Apparently, organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful will require a new operating system.

Google has long worked on expanding its reach beyond mere Internet search. And as many had suspected, it confirmed late Tuesday night that it plans to develop a lightweight operating system based on Linux and Web standards for personal computers.

Why? Well, Google’s standard response to any question about why it’s working on something other than search is to declare that any product that helps people get on the Web, and enjoy their experience on the Web, benefits Google’s advertising customers in that more Web users equals more Google searches.

Yet, Chrome OS represents something more. There’s a competitive impact that can’t be ignored, no matter how often Google insists that it’s in this world to do good rather than inflict pain on other corporations.

Few details were available Wednesday concerning one of the most important and ambitious projects Google has ever undertaken. Sources familiar with the Chrome OS project say Google engineers have only been working on the project in earnest since the beginning of the year, so there’s likely a lot that still needs to be ironed out.

Chrome OS is the byproduct of Google thinking it can do better than Windows, Mac OS X, the various flavors of Linux, and even its own Android operating system. It’s long been obvious that the world has changed from a personal computing model built for individuals working offline or businesspeople sharing files across a workplace to one where the consumer/business lines have blurred and people are expected to be online anywhere and everywhere.

Accompanying that shift has been the decreasing importance of processing power and operating system complexity. For years, the dirty secret of the computer industry has been that most people don’t use nearly the amount of headroom provided to them by modern microprocessors and operating systems.

After all, if you’re searching the Web, sending e-mail, typing up documents, touching up photos, and updating your Facebook status–hardly an uncommon usage model–you’re more concerned with speed and battery life than raw power. Those still playing Doom or editing video will always need something more robust, but most people do spend an awful lot of time in the browser and have embraced smartphones and Netbooks as a way of staying online on the go.

Google’s general idea seems to be twofold. First, it wants to make it easier for regular people to use a computer by making an operating system that is fast, secure, and lightweight enough to run on portable devices.

Sources familiar with Google’s plans for the Chrome OS said that the company is working on a new method of “windowing,” or switching between multiple applications. Google also believes that the whole idea of storing your files and applications in folders is an archaic way of organizing your data, and plans to unveil a new user interface that handles things a little differently.

Secondly, Google believes that through the use of Web standards like HTML 5–promoted heavily during its recent Google I/O conference as the development platform of the future–software development on a browser-based OS will be easily understood by developers reared in the Web 2.0 era.

This is not a new idea. Palm is betting its future on such a strategy, having introduced WebOS on the Palm Pre as a Web-friendly development environment based on a browser engine running atop Linux. Sound familiar?

Google brings much more to bear than Palm, however. It has an entire suite of Web applications and services that already form much of what you want a computer to do: send e-mail, compose documents, edit photos, and, of course, browse the Web.

But why does Google think it needs two operating systems to address this evolving usage model? Much of the language used to introduce Chrome OS could have been pulled from a blog post two years ago introducing Android, Google’s lightweight Linux-based open-source smartphone operating system.

Just a few months ago Google’s Andy Rubin declared Android to be “a revolution” that would help Google conquer the write-once, run-anywhere goal that has eluded the non-Microsoft software community for so many years. And Google executives have endorsed the concept of other companies building things other than phones based on Android.

However, Android appears to now occupy a different role in Google’s thinking. According to Tuesday night’s blog post, “Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.”

As noted, there are an awful lot of details that still need to surface before we can glean Google’s true intent with Chrome OS, not to mention the potential impact. Google said it plans to release the code for Chrome OS later this year, with the expectation that devices based on the OS could arrive in the second half of 2010.

But one thing is for sure: Google’s ambitions are boundless. The company is proposing to do nothing less than rewrite the rules that govern personal computing.

Source: CNET News

People are excited about Windows 7. Overall, reviews of the betas are overwhelmingly positive and it looks as though (not surprisingly) Microsoft has learned from the giant mistake that was Vista. There’s just one potentially sticky wicket for Redmond: Windows 7 Starter Edition.

I bring this up because netbooks are increasingly finding their way into education and with good reason. They do almost everything that students need them to do and can be had for drastically less money than the average laptop. Their size makes them a natural choice for cramped desks and stuffed backbacks and their low cost makes them much more disposable than their 15″-ish counterparts (I know, not very green, but economically sensible when they will be suffering K-12 abuse).

So netbooks are great for us educators. Fine. We’ve established this. What Microsoft has established, however, is that, although Windows 7 will run well on netbooks (unlike Vista), most netbooks will be loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition. According to the Wall Street Journal,

Netbooks are expected to run better on Windows 7 than Vista, which required more powerful hardware than netbooks offered. To encourage use of the new software, the company plans to offer a version called Starter that will be inexpensive but comes with significant limits. Besides only running three application programs at a time, Starter will also lack some spiffy graphical interface features of other versions of Windows 7.

Users will be able to get around these limitations for a price:

Customers who aren’t satisfied will have the option to pay an additional fee to upgrade to a higher-end version of the software, a process that will involve unlocking advanced Windows 7 features that are already stored on their PCs. Pricing for Starter, or for the upgrade, isn’t yet known.

Guess what? They can also get around these limitations with Linux. While none of the current netbook offerings are made to be multi-tasking beasts, Linux means they won’t need to hog processor cycles with anti-malware software and can easily run OpenOffice, a web browser, an IM client, and music software at the same time. Without upgrading Starter Edition (whose 3-application limitations do not include anti-virus), they would have already hit the 3-app limit.

It strikes me that this is an opportunity for Linux that hasn’t existed to date. If users wanted to run Windows, they could buy a netbook with XP Home and run whatever applications they wanted, up to the limitations of the hardware. Users have never experienced software-imposed limitations. I, for one, wouldn’t want to be building a 1:1 program, advocating full classroom integration, and then tell teachers that students will hit a wall following a Twitter conversation in class, typing notes, and accessing information on the web. I wouldn’t need to tell them that on Linux machines, especially if I kicked in a little money for RAM upgrades.

What do you think? Will anyone care? Is 3 apps enough? Or will Starter Edition’s limitations be a real opportunity for Linux on netbooks?

Source: ZDNet

Google is coming a bit closer to releasing a working version of its Chrome browser for Mac.

Programmers for the company had been building an engine that could render Web pages, but it only ran within a simple framework called the test shell. Now they’ve begun hooking up the renderer to a full-fledged browser, which among other things can handle multiple tasks at the same time. That’s key for a real application, especially one such as Chrome that isolates each browser tab into its own computing process.

The result of the work: a screenshot of Chrome running on Mac OS X posted to the Chromium developer mailing list. “Now we can call it Chrome!” crowed programmer Avi Drissman wrote.

Granted, it’s a view of Chrome failing to properly show a Web page, but it’s a step in the functional direction. Google has set a deadline of shipping Chrome for the Mac and Linux by end of June.

Moving Chrome from its initial incarnation as a Windows application to Mac OS X and Linux hasn’t been easy. Ben Goodger, a Firefox programmer who now leads Chrome’s interface work, griped about the difficult balance between preserving Chrome software across multiple operating systems while coping with the different abilities of each.

Google chose to split some of the Chrome interface into a Mac OS X-specific incarnation, despite the maintenance difficulties that imposes, but the choice isn’t as easy when wrestling with Linux’s interface, he said in a January message.

Goodger said that after some teeth-gnashing, Google eventually decided to create the Linux version of Chrome using the GTK package of graphical interface components used with the GNOME user interface.

“My initial thought was that a Windows-clone would be acceptable on Linux provided the performance of the app itself was outstanding, given the general reluctance of some of the team working on Linux towards UI (user interface). But they stood up and made their case for a GTK UI,” Goodger said in a February 4 message, “and…that’s what we’ve decided to do.”

Source: CNET – by Stephen Shankland