In talking at the Web 2.0 Summit, Sundar Pichai, VP of product management at Google, mentioned how apps that work on the web will work in Chrome OS, adding, "As a user, you don't install software, you don't maintain software."
Remember the last time you bought a new computer? How long did it take to install all of your software and get it configured just right? For some of us, that is a process that can span an entire weekend.
If you use Google Chrome as a browser, you might be aware of the ability to create application shortcuts. You do this by clicking on the control button (the one that looks like a page with its upper-right corner folded) and click "create application shortcuts..." This allows you to create a shortcut to the web page on your desktop or start menu. And when you launch the shortcut, the page is launched in a special 'application' window that does away with the tabs and address bar.
That is how simple it will be to install applications with the Chrome OS. You'll simply navigate to the web page and tell the browser to save it as an application.
And if you thought Chrome OS was a new idea based on the growing popularity of the Chrome browser (it's at 30 million active users and growing), think again. They built the browser with the idea of turning it into an operating system.
What does it mean to turn the Chrome browser into an operating system?
Some might be confused about how you can take an application (the Chrome browser) and turn it into a full-fledged operating system. The answer is: you can't. Chrome OS will not use Chrome as the operating system.
The operating system will be Linux-based. As Pichai put it, "We describe Chrome OS as Chrome on top of Linux with a new windowing system."
In other words, Chrome OS is really a new version of Linux. So where does Chrome come into the picture? It is the platform. Rather than running Linux applications, you will run web applications through the Chrome browser.
source:webtrends
