Google has decided to open up another front in its competition with industry titan Microsoft—and this time, it’s attacking the heart of Microsoft’s business by launching its own operating system: Google Chrome OS. Google Chrome OS will be a lightweight, open source operating system initially intended for netbook computers. A separate project from Android, Google smartphone platform, Google Chrome OS will offer a windowing system running on top of a Linux kernel, and Google plans to support both x86 and ARM processor architectures with the new OS. Unsurprisingly, the main goal of the Chrome OS will be to get users into Google’s Chrome Web browser; from there, they will be able to access a wide variety of Web-based applications, rather than having to rely on native desktop applications.
