Google, the big little company we all know and love, has decided that a logical extension of their vision for Google Chrome is the Chrome Operating System. While the original Chrome was marketed as being similar to an OS in how it handled the web, Google decided that the desktop OS is built for an age where people are tied to desktop applications. Google says that ChromeOS will be a lightweight, fast-to-boot-fast-to-run OS that focuses on getting people to the web. While aimed at netbooks, it will also be available for desktops and laptops (so presumably not a Moblin-like interface).
While it will be Linux-based (like Android but seperate), ChromeOS will build many things from the ground up. Now, I probably won’t wind up using ChromeOS (this is purely speculatory with no screenshots or anything) as I like the full-fledged Desktop OS provided by Ubuntu, but because the project is open source and builds on open source projects there will be a lot of new material coming in to the FLOSS ecosystem which will inevitably be picked up by the mainstream Linuxes.
I incorrectly reported on Twitter (based on a misunderstanding of Gizmodo) that it would be able to run Windows and OS X apps. As far as I can tell, there won’t be apps per say but rather web-based applications which can be run on any operating system from any modern browser. This, needless to say, makes more sense, though I am dissappointed because geting Win/Mac compatibility in an open source project would mean Win/Mac compatibility for the Linux universe.
So yes, I’m excited. Can’t wait to see where this goes. I am a fan of Chrome as a browser (if it only did Flash it’d be my default on Linux – it’s alpha is great) and I’m sure Google will do a great job on ChromeOS
According to NetApplications, Microsoft’s forced-use browser Internet Explorer lost 11.4% of the browser market between the three versions currently in the wild (the recent IE8, the first-IE-with-tabs-finally-half-baked-standards-support-they-could-have-gone-all-the-way-but-noooo IE7, and the it-just-won’t-die-no-matter-how-many-times-I-whack-it-with-a-sledgehammer-AHHH-AHHHH-AHHHHH IE6). While IE7’s loss in popularity is explainable – people upgrading/being forced to upgrade to IE8 – and IE6’s persistence is starting to wane because it lacks certain features like tabs and any notion of security, the nice thing is that it’s losing to the renewed competition in the Second Browser Wars. Where it was once mainly between Netscape and Internet Explorer, there’s now Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox (Netscape’s next of kin), Opera,Apple’s Safari, and the new and very impressive Google Chrome. As the Internet Explorer line has done very little in the way of innovation (A small browser called NetCaptor invented them in 1998 and after losing market share to the tabbed Opera, Firefox, and Safari, IE integrated them in 2006) this isn’t surprising.
What is surprising (though not at all unwelcome) is that people are taking enough interest in quality to look past the default, to revolt from the dictatorship of Good Enough. All the new entrants to the browser wars bring new innovations – Firefox with extensions, Opera with Unite and many others, Chrome with Tab Sequestration – and people are realizing that what comes installed on their computer really isn’t that good.
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