Chromium OS source released: another way of thinking

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

A few months ago I lambasted Google for daring to enter the client operating system market with Chromium. Now the source code has been released it’s time to take another look. Like Google’s entrance into the Web browser market, a Google operating system seemed like too much of a diversion from its core business, particularly when it is open source and available to all.

Of course, a new option is rarely a “bad” thing, especially on the desktop which has been stifled by Microsoft’s Windows XP monopoly for at least the last eight years.

The question is not really about competition, but about whether a Chromium OS will give consumers a real alternative to existing products.

Google has made no secret that Chromium OS is geared for netbooks with a Web-centric view of information management.

Why do you need a full client computer when everything can be hosted in the cloud?

That philosophy represents a fundamental change in computing, especially for consumers. Businesses with thin clients would be used to a similar concept, just not all over the Web.

The question I have is whether Google needs to go to the trouble of engineering a full client OS to achieve this.

To give an example of Google’s prowess, it has reduced the boot time for Linux to just a few seconds making the start up experience very seamless. And that was one of the arguments its engineers gave for producing Chromium (watch the video).

But as it happens most (if not all) of the major Linux distributions are already working on speeding up boot times.

As I’ve discussed previously, the same argument applies to Web browsers and the applications they connect to.

Sure Google could force its way ahead of standards to product a nice user experience for its Web apps through its Web browser, but at the end of the day that expending all you energy to paddle down stream.

The advancements in Web standards will invariably result in a better user experience across all products. If Google products help drive these standards that’s great, but that doesn’t mean the products themselves – in this case Chromium OS and Web browser – automatically have merit, they don’t.

Now there’s even talk that Google’s Android and Chromium OS might merge in the future because they both rely heavily on the WebKit standard. Need I say more?

In the case of Android I’ve praised Google enough for helping to drive a paradigm shift on mobile information management, but in the cases of a Web browser and PC operating system the potential for improvement is a lot less compelling.

Mobile software was languishing in the dark ages, but the march of Mac OS X, Linux and Windows (read: Windows 7) on the desktop is in full swing.

It will be interesting to see if Google’s OEM partners for Chromium see success shipping a Web-centric operating system to a desktop-centric PC audience.

I, for one, am interested in using a Web browser as an application, not as a desktop UI.