Chrome OS

I must admit, a new netbook OS from Google, and one that's not based on Android, did rather surprise me. Though there had been mutterings that Android's single-window approach, which just right for phones and (perhaps) internet tablets, was not rich enough for netbooks and (certainly) laptops and desktops, where a multiple simultaneous windows are required.

So the base is Linux, but the windowing system will be new. There might be some overlap with Android at the base, Linux level then. It looks like X gets the thumbs down from yet another vendor as a modern windowing system though.

And on top of their so-far unnamed windowing system, the GUI itself will basically be the browser: Chrome. It's not as far fetched as it sounds. While the idea itself is older, Firefox brought home to me the possibility of writing an application in a browser window. With Firefox, it's not just the inner pane, the one that displays the web page, that's a browser window: the outer pane is a browser window too, and all the menus and toolbars and whatnot that make up the browser itself are built up in the same way as web pages are.

Looking back a few years to Internet Explorers 4 to 6, Microsoft themselves reinvented the desktop as a browser pane with Active Desktop. The desktop could now include HTML fragments that contained anything from a simple specification of the background wallpaper to a desktop widget.

And now Palm's Pré mobile phone shows just how good a GUI you can build using web technologies. WebOS is the Pré's GUI and is written — you guessed it — using this now-standard approach of a browser pane as the basic window type, good for the "desktop" (phonetop?) as well as for application windows.

If Chrome OS can run Flash Player (and therefore also Air) and, dare I say it, Java as well (and there's no reason why it shouldn't, as Chrome-the-browser can certainly do all that) then I'd say it's got most bases covered, even games (to a certain degree).