Google Announces Chrome OS

As if we didn’t see this coming. They bought YouTube, they have the world’s largest and most accurate search engine, they have their own email service, and their own web browser. This was on the horizon and was expected by many tech enthusiasts such as myself.

Here is the scoop, thus far from Google’s official blog:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

They say “targeted at netbooks,” but when they release it, you know good and well people will be putting it on their Desktop and Laptop PC computers as well. I know I am going to. (Why else do I have more than one hard drive in my PC?)

They seem to be taking the Apple side of things as well. They mention key parts in the following what you will find on Apple’s website when talking out Leopard:

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. 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.

They also mention that it is a project separate from Android, which I thought was a good move on Google’s part. (I hate Android.)

Source is here.