TechJunction

It was a busy week in the worlds of browsers and operating systems, as Google proved–with its unveiling of the browser-based Chrome OS–that the two are colliding.

Imagine a computer experience that’s much like TV: flip a switch and it’s on. That was the vision conveyed by Google Vice President of Product Marketing Sundar Pichai Thursday as he offered the public its first look at Chrome OS, the new operating system based on the company’s Chrome browser.

Chrome OS eliminates the boot loader and optimizes the kernel so that all the services that normally load with an OS start-up don’t load until they are needed, Pichai explained.

Although Chrome OS is a year away from release, Google released the source code for the project on Thursday. It also relayed, through it’s demo of the OS, a bit about how it thinks the Netbook should evolve. For one thing, Google plans to develop a detailed specification of hardware components that Chrome OS Netbook makers must adhere to in order to use the operating system.
“We really want software to understand the underlying hardware,” Pichai said.
The Chrome OS unveiling came on the heels of sneak previews from Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. Among those was the release of an Office 2010 beta, with new features such as a mechanism for connecting Outlook to social networks.
The software giant announced plans for the formal launch of Windows Azure, the cloud-based operating system that lets developers write programs that run on servers in Microsoft’s data centers. It will be in production for all users starting January 1.
And Microsoft showed it’s serious about building a competitive browser with the first glimpses of technology in Internet Explorer 9.

Google has three top priorities for Chrome OS: speed, simplicity, and security. All three are aided by the fact that Chrome OS runs on a limited set of approved hardware, available next year only from cooperating manufacturing partners. For speed, Chrome OS uses only flash memory-based solid state drives (SSDs), which are faster and more power-efficient than conventional hard drives with rotating magnetic plates. Chrome OS also uses a simplified software suite because the only application it has to run is the browser.

Not to be forgotten in the browser wars, Firefox maker The Mozilla Foundation, reported revenue grew 5 percent to $79 million in 2008. The organization also noted that it’s not interested in building a Firefox OS.