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Google executives talk up Chrome OS

by Sylvie Barak on 20 November 2009, 09:25

Tags: Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)

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Open sourcery

Google executives were on hand today to answer a whole host of questions about the upcoming Chrome OS, a product creating tremendous buzz a whole year before its official launch.

Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management, began by announcing that although the official launch was a whole year away, Google would be making the source code available from today, for open sourcerers to tinker with.

Pichai went on to boast that Google's Chrome browser, on which the OS is modeled, already has some 40 million users, drawn to it mainly for its clean look and high speeds, which, he noted proudly, can tackle Javascript some 39 times faster than Internet Explorer.

Being the Internet king, Google says it is of the utmost importance to the firm that web applications work just as well as desktop applications. Indeed, Pichai expressed his hope that graphics, video/audio applications, real-time communication, notification and local storage would all work well in Chrome OS by its release in late 2010.

Google, said Pichai, had been watching the stars align and has positioned its OS to take advantage of a number of converging trends, including the popularity of netbooks - driven by the recession - the ever growing buzz around cloud computing and the increasing blur between smartphones and laptops.

With new mobile internet devices on the horizon, Pichai said it was about time for a better level of computing to become available, "and we believe it's Chrome OS," he added.

"All Chrome data resides in the cloud. Anything you put in the machine is immediately available to you anywhere," he explained adding "We want all of personal computing to work that way ... If I lose my Chrome machine, I should be able to go out, buy a new and recreate my previous computing experience easily."