Chromium OS – The Bright Side

The source code for Google’s Chromium OS was released today. Now, it’s clearly not meant to completely replace Windows, Linux or any other OS. It’s meant for a different market – mainly the market of netbooks, but I guess laptops and public computers could make good use of it as well. It’s not all that clear at this point, if you ask me – but this is no revolution in the OS division. More of an evolution, making a new type of OS – namely a web-based (and dependent) one.

I think there’s one idea that will stick around and probably make an impact on the regular OSes, though – and that’s the idea of integrating the web browser into the OS. In Chromium, it’s taken one step further, of course, the web browser being the OS. But let’s say Linux took this idea and made it so that you actually could browse the web and it would look like in Chromium, but you could at the same time switch to your “regular” desktop. I mean, look at the picture of Chromium’s UI. At least I would love to have the option of having it look like that when I’m browsing the web on my Linux laptop or Windows desktop. It looks gorgeous!

Many people use several desktops in Linux. What if one of them was a designated browser desktop?

Not to mention, Google is right on about more and more people using their browser and the internet for more and more these days. This idea is tapping into a completely new market, and it would only seem natural for Linux, Microsoft and Apple to follow after. I doubt they’ll be willing to just leave this market alone, after all – and I also doubt they’ll be willing to build their version of this could-OS completely from scratch. Integrating the browser(s) more into the OS, both UI-wise and performance-wise, seems like a natural progression.

This might be a bit hard to do, considering there are several different web browsers out there, but if it’s possible, it would be absolutely awesome. And of course, Windows and Apple would have a much easier time integrating their proprietary browsers into their OSes. It would be a bit of a letdown for those of us who prefer using better browsers, but let’s face it – we’re not a huge chunk of the PC market, and we’d be fine with our favorite browser still running in an old-fashioned window.

I hope I’m not completely off on this idea being realistic, because it would be really cool.