Google Announces Chrome OS

Google held a rather small event today to announce its new Chrome OS.  The OS isn’t even in beta yet, but they wanted to give developers and members of the open source community a very early chance to check it out.  Rather than type out a really long post about it, I’m just going to give a bulleted list of all the important information.  Much courtesy to Engadget for initially summing up the live event.  I will say, however, that the concept is interesting, if nothing else.  I’m still very wary of our society’s increasing reliance on the cloud.  GMAIL goes down often, for example.  Basing an entire OS off the cloud and storing absolutely nothing locally, quite frankly, scares the crap out of me.  Google said that the limited cloud downtime should equal or be far less in time than that of the average computer downtime due to viruses or other headaches.  Never, ever, have I been unable to access my files on my Mac because it was “down.”  I just wanted to mention that. Click through to get the bulleted list summarizing most of the announcement.

Here’s the run down on Chrome OS in bulleted form:

• The entire OS is web-based and runs in the Chrome browser
• USB drive contents show up in a browser tab
• The notepad actually creates a Google Docs document
• Web apps are launched from an apps panel that sits off to the left of the web page tabs
• Some apps included right now include Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and Hulu
• Background apps like Google Talk can be minimized to “panels” that sit in the bottom of the screen
• Local storage is just used to cache information.  Everything is stored in the cloud. (YIKES!)
• Google also said it’s “very committed” to Flash, and that it’s looking to hardware accelerate whatever code it can
• Google admitted that Chrome OS won’t be for everyone – mainly for people who are very web focused and those who do most of their daily activities in the cloud already
• Chrome OS won’t run on everything.  There will be specific hardware requirements. One major example is that Chrome OS will only run on Solid State Drives.  This is apparently to boost performance.
• Google is supporting both x86 and ARM CPUs
• Release date? It’ll be on a few netbooks in the second half of 2010
• Offline access?  TechCrunch summarized Google’s answer by saying: “WiFi is the use case we have in mind. But having said that, there will be ways to plug in and play media (listen to music and read books, etc) And with HTML5 there is offline support.”  Perhaps Google Gears?

Check out Engadget’s gallery of the event here, and watch the Chrome OS preview video below: