What Does Google Chrome OS Look and Feel Like? (
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Chrome OS looks sleek and feels fast, according to screenshots from Engadget, but what do we really know about the Chrome OS experience? Not much, though a source familiar with Google's application development says Chrome Web browser will essentially leverage Chrome OS to run Web apps really fast. That sounds all well and good, but what will this ultimately mean for Linux distributions?
Google engineers
were quite vague in their description about what its new Google Chrome OS would
look and feel like, telling the high-tech world that the user interface is "minimal
to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the Web."
Chrome OS, which has all the reporting world
hailing it as the Microsoft Windows killer or as a non-player, is also supposed
to be "fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the Web in a few
seconds." A Google spokesperson declined to comment about the look and
feel of Chrome beyond the blog post from Tuesday night.
Resource Library:
However, a source with knowledge of Google's plans
regarding the OS told eWEEK that Google has not finalized many of the design
decisions and that Google is still baking the back-end code for the product. Just
as Windows sits quietly in the background while Microsoft Office and other
applications run on top of it, Chrome will be fairly invisible. The user
experience will take place in the browser, where everything will run as a Web
app.
Saul Hansell of The New York Times echoed this notion in a blog post July 9: "It will be built on a simple version of
Linux that is meant to run only one application: the Chrome browser. Google's
idea is that anything for which you may have wanted a separate software program
can be done within the browser instead. Never mind all the other functions and
add-on programs you find in Windows."
UPDATE: Screenshots of the forthcoming
Linux-based OS for netbooks leaked to Endgadgetproved to be fake, whipped up by a graphic designer using CSS and HTML.
Googleclaimed July 8 that it is currently working with Acer, Adobe, Asus, Freescale,
Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba to get Chrome
OS into the market.
Google could easily change the user interface several times, and the product may even
be faster once it reaches netbooks in 2010 to 2011, if it even sees the light
of day that soon. Why doubt Google's bid to get Chrome OS to market in 2010?
If Google does the smart thing, it does not fork, but it brings a true web awareness to the desktop which would then be populated with Google Apps. A...
Application Development 
