Google is ready to throw its hat into the Operating System ring, but instead of focusing on its Android OS for mobile devices, the company is going to base its new system on the Chrome Web browser. Chrome OS will target netbooks, and looks to be yet another move by Google to chip away at Microsoft's market dominance.
"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," said Sundar Pichai, vice president of Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director, on the company's blog. "The software architecture is simple -- Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel."
Some of the features Google is touting in Chrome OS sound very similar to Apple's pitch for Mac OS X. The OS is designed to run fast, users don't have to worry about remembering to back up their files, and users don't have to "spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware."
They added "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 plans to release Chrome OS later in 2009 with an open source license so developers can start working with the code and making their own changes.
The company is calling the Web Chrome OS's platform, and touting that all Web-based applications are compatible without any changes. By focusing on Web standards and Web-based apps, Chrome could turn out to be a nimble OS that changes easily to fit user's needs -- something that Microsoft might have a hard time competing with.