In a world dominated by Apple's Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows there has always been other contenders, mostly in the form of many different distributions of Linux. Google, best known for it's search engine has long been one to put their own spin on technologies and applications to dare people to think different are well on their way to releasing their own.
Ahead of Google's event they released the source code and design documents for Chrome OS using a git repository pre-empting their announcement that as of today Chrome OS is now open source and the community will be working on the same development tree as Google. The announcement also included that the OS will not be available today, which does follow with the previous speculation that it would be released in 2010.
They then took a diversion to talk about Chrome (the browser) and how far it has come over the past year in terms of the growth of it's user-base and it's development and how they plan on continuing to improve it into 2010 with HTML + JavaScript based extensions and a focus on web based applications working well within the browser.
For Chrome OS they are focusing on:
- speed - they want it to be "blazing" fast, Chrome on Chrome OS will be even faster,
- simplicity - all data will be stored in the "cloud" so that you can log in to any Chrome OS with a roaming profile,
- security - very vague, but will function in the same way as browser security.
In their demo it took around 7 seconds from a cold boot to the log-in screen - quite impressive! Once logged in you can see that it looks very much like a normal Chrome browser window.
As you can see it is pretty much just a browser with tabs across the top and a Chrome OS logo which when clicked will open up the application menu. Interestingly this does like strikingly similar to a leaked screenshot that made it's way around the internet over the past few weeks so it seems that the person who leaked it really had seen what Chrome OS looked like at that time.
All of these applications are web based applications and are not stored locally - everything is in the cloud as the operating system is designed to be run from the "cloud" so that the OS itself can be installed onto Flash based storage without much available space. This means if you manage to get it installed as a Virtual Machine (which they do say should be possible with the current source code) then you're not going to need a great deal of space to get it installed. The user data which does get stored is actually all encrypted so if anyone swaps out the SSD all the personal information will not easily be readable.
Any files you have such as Microsoft Office files will be able to open automatically using the Office Live web application as well since it is one of the many web applications that work. The point in them demonstrating this is that it and many other non-Google web applications will just work if they already work in the Chrome browser as there is no proprietary technology used in getting applications added to the menu - it is like having bookmarks for web apps.
Second, because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn't trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot.
You're not stuck to just one set of tabs either, Chrome OS has a feature very similar to "Spaces" in OS X to provide multiple desktops that you can switch between using the "overview" screen which also provides an easy way of creating a new instance of the browser. In addition to this it is important to note that every tab is a separate instance which is "sand boxed" and totally protected against each other tab, and the OS itself is protected on a read-only partition that can only be written to by the root user.
The new browser based operating system isn't entirely tab based either - it includes these things they're going to call "panels" (which hopefully they'll improve the styling of) which are persistent across all tabs. These panels are for things like Chat and viewing contacts, and will also appear when connecting external storage devices so that you can open up content from them easily.
Looking back at security again they have gone with a silent automatic update system similar to how Chrome OS updates itself at startup if it needs to, but in the case of the OS it will also validate itself to ensure that no malware has infected the system. If something is detected with an invalid security certificate it will revert itself to a "clean" version and will automatically fix itself. The technology behind this is what they call the "verified boot process" and is quite an interesting concept. It is particularly good to see that it can fix itself should it go wrong.
Their aim is to release the operating system by the end of next year in time for the holiday season, but apparently it will only run on Chrome OS approved devices that use solid-state drives - it will not work on a hard drive. I'm sure someone will get it working as a VM or on a HDD sooner or later though.
This is not intended to be run on people's main machine, but on an accompanying netbook which is used primarily for Internet based work as there are applications that cannot run on this. It does however have a good number of video codecs already included which means most video should be able to run off the bat and is hardware accelerated.
One of the questions people have is what do you do if you have no internet connection? This is something Google have thought about and a lot of content will have the ability to be cached, such as books and videos. I imagine as HTML 5's web application cache support is adopted on more sites it will probably improve what can be used offline.
After having seen this I do find it very tempting to see how I'll get on using it for all web based tasks for the foreseeable future though I imagine without a netbook it will not be the same experience as it will have to be run in a VM. The UI does have some bits that look quite nice, though some of the UI I think is also incredibly ugly which hopefully will be improved so that it doesn't have a negative impact on the user experience. What I'm asking myself now is what this will mean for other operating systems. Google have clearly stated it's not intended to replace your primary machine, nor are they saying they want to replace HDDs in machines with SSDs as it is primarily a machine for net access. What it does mean however is that companies like Apple and Microsoft may see the silent updates, the self-repair, and the certification of root-protected operating system files as something they could mimic in future release of their own operating systems. Google have once again raised the bar, and I wonder what Apple will do to beat it should they release a netbook or tablet of their own.
