Chrome for the holidays

This may be one of the last holiday seasons without sub $200 netbooks. Shortly before Thanksgiving Google made its new [free] Chrome OS available to third party developers. Chrome OS is a lightweight system for netbooks and users willing to live in the cloud. It is obviously a high priority project for Google; their anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts was unable to contain his glee while live blogging the announcement. The blog Vertical Measures listed ten important features and, while it won't be fully user ready for awhile, Dell immediately produced a version for one of its netbooks. The blog Get A New Browser was able to get Chrome to run in a virtual environment well enough to get some screen shots. Their technical assessment? "Meh".

Almost every other blogger was far more decisive. In VentureBeat, former Google engineer Vijay Pandurangan made the detailed case that Chrome could facilitate a world where web based apps will become open commodities and that some existing nuisances (such as Microsoft and Apple) currently separating Google from the user could become irrelevant. All Facebook declared wistfully that Chrome will create the all encompassing platform that Facebook always wanted to become.

The pessimistic camp has trouble believing that consumers will march completely into the cloud as Google hopes they will. Econsultancy came up with twelve reasons why Chrome will fail and Infoworld added the phrase 'Big Time' when you throw in the fact that Chrome will not provide the necessary file support for users wanting to keep their photos and music files safe at home.

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