest UI developments.

The above screenshot shows a new sidebar feature which we hadn’t seen in any of the previous Chrome OS mock ups. It seems like this sidebar will show a list of all the open tabs; also at the bottom of the sidebar will be battery and wifi indicators. This sidebar seems to remove the previous clutter that we saw on the address bar of previous UI mock ups.

Above is a screenshot of the settings/options menu.

Above is a screenshot of a feature that we haven’t really seen much of; the content browser. It seems like it’s still in it’s early stages of development; even so it still looks promising.

As seen in the picture above, it seems that Chrome OS is beginning to find it’s identity as a clean and minimalist OS (indeed this was Google’s initial intention). The screenshot also shows that with the newest mock ups, it is now possible to browse the web without signing in with a Google account.

Lastly, we have the notifications feature pictured above. We have already seen a lot of concepts of how this feature will look; it seems like there hasn’t been much change in this area.

From the available UI concepts it is clear that Chrome OS development is progressing well. The operating system seems to look more ‘solid’. Even though this can be said from looking at the UI concepts what really matters is the code; therefore, we can only wait to test Chrome OS after is Q3 release this year.