An Overview of the Chrome Operating System

Chrome OS is Google's latest project that they hope will change computing in a major way. Most web users have heard of Chrome, the Internet browser created by Google to challenge Firefox, the most popular Internet browser at this time. But most people may not have heard of Chrome OS, the Chrome based operating system that Google has been working on.

Chrome OS is simple, lightweight, and lightning fast. The operating system is meant to be a quick way to jump on the Internet from any wifi hot spot or with 3g connection almost anywhere with cell service. The idea behind Chrome OS is that computing is moving almost entirely into the Internet, and we are always on the go. Think of what the average person does on a computer these days, check email, check Facebook, video chat, text chat, share/look at pictures. Now what can all these things be categorized under? Surfing the Internet!

What Google does with the Chrome OS is simplify the computer. Google cuts out all the crap, and just keeps the one thing everyone uses, which is the Internet browser. When you turn on a computer running Chrome OS it boots not to a desktop with a ton of icons to different programs, but instead it boots into the Chrome Internet browser. When you boot into the Chrome OS for the first time and are brought straight into the Chrome browser the first big difference you will notice is that there are no close, or minimize buttons. The computer only runs an Internet browser!

At first having only an Internet browser to use may frighten you. What if you need to do something other then browse the Internet? What if you needed to do something productive like type a word document or make a power point presentation? Well Google documents exists for just that, you can type a document online! Google while building the Chrome OS has also announced the Chrome Web Store. The Chrome Web Store is similar to the idea behind apps for your iPhone or Android smart phones, small applications using an Internet connection that you can run. With this web app store, developers will be able to make apps that run from within the Chrome OS and use your Internet connection.

An advantage of this online computing is that everything is stored in the cloud. What this means is that all tour data can be accessed not only from anywhere, but from any computer with an Internet connection. Not only is Chrome OS built for cloud computing but it also is built for speed, since the whole operating system is just the Chrome Internet browser, it is extremely light weight on system resources. As a result of being being light on system resources it is extremely energy efficient meaning long battery life for a laptop.

On the negative, side of things web apps are at this moment still elementary compared to normal applications built for the desktop. But we should also notice web apps are advancing at an incredible rate, especially with web technologies such as html 5 paving the way for more advanced apps that can be run in a browser. The other major downside of an operating system based around an Internet browser is that what happens when you do not have an Internet connect? It pretty much becomes useless, even if some web apps have offline modes such as Google Documents.

Lastly why would Google spend the time to design a whole operating system around an Internet browser? That is a simple question to answer because Google at its core is an Internet advertising agency. Basically their thought is the more people they can get online the more people will see their advertisements.