What is Chrome OS – AKA the Google OS for Web Computing

What is Chrome OS? If you use the Google Chrome browser, you know that its targeted for those users (I myself am one) who do work, make notes, write blogs and do programming all on the web – in the cloud in other words, rather than on old style applications that reside on you computers hard drive. The newly announced Google Chrome Operating System promises to be the OS for working in the cloud – it is primarily aimed at netbooks, which depend on cloud computing for most if not all of their appeal.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Will you use Google Chrome? The answer for me is heck yeah! I think this is the technology that will finally remove us from being chained to our PCs – now computing will be netbook-to-smart-phone-back-to-netbook, and repeat as needed.

What is seems to be is basically a Linux kernel with an interface (hopefully/probably minimal) built on top of it. It will be specifically aimed at accessing web applications. Will Facebook/Twitter be included as ‘Google Chrome Apps’ right out of the box? The other big question, especially for programmers, is how will we program for Google OS? IN order to keep the footprint small, I don’t imagine Chrome OS will allow developers to build windowed applications for it – probably only web applications that can tap into the speed of the Google OS.