Just when you thought it was safe to assume that Google’s netbook OS would go to Android, Google drops a wtf-scatter-bomb and announces a Chrome OS. Seriously? Talk about left field. Initial skepticism will, most likely, be pretty heavy on this one. Google already has a perfectly good phone operating system that not only is growing daily in user base, but has been talked about being a netbook OS since its inception.
Chrome will be open source like its bigger brother Android, continuing my bewilderment about why they just didn’t stick with Android. And if all goes to plan we will see our first Chrome-based netbook released in the second half of 2010.
Although, I’m digging what they’re going for and how they’re going to accomplish it; so much so that I want to plagerize this paragraph for your reading pleasure:
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.
To have an entire OS boot up in seconds is quite the benchmark to set, but unsurprising in that it’s going to be a very barebones OS with most of the work being done, stored and modified in the Google Cloud. A very good move for the minimalist hardware nature of netbooks. It should just work? Where have I seen that before…
There is a lot to this new OS; so much so that I’m becoming a believer after rereading the article a few times while writing this article. I would check out the blog post in the following link to see what I mean.
[via Google Blogspot | Thanks, Devolio!]