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Google Introduces Chrome OS, Web Store and New Chrome Features

At the event held yesterday in San Francisco, Google’s executives showcased the Chrome OS, the first browser-based operating system. Google describes it as “an operating system that is built and optimized for the web.”  They added that building an OS around the browser will make computers faster, simpler and more secure. Chrome OS is still not publicly available, and the company revealed that notebooks running on the new OS from Acer and Samsung will be commercially available in 2011.

However, Google did announce the Chrome OS pilot program offering small quantities of Cr-48, a first notebook to run new system, to qualified users for testing. The program will be launching among selected businesses, developers and individuals  who can apply for the program on the Chrome Site.

Google  says that notebooks running on Chrome OS will be set up in less than a minute, resume from sleep almost instantly, and will come with an integrated 3G connection and 100MB of free data usage per month from Verizon for the period of two years. Individuals will pay $9.99 per day for unlimited data access.

Google Chrome team revealed that Chrome browser has seen an amazing growth this year with number of users tripling to stunning 120 million. They also introduced some of the latest features designed to improve user experience and increase the speed of the Chrome browser. Among them is Google Instant, a feature  which allows loading of frequently browsed pages as a user types.  The Javascript V8 engine is also improved and will process complex javascript code even faster. New built-in PDF viewer is said to be amazingly fast, loading PDFs instantly and allowing users to easily scroll through large documents. These features will be available to users in the near future.

Next exciting announcement coming from the search giant was the launch of Chrome Web Store which allows users to easily browse and buy web apps through a unified storefront. The apps can be run in any web browser that supports the same web standards as Chrome. Payments will be done through Google Checkout payment system enabling users to buy and download apps with one click.

Some of the companies that demonstrated their apps at the yesterday’s event were the New York Times, Amazon, and Citrix. At the moment most of the apps in the web store are free, but there are also some subscription apps, and some that even work offline. The majority of the apps are HTML5-based web apps. The store is currently available only in the U.S., but will expand to number of countries at the beginning of next year. According to Google, the Chrome Web Store will be “helping people discover great apps and developers reach millions of users around the world.”

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 6th, 2010 and is filed under Business Incubator. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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