Link Details

Two separate sources—one inside the company and one outside it—have confirmed to Ars tonight that Google plans to launch an operating system built in some fashion around its new Web browser, Chrome. One source says that the new OS will be launched soon, perhaps as early as tomorrow. Tentatively called "Google Chrome OS," the project appears targeted at netbooks, the tiny portable computers typically used only for such light tasks as Web browsing and e-mail. Chrome, of course, isn't an operating system, but a quick-booting OS built around a single application like Chrome would be a natural fit for a netbook. With such an OS, Google could obviously make it extra easy for users to access the full range of Google cloud applications through the browser—Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, etc. Beyond the bare outlines, we have little solid information at this point, though the idea of a Google OS isn't some novelty; in fact, it's been aired publicly for years. In early 2006, we reported on Google's denial that it was prepping an OS distribution of its own based on Ubuntu, but the idea had already been rumored at that point for some time. More recently, the (relative) ease of porting Android to netbooks led to plenty of speculation that Google's full computer OS, when it appeared, would be based on Android.