Google Chrome OS

 It's almost two in the morning now in the city. I was just about to wrap up my writing session with Mathematica/LaTeX when strange news of a new operating system came flooding in through the internet. The RSS reader registered a mention of Google Chrome OS from ArsTechnica while I received links to an article on NYTimes on the possibility of Google OS, and then the flood gates opened on friendfeed and twitter. Apparently the Google OS is something people had been secretly fantasizing about all these years, since it's currently trending at the top of twitter trend list recently occupied by MJ's death. Yes, MJ fans. A news of a computer operating system that's not set to be released for another whole year just beat out MJ's death news on twitter. Read it and weep (no disrespect to MJ, but it's about time though). 

There aren't any detailed news coming out of the Google regarding the OS at the moment. I'm risking disturbing my sleeping routine on a workday (yet again) to find more news about it, being an OS junkie I am (not good with computers, I just like Operating Systems for some odd reason). Yet no new news beyond the single blog post on the official Google blog and some smatterings of articles on the web, most of which point back to the official Google blog post. 

I don't know what to say. I'm probably one of the few zillion people who've been waiting for Google to get to work on some kind of major operating system for a while now. I'm something of a hobbyist of the Android platform already, and my primary web browser was set to Google Chrome right until Firefox released 3.5 and one of my favorite otaku web celebrity went some lengths to support it. I'm seriously considering switching back to Chrome now, since all my bookmarks are on delicious now I don't have to worry about switching browsers anymore. It's all available from the web through the horrible alchemy of cloud computing.

I am somewhat skeptical on the whole Google OS issue though. While I love the idea, and I certainly will install it on a new pc (will need to hunt down some old boxes I don't use anymore... Sadly I can't really experiment on my work laptop), pushing out a whole new operating system is kind of a big deal. And this OS is supposed to be based on Chrome, the web browser. Last OS to attempt something with such bravado was Windows OS (the whole of the operating system runs on i.explorer shell) and they really got burned for it. Although I must say it would have turned out a bit differently if the web browser Microsoft used as their operating system shell wasn't such a clunky mess... So would it mean that Google Chrome OS would stand a chance of becoming a classic operating system like the hollowed OS X and WinXP (I know, I know, but lasting for a decade as the defacto operating system of choice for the world needs something more than marketing savvy)? The Chrome web browser is certainly leagues better than what Internet Explorer was/is afterall.

There's one more thing I'm worried about in particular though. The Chrome web browser is something of a resource hog, though not nearly in same level as I.E. Chrome, perhaps due to some of its advanced features, can't run on older operating systems wherein modern Opera browser for example have no problem running on Win98. Also I do remember some people complaining about the responsiveness of the browser under anemic/archaic hardware settings. I still remember the day I found out that 5-tab strong Chrome session will slow my then-3 months old Thinkpad if I left it open and running overnight due to some issue in memory/processor management. The most recent update to the Chrome fixed most if not all of such conspicuous issues but I still have my doubts. This is especially alarming since the first iterations of the Google Chrome OS will be coming out for netbooks, which tend to have even weaker hardware than laptops, which falls behind desktops.

There's also the danger of how viable future market for netbooks might turn out to be. It's always possible that people decide they want cheap larger laptops afterall (which is probably the reason why some of the bigger companies still don't have a decent netbook line-up of their own. I'm looking at you, Sony. The jokes you put out on the marketplace shouldn't even be considered netbooks, though you do make some good laptops).

And of course, as with the Google Chrome/Chromium web browsers the whole operating system will be open source, I'm guessing in similar style as linux or BSDs. Which in itself should be enough to make people drool over themselves... Now that I think about it, my current netbook Asus 701 4G (the first commercial netbook that ever came out in the U.S.!) is about due for an upgrade. Maybe I should hold out for an year and get my hands on the first production units of the Google Chrome OS netbooks!  

I eagerly await for our future Google overlords.