It does sound like a really good idea. After using Chrome for a while, it’s just really hard to go back to the other slower browsers. Firefox takes over eight seconds to start, which really chafes at me.

I’m not ready to give Google more business though, they have control over so much public and private information on the web and that’s a little too much power for my liking.

I think naming it identically to their browser will be a tad confusing, but other than that I like the idea of another free operating system choice (especially one with Google’s level of resources behind keeping it maintained).

I did think about the browser/OS same-vendor issue myself, but as they’re not a monopoly yet and the OS is free, I guess it’s not really a problem for now.

In five to ten years if Google’s suddenly dominating the browser market and the OS market, then at that point we can grab some pitchforks and make angry noises.

Microsoft was already in a monopoly position with its Windows OS when they were criticized about making Internet Explorer an integral part of the Operating System (which to the layman user, meant that he/she would never even think of trying other web-browsers, thus the anti-competition argument). Besides, IE’s lack of standard compliance was well-documented, and its vulnerability / numerous security holes were a clear incentive for the industry regulators to intervene in order to enable competition.

As far as I know, Google-OS is not in a monopoly position, right ? Furthermore, it’s going to be open-sourced for the most part, and support for other browsers will be ensured.

Google Corp. understands freenomics probably better than any other competitor, and they may well be the next monopoly in a new era of cloud computing. We shall see. For now, their contribution to open knowledge and open-source software undeniably benefits the world, which until very recently is not something that could be said about Microsoft.

I for one am looking forward to playing with Google’s Linux-based OS. It won’t replace my main Mac OS X machine but it should provide an interesting small form-factor / mobile computing experience. Let’s hope that Google get hardware manufacturers to adopt Mary Lou’s / Pixel Qi outdoor-friendly energy-saving LCD displays !!

Cheers, Dan

You can even script Illustrator with JavaScript.