Google Announces Chrome Operating System

Just when you think all Google has up its sleeve is the removal of some beta labels, the company unveils its plans for an operating system based around its Chrome web browser.

After rethinking browsing, Google has decided to do the same thing with operating and late Tuesday the company announced that it was working on its own open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.

Details are scant at the moment. We know that it will run on both ARM and x86 chips, and we know that we'll see netbooks running the software in the latter half of 2010 (Google says its already talking to partners). Because they're stripping everything down and going back to OS basics, users won't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. According to Google, "It should just work."

"The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel," writes Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management at Google. "For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies," he explains, adding that, "of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform."

For those of you wondering what this will mean for Android, Google assures that this is a completely seperate project. The Chrome OS is created for people who spend most of their time online and is designed to power computers of all shapes and sizes, from netbooks to desktops. Google does concede that there are areas of the two that overlap but goes on to say that choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone.

Check out the full blog post about Chrome OS by clicking here.