Google announced a new Operating System (OS) that will initially target the new market of netbooks. The name of the OS is Google Chrome OS and is not set to replace Android (Google's mobile OS). The goal of the new OS is to be fast (boot and operation speed), safe, simple, and Internet centric. Though it was just announced a few days ago and their is tons (literally, just Google it (that's funny)) of stories on it, there is not much actually known about the OS. No pictures, no hands on experiences, just a lot of speculation and a few facts. So unfortunately, that is what this post is, the facts and my two cents (which should be worth more than that, you would think).

I really am not quite sure why everyone is getting so excited. The concept is basically load just enough things to let you browse the Internet; in fact, they are saying if you want to develop for the OS, you can go ahead and do it now because it's focus, like everything Google, is web applications. So you can download the Google Gears API and develop with that, everything should work the same. This is why I do not think the OS shows a real threat to Microsoft Windows, in fact, I see the two going hand-in-hand. I have this cool mode on my laptop (which I never really use but I love the idea) where I can boot into this limited mode that only allows me to watch movies. This mode boots quicker than a full Windows boot and saves battery life by not having to load, run, and handle a bunch of other processes. So why not have a similar thing but for Internet browsing? Have a button that boots to Chrome OS and lets you get to your e-mail to look up that number in under a minute, sounds nice right? And you can have a full OS to run everything else.

The fact that the OS will have Google Chrome points to a hint that the now popular Google Chrome web browser for Linux is getting closer to being completed. Windows only users may not know this, but there is no official release of Chrome for Linux (or Mac), only development builds are available. So this could be good news for the Linux community who has been asking to use Chrome since it was initially announced the browser would be cross-platform.

The only application that is "officially" announced is the Chrome web browser, which it only mentions once in the blog post and I almost did not catch it. But I am sure just like the Android, it will come with a bunch of Google apps.

Why some have been scared that this will hurt the open source community, namely Linux itself, I see it as a good thing. One of the reasons why people are scared of Linux is because they are not use to it. People have grown up around Windows and it has become so second nature to some people, that anything different seems hard because they have to learn something new. With brand popularity of Google, people are going to use it, so they will become more familiar with how Linux works which makes them more likely to try other distros because they may now know how to work with it. It is the same exact thing Mac did, majority of the people using a Mac now do not know OSX is running Unix in the background. While troubleshooting my sister's Mac, I had no idea what to do in the GUI, so I found the command prompt and started probing my way through command prompt. So if Google does a good job with the new window system, they could change they way people look at Linux, literal.

We will see what Chrome OS will become, but right now most everything is speculation. If you want to see my source for most this information, you can check out the Google blog.