Earlier today in Mountain View, Google unveiled details of their Chrome OS that was announced earlier this year. The Chromium OS Project was also launched today and it’s Google’s hope that open source developers will lend a hand to build it out. They most recently opened up Wave in the same manner.
Chrome OS is meant to be an extremely lightweight OS focused entirely on the Web experience. It will initially only be available on netbooks and users will not be able to download the OS as is. You will have to purchase new hardware to have access to the OS. While Chrome OS is still a year out, Google does have plans to open up the OS to other types of hardware, but an official announcement won’t be made until the middle of next year. It’s also worth noting that Chrome OS netbooks will ship with Solid State Drives (SSD) because everything will be stored in the cloud.
A stand alone Chrome Web browser is currently available for Windows users. A Mac version will be released before the end of the year with a Linux compatible version to follow shortly thereafter. If you’ve seen the Chrome browser then Chrome OS won’t look much different.
Google is focused on simplicity, security and speed. To that affect, Chrome will boot up in seven seconds. Everything will be stored in the cloud and your Chrome netbook will always be up to date. No need to install drivers or go looking for patches. Chrome OS will be divided into three separate partitions on the SSD: a root partition, user partition and a swap partition. If Chrome detects any sort of corruption, it will automatically wipe and re-install a clean version of the operating system.
The following videos were released by Google to give developers and the common man a look into the new OS.
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