Today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

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.

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.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Quick. Someone send a truckload of Tums over to Redmond.

Thanks, Mr. Justin




  1. Patrick says:

    # 55 Somebody_Else said, “but its actually a fantastic OS.”

    In what way is it worth the bloat cost, dropped wireless connections, missing drivers, etc., over XP?

  2. zorkor says:

    Whats next? YahoOS?

  3. Somebody_Else says:

    @ #55

    We’ve had this discussion before. Vista has been faster than XP since around the time SP1 came out. The security improvements alone made it a worthwhile upgrade. There are fewer known exploits for Vista than Apple OSX.

    Driver support took about 6 months to catch up, its like that with every major OS release. That was the cause of poor performance on some systems early on.

  4. Somebody_Else says:

    ^ Meant to say @ #61

  5. Patrick says:

    # 63 Somebody_Else said, “We’ve had this discussion before. Vista has been faster than XP since around the time SP1 came out.”

    No. With using XP base recommended H/W, Vista is no where near as fast. The security “improvements” were bypassed before the RTM version shipped (you didn’t read my posts I guess). Try again.

  6. Somebody_Else says:

    #65
    Just give up Patrick, nobody listens to your disinformation anymore. I’m not going to go through this with you again.

  7. Patrick says:

    # 66 Somebody_Else said, “SCREECH!”

    You’d be funny if you weren’t so stupid.

    Why Is Windows XP Still So Much Faster Than Vista?

  8. jbellies says:

    Patrick #67. I avoid Vista when I can, but the article was lame. No benchmarks. The OSes installed on separate partitions of a conventional HD–as everybody knows, that would give one of the OSes an “inside track” into faster disk access. In the 15 months since that article was written, somebody *must* have done a better job.

    But to give this a slice of on-topic content, I installed Google Chrome, but discovered it was not in the same league as Opera or Firefox. It’s a kind-of toy browser. It does certain things well (like, in my experience, speed of loading a page, especially in gmail), but… just MHO. So I don’t see how ChromeOS will be more than any browser over linux. But it could still succeed, because in the world of new tech, we seem better able to predict the tech than to predict how and how much we will use it. One good effect (for users, maybe not for shareholders) might be an OS price war. Following the lead of the browser wars, $Zero would be nice.

  9. Patrick says:

    # 68 jbellies said, “Patrick #67. I avoid Vista when I can, but the article was lame. No benchmarks.”

    I’ve posted several actual benchmarked reviews over the last coupled of years here. They can be Googled and say, essentially the same thing. It is not surprising since both OS’s use the same basic kernel but Vista just added much more bloat…

  10. Somebody_Else says:

    #68, 69
    My actual XP, Vista, and 7 (beta) benchmarks are here:
    hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1383898

    @68
    I had the same experience with Chrome. Its nifty, it works, but its not as good as Firefox. Firefox has such an extentive collection of addons that I don’t see how anyone else will be able to seriously compete with them.

    Same thing with the Chrome OS. We don’t really need another Linux distro. All Microsoft has to do is offer a low cost version of 7 for netbooks and bam, most of the market share is out of reach.

  11. Patrick says:

    # 70 Somebody_Else said, “My actual XP, Vista, and 7 (beta) benchmarks are here:
    Test Rig Specs:
    Athlon 64 X2 4200 (2.2 GHz)
    2GB DDR 400”

    Now try it with 32 bit versions (what home users mostly have/had) and 1/2 Gig RAM, OR MS recommended 128 Meg…

    As I stated before…

  12. Postman says:

    #65,

    With computer still getting roughly twice as fast every two years or so, you quickly run into a situation where the few percent of difference in performance is not detectable.

    The only area it matters right now is on netbooks, and I am still not convinced those are anything more than a fad.

    For example, I have heard for the better part of the last 20 years that we will all stop using desktops any day now, and guess what…

  13. Postman says:

    #70,

    I have a similar experience but it goes like this… Yeah, chrome is faster than IE and firefox, but so what? My web pages render in 2/10s of a second instead of 4/10s of a second? Chrome doesn’t do anything to fix the totally innappropriate ways thats AJAX is being used now days.

    The web, is and always will be, a really fancy yellow book application. AJAX… what 5 years on now? Has totally failed to displace ~any~ desktop application.

    ChromeOS is happening because that was Googles whole web 2.0 business model, and they failed. Now they need a platform where they can distribute their client server apps.

    Also, this is not as much as Google bringing open sores to the desktop, as it is Google bringing closed source to the web.


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