Edit Post ‹ The Official Blog of LG — WordPressJust 9 months after launching Chrome – and a day after all Google Apps finally left their Beta cocoons, Google are looking to the future once more:

We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

The Chrome OS will be an open source “lightweight operating system” that will initially be targeted at netbooks and Google predict the code will be open sourced later this year with the view of the OS becoming available for consumers before the end of 2010. They explain on the official Google blog:

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

As Lifehacker put it:

It’s easy to assume Chrome OS is a strong push to get users familiar with using Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and other web suites, both online and off. It’s harder to figure out the specifics of how Google’s platform will overcome the deeply entrenched Windows familiarity that has kept other Linux-based netbook upstarts mostly in check, and how it will accommodate the vast array of x86 hardware compatibility quirks that plagues Linux distributions to this day. More details and discussions to come, certainly.

Linux has never managed to gain the mainstream familiarity of Windows which makes this particularly ambitious project, but if anyone can, maybe it’s Google… Definitely one to watch!