Apple has included a new Chrome OS-like browser only mode in the latest developer’s beta release of Mac OS X Lion which was released last week.
According to MacRumors, the new feature shows up on the Mac OS X Lion’s user lock screen. From there you are given the option to “Restart to Safari” rather than logging into the full OS. This lets you restart your machine into just the web browser and nothing else.
This browser-only mode lets unauthorized users browse the web at ease via Safari rather than allowing anyone else access to your personal files or the applications built into your Mac. The actual Safari Only mode doesn’t run from a primary partition either, but from the recovery partition on your hard drive, this means that you can still use Safari even if you whole system goes down…assuming it’s via a software problem and not hardware.
MacRumors goes on to say that the feature is reminiscent of Google’s new Chrome OS, which allows the user to make use of a simple web-only based operating system. MacRumors say that Apple is unlikely to be planning to do this however and their new option is likely to be offering up a sandbox mode that could allow OS X Lion to be used as a secure and anonymous web kiosk.
Thanks to Neowin user Mephistopheles for the submission