Breaking news – Google announces new OS for netbooks

Will the Chrome OS be the ultimate Windows killer?

Android has made quite a statement in the market when launched. Similar impression was given by Chrome. The Google folks still call it more than a browser - it's made for running web applications, each tab runs as a separate process, the interface is minimalistic which makes it fast to load - and there's even a task manager. "We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build," – said Google last September.

Taking this vision forward, after almost nine months after releasing Chrome, Google officially announced a Chrome OS. The reason for this project is that they believe the operating systems that browsers today run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So it can be expected that Chrome will integrate web applications seamlessly. Now this was a good strategy to initiate this project, as Google has a host of web applications that threaten to replace MS Office and PDF reader in the future, as these applications, known as Google Docs, let you work online as well as offline. Your documents are saved online which makes them more secured, and you can access them even offline.

That fact that got us interested was that Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Well, well, well – Android is already out on netbooks. So it remains to be seen what difference and superiority Chrome OS will bring – as it is also built on top of Linux kernel.  Anyway we can expect the open-source code later this year, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS should be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

The difference between the Chrome OS and the Android project is in the objective mainly. Android is aimed at working across a variety of platforms ranging from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.

Google Chrome OS is expected to run on both x86 as well as ARM chips. The two main advantages Google’s OS is expected to have over the latest sensation - Windows 7 can be narrowed down to the fact that it will almost definitely be free and be web-based, which in turn will help netbooks run faster and offer a more integrated experience – as pointed out by telegraph.co.uk.