Here at Web-Empire we have been watching for news of the fabled Chrome Operating System from Google. With rumours that it might take on Microsoft and the like we thought we would delve into the subject abit more and share it with you:

The recent news about Google’s Chrome OS has raised the interesting question of what an “OS For The Web” might be like, as Chrome OS (as the name suggests) will be based around the Google’s Chrome web browser.

Many have discussed, in the past, whether the rise of usable Web applications will one day make “desktop applications” obsolete. Applications like Google Docs already provide word processing, spreadsheets, and the like, purely through a Web interface; and web- based email has been around for over a decade now. Just about everything you do on your PC can be done on a web site, although the quality of the experience may be somewhat less in a browser window – and things don’t work too well when you’re not connected to the Internet…

But there’s no reason why those pitfalls can’t be removed. Google Gears is a browser extension that lets Web applications install themselves into protected areas on your PC with their own protected areas to store their data in, meaning they can run without an Internet connection. And ongoing improvements in HTML such as HTML5 will continue to improve the quality of the experience that browser-based apps can provide.

Details on what Chrome OS will work like are not yet available, so all we can do is suppose; but given Google’s existing work on Gears and the Chrome browser itself, it’s quite likely that Chrome OS will not necessarily be simply what “an OS with just a browser” might imply; it could well extend what apps in the browser can do until it’s enough to do everything you’d want to do on a PC.

Some of the technical implications of that are discussed in [one of our consultants comment to a posting on technovia](http://www.technovia.co.uk/2009/07/%E2%80%9Cthe-internet-is-everything%E2%80%9D-deja-vu-all-over-again-%C2%AB-gartenblog.html?dsq=12437320#comment-12437320 ).