Google announces new operating system

[Guest BlackSun_*]

Google announced today that they are developing Google Chrome OS. The operating system, announced on their official blog, will be based on their Chrome browser, which is now nine months old.

 

Google said that at first it will be targeted toward netbooks, but in the future, will eventualy expand. The company said that it will continue to be developed alongside Android, their operating system currently being used on mobile devices.

 

The system will run in a windowing system atop a Linux kernel and will be fully open source. It is planned to be released in 2010. On their blog, Google said, "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," said the blog post written by Sundar Pichai, Vice President Product Management, and Google's engineering director, Linus Upson.

 

Both men said that "the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web" and that the new OS is "our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be".

 

It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So 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.

 

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices 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. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

 

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

 

We have a lot of work to do, and we're definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision. We're excited for what's to come and we hope you are too. Stay tuned for more updates in the fall and have a great summer.

 

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/int...-chrome-os.html

[Guest Savas]

Microsoft has been very slow in embracing the Web. It’d be interesting to see if there is any reaction to this.

[Guest LAW_*]

No existing browsers, including new architectures like IE 8, Google Chrome, and OP, have a multi-principal operating system construction that gives a browser-based OS the exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resources among web site principals.

 

Last Feburary, Microsoft Research released an interesting paper [PDF] about a Web browser it calls Gazelle that's constructed in such a way to act like an operating system with the browser kernel exclusively protecting resources and sharing across Web sites.

 

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/79655/gazelle.pdf

[JT Allen]

Any legitimate competition to MS is good competition imho; IE 8 was supposed to be an "improvement" but crushes my system about every other day.