Thursday Chrome OS, Google’s new web only OS, was just released. Basically Google is seeing that 90% of our time on the computer is being spent on the internet. All our email, pictures, music, videos social network, etc are all on the web. In this sense everything else on your computer is bloatware.

Heres a quick video from Google explaining their new lightweight os.

Immediately with the release of a the code, copies began flying around the net. Specifically a virtual disk with the OS built (download) that you can just pop into a new VM on VMWare or Virtualbox and you are up and running. When it boots up you are prompted for your Google account login, after logging in its basically just like chrome. The tabs are a little more customized, and
Screen shot 2009-11-20 at 7.25.35 PMthe rest is just a browser. And thats the thing, its just a browser, its very far from an OS. Chrome “OS” is chrome, on top of a very stripped down ubuntu. In fact thats how you build it, take a copy of Ubuntu 8.04 or later, get all the pre-requisites, build chrome and you are done. It still feels a lot like linux, and you can easily tell it uses GTK for all the gui stuff.

I know this is just a dev build and its the very first source open to the public, but how exactly is Google’s vision going to pan out for this? There are some key things missing here such as being able to change the display resolution. Is the OS going to be useless if you can’t connect to the internet? If you are at all anything like me, you don’t like having all your eggs in one basket, having an offline copy is a must. I think Google gears is going to be a key player into making a local copy of the “cloud”. Though with all these features that a lot of people see that are lacking from chromium, does Google really have any intention of putting these sorta things in? I think a fine line is being walked right here between being simple, and being too simple. Being simple is good, yes. Keep things lightweight, fast, and too the point, but neglecting adding in more features, nobody is going to use it.