Once again, William Wright has allowed me on his drive time show on BBC Radio Lincolnshire (listen here), this time to talk about the new open source operating system from Google, Chrome OS. At this stage it is meant mostly for netbooks, but Google are saying there will be eventual support for laptops and desktops too. Now when I say OS, that’s not really meant in the traditional sense of the word(s): everything Chrome OS does is ‘in browser’. In fact that’s all Chrome OS is, a browser, in particular, the rather nippy Chrome browser. So how does that work? Take a look at the screen shot below:
As you can see, any traditional desktop type software is replaced by a web application. Your photos are stored with Picasa, your documents with Google Documents. There are no on board applications, everything is server side. This ‘thin client’ style of computing means that your computer will be uber-nippy. From switch on to editing documents/surfing the web should take you no more than 10 seconds. You sign in with your Google account and everything flows from there, much like the Android OS for smartphones.
As we all know, Google have been pushing for a while now for you to store all of your information in ‘the cloud’, in particular their cloud (Gmail, Google Documents, Picasa etc). This of course has benefits for us all: no need for personal hard drives, backups, photos and documents are universal and easy to access from any computer & of course, no duplicate files because everything is stored centrally, on one far away computer. Unfortunately this has its downfalls also. Internet connections can be shaky & unreliable. As much as I hate to say it, but we don’t have 3G/WiFi coverage everywhere we go, leaving you with a very shiny, nice looking, but useless brick if your running Chrome OS and have no connection. Having said this you will still be able to access the applications in offline mode thanks to the genius of Google Gears and the advent of HTML 5 but of course without being able to send anything over the tubes.
Ultimately, Chrome OS is a fantastic idea: a light, fast & simple OS meant for secondary use to your main machine, mainly for browsing, web video & photo/document editing. In my opinion cloud computing is also a brilliant idea, but there needs to be some sort of balance. I would rather have the option to back up the information locally as well as in the cloud, just in case. I would also like the option to install my own applications on there. Having said that its still early days yet and I’m pretty sure most users feel the same. Hopefully the big ‘G’ will open up to the users needs and wants and build these functionalities in. Watch the video below for the official run down of Chrome OS.
