Pinderkent

Earlier this year Google announced Google Chrome OS. Subsequently, some early indications of what it may offer came to light. And now there will apparently be an event held soon, where further details pertaining to Chrome OS may be made available.

I am interested in seeing what Chrome OS may offer us. Based on the original announcement, it sounded like it would bring some fresh ideas to the table. This is something we really haven't seen for well over a decade now. Modern mainstream desktop operating systems like Mac OS X and Windows 7 aren't overly different from their equivalent releases of 10 to 15 years ago. Mac OS X is still remarkably similar to NeXTSTEP and Mac OS 9 and earlier, while Windows 7 still follows the concepts introduced with Windows 95.

Looking back, the last truly innovative desktop operating system is likely BeOS. I covered many of the excellent design decisions behind BeOS in an article earlier this year. In short, it was far too many years ahead of its time. It's only today that we're getting the hardware that it would excel on. And although the original BeOS implementation can best be considered dead, the Haiku project has been making good strides creating an operating system inspired by it.

If Chrome OS can bring even just a fraction of the innovation that BeOS brought, I think we should be able to consider it a success. Unlike BeOS, Chrome OS has a powerful backer, which may very well be what it needs to become a mainstream competitor to the existing consumer-grade operating systems that are widely used today. So I'm looking forward to the upcoming announcements regarding it, and hopefully we'll be able to start using it out quite soon.