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Story: Google announces Chrome operating system

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Yeeeaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!!!!!!!!

I almost didn't believe it! This is the best news ever. Even if Google isn't able to shove Microsoft aside hard enough to reach market parity, the fact that they are in the market is great. Microsoft will have to contend with a serious threat to their arcane and trade-restrictive business model. If nothing else it might bust up the over-priced shrinkwrap and OEM disk market for Windows.

The two Google aps I won't let run on my systems are Picasa and Google Desktop for the same reason for both. The freaking hard drive grinding to make up indexes for pictures or text. Google hasn't always hit on the best UI or killer ap with everything they've done but my gut feeling is that they're doing better than Microsoft overall. Windows Search 4.0 validated to me that Microsoft can't do desktop search any better than Google.

On the other hand having another major software group working on a different user interface design means that Linux will be improved also. There will be three major desktops, KDE, Gnome and Chrome.

Browser wars are back! With Firefox and Chrome both performing better than even Microsoft's latest browser, third or fourth place ought to wake up somebody at One Microsoft Way.

Yes there are privacy concerns with Google's browsers that still remain un-addressed. But you can turn off most of the demographic skulduggery and have a very interesting web browsing experience. I used it today to open some pages on that wiki product I hate but have to use and the pages almost made audible pops as they opened. (Yes I emptied the web page cache first!) At first I thought that the speakers were on but I looked at them and they were off. Somewhere between my ears the action-adventure "movie" got a sound effects track!

I've downloaded Chrome version 2.0 and have run it both at home and at work. It is blazing fast compared to IE7 or 8 and still faster than FireFox 3.5. If Google can maintain that sort of performance in their Chrome OS it will be the Windows killer that might actually keep Windows in third place.

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