Will Google Chrome OS take over the world?

You have probably heard about Google’s announcement of Google Chrome OS. If not you can read Google’s announcement on the Official Google Blog.

So now that we are all caught up on the news we can start analysing what we actually think of the idea of the Chrome OS. Obviously baring in mind that it has barely started development and won’t even be seen until next year. So lets start with comparing it to Android.

Chrome OS vs Android

So Android is Google’s mobile OS that allows developers to create apps, mainly in Java, that are installed onto the system which means that they don’t need necessarily internet connectivity to be used. These are quite often specialised pieces of software that utilise some of the devices hardware like a bluetooth, 3G, GPS and camera.

But recently some developers (not Google) have managed to port Android onto a netbook (Chrome OS’s initial target market) and use most of the apps (except GPS and camera etc). So already we can see an overlap with their two operating systems but as Google haven’t done this themselves we can be sure that they won’t be doing it in the near future.

Many people have been asking the question “Why have Chrome OS and Android?”. Well I feel the answer is pretty simple. One uses local specialised hardware and one doesn’t. Chrome OS is very likely to have desktop with links to lots of web apps that make use of HTML5/Gears technology and use the cloud extensively. Whereas Android has apps installed on the device that require a completely different language, UI design and marketing.

Chrome OS vs Windows/OSX

So these two popular desktop Operating Systems obviously make use of the local file storage for everything from the users documents to programs they have installed. Will this way of computing change when Google Chrome OS comes out? No way. You can’t run Adobe Photoshop in a web client unless it is a full Java Applet, which to me isn’t a true web technology.

Google Chrome OS wants to use the cloud, which doesn’t require any local storage other than the local OS and any cached files for offline working. This won’t be extensive as it is more likely to be documents and spreadsheets that get stored rather than large media files. Even thinking of a large movie file, how is that handled? When a file is streamed there is a local cached copy placed on the hard drive. I’m interested to see how will they over come this?

I really don’t think Microsoft or Apple have much to worry about. Microsoft may feel that XP (which almost 8 years old) might have some competition in the netbook market, but Chrome provides a completely different solution to the problem and it would be up to the consumer to see which solution suits them better. Cloud computing and web apps or using installed apps and local storage. Obviously there will be a small overlap and is not to be taken literally.

Apps

The apps that will be built for Google Chrome OS are going to be totally different. For starters they will be using different programming languages to the installed apps on other Operating Systems. There will be minimal overlap between desktop programming languages and those that are used on the web (apart from .NET and ASP.NET).

The web apps that are created for the Chrome OS are said to work on all standards compliant browsers. For a starters we know that all browsers are different and that IE should die a painful death. So this must mean that the browsers on other operating systems must be able to accommodate some small local storage for caching of files and small databases. Therefore they need Google Gears or an HTML5 compatible browser. At the moment it seems only Opera, Safari, Firefox and Chrome support a couple of HTML5 standards (like video and audio tags, Safari also supports local database storage without Gears). So by the time Chrome OS comes out all these browsers need to support HTML5 which IE9 most certainly won’t support all of them.

Will Chrome OS take over the world?

Errr…. no! I don’t think it will take over the desktop OS world, though it will have a pretty good stab at the netbook market. It could change the way we work remotely (without a laptop). This is Google, everyone knows them so no matter what they do they will have some traction in any market they choose. I just don’t think the world is ready for complete cloud computing, especially the security aspects of it keeping you personal documents on a server somewhere else on the planet.

Most people don’t realise they use cloud computing. Do you store photos on Flickr/Facebook? Do you use GMail/Hotmail? They you already use cloud computiong, so the change to using pure cloud computing isn’t as great as you think. But still I think Google have a lot to prove and I really look forward to seeing what they come up with.

Please leave any questions of comments below.

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Saturday, July 18th, 2009

10 Comments to Will Google Chrome OS take over the world?

Awesome! Google designing an operating system? I’ve been hoping for something like this, and i’m excited to see how a primarily cloud based system will work. With all the success of their products, and with Linux at it’s core, it’s gonna be something =)

Toss me down for beta testing =)

Frank on July 18th, 2009

Chrome OS would be very competitive on Microsoft operating systems. I was thinking that one day, Google would launch an Operating system that would complete with Windows XP or Vista. Google and Microsoft would compete head to head now that Microsft launched its Bing search engine.

detoxdiet on August 6th, 2009

Chrome OS is based on Linux and is only available for Netbooks. I wonder if Google would make an OS that would compete with Windows XP or Windows 7.

Jenny Lee on August 22nd, 2009

with the release of Google Chrome and Microsoft Bing search engine, one would expect that there would be a very stiff competition between Google and Microsoft.

arthritistreatment_boy on September 3rd, 2009

Chrome OS is just based on Linux and it is not really a “real” proprietary operating system from Google. i wonder if Google would also compete with MS Windows in the future.

Acnelady on September 9th, 2009

Chrome OS is sort of a very basic operating system based on Linux. i wish that google make an operating system just like Windows XP that would compete with Microsoft

Janice on October 20th, 2009

i tried Chrome OS and it is pretty much like a scaled down version of Ubuntu. Chrome is just based on Linux and there is not much innovation in it.

Pinoytech on November 18th, 2009

I have installed Chrome OS on one of my netbooks and the performance of Chrome OS is just okay. there is nothing fancy or very special about it. It was just a sort of GUI version of linux or something.
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