Long before the browser Google Chrome was released there were many people that speculated about Google releasing their own operating system. There was even a number of screenshots that claimed to be of this mythical creation. Now it's happened, Google have announced their operating system will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.
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.
They've also stated that they're working with OEM's to release a number of netbooks next year and that the OS will run on the x86 architecture and on ARM. I'm quite surprised they haven't skipped past x86 and gone straight to 64-bit. From the sounds of it Google Chrome is becoming like IE in that it will become the windowing system and the applications will be web applications (meaning they'll run on Windows, etc. as well). Hopefully they won't have any anti-trust issues rise from this just as Microsoft had.
It does sound fairly innovative, but I wonder how they'll fair against the giants - Windows, OS X, Ubuntu (and the other distros such as Red Hat) as essentially it will still be just Linux distribution and probably won't be able to target the larger audiences due to most games being unable to run on it.
I'm also quite surprised they've called it Google Chrome OS though I can understand why they've done it. I guess further down the line the line between OS and browser will become blurred and so they'll be able to just drop the OS part of the title and people will still recognise the name as being an Operating System.
