Having launched their popular web browser Chrome around 9 months ago, taking a supposed 30 million userbase with it, Google haven’t rested on their laurels and have today announced the news that they plan on releasing an operating system based around their popular web browser.

Obviously the operating system industry is a one very much dominated by Microsoft products (the windows family accounts for approximately 90% of OS usage at the time of writing) and they come into the operating system field just around the time Windows are planning the release of their own new OS, Windows 7.

Alongside Microsoft, people are beginning to adopt Linux as a stable platform and you also have the Mac platform growing in popularity. With that in mind, let’s take a look at what a Google OS could bring to the OS community:

• Google says that operating systems we use today weren’t built with the web in mind, meaning we aren’t maximising the potential of the software we use everyday.
• Google Chrome OS will be open source, meaning that anyone can write and add applications as well as actually write to the OS itself (we can’t see Microsoft making it’s OS platform open source anytime soon).
• It will initially be aimed at netbooks, meaning it’ll be optimised to run on x86 and ARM chips, another advantage over current OS’s.
• The Chrome OS will concentrate on speed, simplicity and security and will be designed to have you on the web within seconds of starting up your machine.
• They are completely redesigning the security architecture of the OS “so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.“

As is usual with Google, they don’t do things by halves and it seems that rather than releasing some kind of standard OS with a Google logo attached to it, they are trying to rethink the whole OS platform which can only be a good thing for it’s end users (and a bad thing for Microsoft?).