Chrome OS: What Is Google’s Goal?
Posted on July 8, 2009 |
Google's announcement that it is working on a lightweight, Web-based operating system for netbooks, to be called Chrome OS, is a surprise only in its timing. As I wrote last September, when Google released the Chrome browser and Sergey Brin denied that its ambitions went beyond building a fast, simple browser:
Don't believe it for a second. Although the first version of Chrome has a half-finished feel and runs only on Windows, a close look at its features and underlying design reveals a far more dramatic goal. Chrome aims to take on not just Internet Explorer's 75% share of the browser market but Windows' dominance of the desktop itself.
Chrome was designed less as a competitor to the feature-rich Internet Explorer and Firefox than as a container for running Web-based applications. That made it, in effect, the user interface for a Web-based OS. Add a kernel (Google, unsurprisingly, is using the Linux kernel as the core), a window manager, and assorted other pieces of OS infrastructure and you can have a simple, fast, and robust operating system without a massive development effort.
