"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. 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." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

via http://ff.im/4WpZ8 - Paul Buchheit

9:37 pm is an odd time for a blog post. I'm guessing that this post was published early in response to http://www.nytimes.com/2009... - Paul Buchheit

Sounds awesome btw! "The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. 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. And 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." - Paul Buchheit

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - patrick

This sounds like it would be perfect for Arringtons CrunchPad - patrick

patrick, that would be pretty neat, wouldn't it? I don't know much about the hardware/OS in the CrunchPad though. - Matt Cutts

sounds awesome indeed - Edwin Khodabakchian

This sounds very, very interesting. Shame we have to wait till fall to hear more details. :) - Sean Brady

Timing matters a lot Sanat. 10 years ago the tech and users weren't ready for this, but we're just about there now, especially with tech such as NaCl. - Paul Buchheit

woot - Robert Higgins

I agree with Paul. I think that people are ready for this. I am wondering however if there will be some confusion regarding Android versus Google Chrome OS. - Edwin Khodabakchian

I am so happy this is happening. - Bret Taylor

Edwin: I was confused till now about Android usage in netbooks but this announcement actually clears that up. - Kiran Patchigolla

Paul, your guess on timing is probably right. The story broke, so they hit publish. Note the last paragraph says to wait until fall and to have a nice summer. This is a very interesting development indeed. - Louis Gray

How will this differ from just being a special Linux distro? - Gabe

Gabe, in the same way that Android differs from a special Linux distro :). They both use Linux as a device driver layer, but have built up a whole new application layer. - Paul Buchheit

Gabe: from the blog post, they are writing a new window manager (and presumably getting rid of X since it is so slow and resource intensive). And I also presume working on startup time and power consumption will involve some deeper changes to the OS than most Linux distributions. - Bret Taylor

Right on. Just like Apple did with Mac OS X. - Sam Grover

"It should just work" - Hayes Haugen

Bright move for an excellent project. V8 is so slick, I wished for it to be utilized in a broader domain than "just" within the confines of a browser. Stripping out all kinds of unnecessary OS components, building a layer of native windowing on top. Very excited. - Mustafa K. Isik

a new windows system is interesting - Google just open sourced a custom NX server (http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009...) so I wonder if that's related. I think overloading the Chrome name is a mistake, though - look how that worked for Sun with Java (remember the Java Desktop System - which was a Linux distribution and JavaFX?) - Nick Lothian

Won't people get annoyed when Flash doesn't work, or QuickTime movies won't play, or something like that? - Gabe

How soon will Chrome have enough market share for Google to push major new browser features? There are lots of ways to imagine a browser, but we're all still using more or less the same one. - Zak Stone

I'm so excited. I wonder when we can get our hands on the real stuff. - Sung W. Lim

Gabe: I think a lot of the work that is going into HTML5 is to mitigate those issues. - Mark Trapp from iPhone

Mark: Are you suggesting that people will write their apps in HTML5 (along with or instead of Flash), or that somebody is going to make a usable implementation of Flash in HTML5? - Gabe

Gabe, I don't see any reason why they couldn't get Flash running on Chrome -- they already announced that Flash10 will be on Android: http://www.googleandblog.com/adobe-a... - Paul Buchheit

Web-as-a-platform has a long ways to go. I think this is great work they are doing but just don't see it as being transformative. - Hayes Haugen

People will still want to run native compiled apps. Especially for games. - Rodfather

Rodfather, see http://code.google.com/p... (sandboxed x86, in short) - Paul Buchheit

Gabe: The former. HTML5 includes built-in video and audio support, and includes Canvas, which will in large part act as a replacement for most use-cases of Flash. Some parts of it are already out there, but it'll still be a couple of years, I think, before it's ubiquitous. Maybe Google will get Apple and Microsoft to port their stuff to Linux (like Paul says, Flash is already in the works for Android) so it'll work on Chrome OS, but it seems more likely they're banking on HTML5's success. - Mark Trapp from iPhone

Paul, Native Client sounds exciting - Rodfather

A new windowing system just to run Chrome? Sounds a bit overkill to me. It feels like their "broad vision" is ignoring some important offline user behavior that can't easily be addressed with Gears. Soon they will probably need a file manager, a desktop, proper windowing, reserved areas on the screen to display "things" about what's happening and some more. Yeah, voila, what I just described is a fully-fledged Linux desktop, something Ubuntu-like. I hope they're not reinventing the old wheel. - Enver ALTIN

What's going to happen when somebody needs to print a boarding pass or tax form? - Gabe

Hopefully it will have some kind of printer support. Printers have to be the most backwards, broken part of the PC world though. Even on osx and windows, they never quite work, and sharing is nearly impossible. - Paul Buchheit

@Paul .. good luck with that :) But we don't need printers, right? Everything can be done on the web. - Tim Hoeck

Enver: except that Ubuntu takes forever to start up and X and all common desktop environments (Gnome, KDE) are slow as heck. I hope they reinvent a few wheels, if those are the wheels I have to choose from. - Bret Taylor

Google and Microsoft getting more and more alike. - Rutger Blom

Will Google take a cut from the devs for apps written for Google Chrome OS? - τorƍue

Rutger: They are in the same space but not alike. i cannot imagine windows being open sourced - Kiran Patchigolla

τorƍue, nope.. but you'll have to look at ads in your OS. :) - Tim Hoeck

Kiran: I can actually see Microsoft releasing an open source OS if that generates money for them. I just meant Google, by first releasing a browser and now an OS, is starting to look more like Microsoft in my eyes. They just apply a different license to their source code and "do no evil" right? - Rutger Blom

Finally! - phil

Finally, maybe it'll force IE to become standards-compliant. I'm sick of this ..oh yeah, now I have to make it work on IE (6,7,8).. this is such a clean concept (that we all knew was coming)!! - Chris Myles

Did you notice that few weeks ago, Google announced that they were integrating NaCl into Chromium: "we have a strong preference for delivering Native Client pre-installed or built into the browser, and we'll be focusing on that as our main strategy for delivering Native Client to users. Careful readers may have already noticed evidence of integration into Chromium <http://dev.chromium.org> in the Native Client source" http://groups.google.com/group...? - Jérôme Flipo

Bret, sluggishness is a feature of today's Linux desktop, I agree -- but determining to reinvent instead of giving a few hands to fix the problem? Just to host a browser? It doesn't seem like a good move to me. - Enver ALTIN

I hope the good old classical *nix utilities will be available in this grand new OS, specifically vim+git? I'm just going so well with Linux. - Juvenn Woo

I think they should have kept it a secret until they had more code. Also, history is littered with attempts to do this. Remember NetPC? Remember JavaPC/JavaOS? Remember Netscape's Javascript Push Desktop? Maybe the web is mature enough that people are ready for this concept now, atleast on mobile devices like the Pre and NetBooks, but there's a still a lot of people who like to run OGL/DirectX games, desktop media editing (video/photos), and other apps that are still unmatched by HTML5 capabilities, and will be for some time. - Ray Cromwell

ChromeOS is custom GUI for web apps running on a linux kernel, right? So how exactly is this different from Palm's WebOS which is a linux kernel running a custom version of webkit. - Greg Morgan

Greg, it's probably conceptually similar, except that ChromeOS will be designed for netbooks instead of cellphones (which obviously have different ui constraints). - Paul Buchheit

Isn't a huge difference compared to WebOS (which allows some API calls to the hardware) that the apps developed for Chrome OS are limited to the webbrowser sandbox? In the blog post Google says "And 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." Unless they try the Microsoft Active X approach to get around that, which sounds like a pretty bad idea to me. - Daniel Chow

Will this mean I get adsense on my desktop? ;-) No but srsly I am amazed to see that this interesting project wasn't started by a team that has just left Google. - TobiasVerhoog.com

Finally - Ozkan Altuner from Android

@Ray Cromwell, you're right, they should have kept their cool, and let the NYT publish what it wants without explicit corroboration. It's MSFT that's the master of premature announcements, aka vaporware, not Google. As it is now, the assorted self-styled tech punditry of the world will have half the summer and fall to speculate, when they could have been caught largely unawares with a simple faït accomplí. - ianf ⌘

@patrick "This sounds like it would be perfect for Arringtons CrunchPad" and @Matt Cutts: "that would be pretty neat, wouldn't it?" - possibly, only Arrington needs the OS by last friday, not "in second half of 2010," when first "Chrome'd" hardware is supposed to arrive. On a personal note, I'd probably be more enthusiastic had they managed to bring out a stable Chrome browser for OSX, not solely the old Windoze… first things first. - ianf ⌘

@ianf: Like your "rock dots" in fàït accômplí :) - Joel Webber

Nifty design goals. - Mark Essel

I hope standart Linux tools will be available :-) Vim, ssh should be there! - Eren Türkay

Someone said "I hope they're not reinventing the wheel" -- I hate to break it to you, but that is what Google does best: reinvent. Search Engines, webmail, jabber, web browsers, linux for phones, email ... all of them had already been invented once ;-) - Joel Bennett

If we never reinvented the wheel, we'd still be using tree trunks to roll things on. - Rich

a great opportunity for linux, IMHO. And anyway, another player in the field of OS, which is good ;-) - Marco Castellani

I hope Chrome OS will bring real innovations to Linux (which is already innovative). Not only Google's logo! - Thierry R. Andriamirado from email

This is big. Like... Biblical Big. - Mike Troiano

Oh, yeas? And what epochal software, pray, has the Bible brought forth? I can only think of the virus of religion itself, but that's hardly a cause to celebrate [spoken as true atheist]. - ianf ⌘