Chrome OS

[Sources here, here and here.]

Google's launching a new operating system based on Chrome, evidently aimed at hitting Microsoft where it really hurts. At first it does seem like a game-breaker: to run an entire OS and all your programs from a browser. And admittedly it does look enticing - after all the future of the computer is the internet.

But I can't help thinking that this is history repeating itself. First, we had command-line-based OSes. I guess most of my generation isn't familiar with DOS, but my family was an early adopter when it came to computers and I used it for probably 2-3 years when I was a kid.

And then came Windows 3.1, which came with a delightful tutorial demonstrating things like how to use the mouse, and windowed applications - believe it or not, applications weren't always either full-screen or boxes with the minimize/restore/exit boxes at the top-right corner! - and things like check-boxes and drop-down menus. I remember a portion of the tutorial where you could do something like choose different flavours of ice-cream and toppings and it would calculate the number of calories for that serving. Really unimpressive now but then it was quite something.

And then Windows 95 introduced the Start button and the Taskbar, another significant leap forward. (And it was also much less of an eyesore!) The Internet came along around this time too, and with it Netscape. Netscape was my first and primary browser for a long time, before I reluctantly moved back to IE because Netscape 7 was intolerably unstable. 

Then came Firefox (Firebird at first) and tabbed browsing, and then I started using Opera (which I still stick to) and mouse gestures (which I cannot live without, now), and Chrome came along late last year - and now Chrome OS.

Come to think of it, tabbed browsing is awfully similar to a taskbar - they're visual ways of swapping between pages or applications. As for web applications, they've been around since javascript and flash, and nowadays with Java and all the different scripting languages you can get incredible functionality packaged neatly in a single webpage. Gmail for instance - a pretty good example of packaging combined with sophisticated scripting underneath.

But it should be pointed out this is simply a reworking of the old situation. Where once we had an OS reading programming code to display applications onscreen, now we have an OS reading code to display a web browser, which reads yet more code to display web applications, streaming videos, flash games and the like.

So now that we can spend nearly all our computer time on a web browser, it kind of makes sense to cut out the OS entirely - to make the browser the OS, as Google plans to do. Google seems to have a plan to take over everything, just that this new Chrome OS idea really isn't as revolutionary as it's being made out to be. 

If you don't have programming experience or know next to nuts about computers, I guess all this would be lost on you. So to navigate away from this page, you might as well click here.