Google just announced that the Chrome OS is ready to be kicked out in the open for the developer community to get involved.

Yes, just for the developers for now. The final release will be available same time next year. This release invites the developers to join the open-source community and build the Chrome OS. The project currently includes the latest code base, designs and user interface experiments.

It’s obviously too early to predict what the Chrome OS will look like but be sure that it will be one of the fastest OS you’ve ever used! So how are they doing that?

Google Chrome OS is laser targeted at users who heavily work on the internet so the most important thing for them is a browser. This gives them the flexibility to look at the existing technologies and get rid of the process and technologies that are not required and improve the ones that are required.

For example – Google claims that the OS can come back from sleep in almost 1 second! NOW that’s crazy!

I wrote an article about a DOS based Browser which make Operating Systems like Windows less meaningful. The article suggests creating a technology which is ONLY capable of running a browser and within that browser lies your Operating System.

This article was published almost two years ago – So just like the Windows 7 users I can proudly say Chrome OS WAS MY IDEA! – Read the article here.

Click here to register and get regular updates about Chrome OS while you wait for it to see the light of day.

Watch the following videos to see some early impressions of Chrome OS!

This Video discusses and shows how Google Chrome OS will make things faster and possible

Want to see how quickly Google Chrome OS boots? Check this video out!

An overview of the Chrome OS

This video explains how the opensource process for Chrome OS works and talks a little bit about the underlying technologies of Chrome OS

Google recently announced its roadmap of entering into the OS market for machines ranging from Netbooks to the regular PC’s.

With the growing popularity of not so powerful but extremely mobile netbooks we needed something that was absolutely optimized to run on such machines.

Running vista on these machines is just plain wrong and there can still be something less bulkier than Windows XP that’s currently dominating the netbook
market.

Linux was certainly the first choice of the Netbooks but it certainly cannot match the user-friendly interface of Windows which is why most of the users opt
for a Windows based netbook.

Google is now trying to change that by designing a much simpler and easier interface to accomplish simple and everyday tasks.

While reading the following lines from the announcement reminded me of Palm’s new WebOS which works on the same idea.

Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google is certainly underplaying it by calling its version of OS lightweight which will help users complete simple tasks quickly. In my opinion it will be or will become a full fledge OS that will eventually compete with Windows OS.

If Google does not deliver a fully functional OS which exploit’s the power of netbooks I don’t see how it will take on its competition, Microsoft. Besides if it delivers an OS which only checks e-mails or does the things only a browser is capable of doing then it will actually be wasting the hardware resources available on Netbooks which makes Google Chrome OS less desirable.

Nonetheless it’s a good move on Googles part to identify the fast growing Netbooks as the entry point into the OS market but its success only depends on what it offers.

Google Chrome OS is expected to hit the market in the second half of 2010 and will run on both x86 and ARM chips which is popularly used on Netbooks.

I am sure this announcement has triggered a few high-level meetings at Microsoft to discuss their strategy to counter Google Chrome OS. The moment Microsoft got a little aggressive with Bing, Google put it back on defensive by announcing Chrome OS.

Click here to read more from the announcement.