Chrome now, what next?

Have you tried the new google chrome browser?  

Google has been telling for years that "We're not going to make a browser!".    So, why now?  They say things have changed in the past few years.  And today's browsers are simply not ready for tomorrow's world.  Google see's tomorrow's computing as a set of web-apps, a gradual deviation from the install-and-use desktop scenario.

Google already has a powerful set of webapps including the ubiquitous gmail, google docs, google reader, maps, orkut and many more.  Rumours are there that they are going to provide a web storage as well.  (Note that the gmail drive was not from google)

The benefits of web-app based computing are many.  First thing, most of these services are free. (At least in the case of google, where they source their $$$ from advertising)   The next reason is that working on mulitple computers is quite easy.  You don't have to carry around your settings or data between your office PC and home PC in a USB stick any more.  No more painful merging  or synching of your documents as well.  Also, its quite easy to share your work/data with your friends/family.  It's not only sharing, but collaborating.  

Fine, but why do you need a new browser?   

Most of these web-apps are written in Javascript and AJAX.  The existing browsers started as HTML viewers.  Though there have been improvements for most browsers over time, they were incremental (Except, may be Firefox 3).   Currently the bottleneck in attracting users to web based computing is the speed of webapps.   Think of this - for viewing a spreadsheet in google docs, you need to start the browser(assume you are connected to net), launch google docs, login, select your spreadsheet and open it (opening is the slowest among the others).  It's quite reasonable that users ditch google docs and use MS office - you only need a few clicks here.  So, there comes chrome.  Along with google gears, and its improved js engine, chrome aims to bridge this gap.  

So, what next?

I think, an OS from google.  

Once you are fully into web based computing, you only need a minimal OS and a browser.  You don't need massive hard disks or optical disk drives.   

You hear music through streaming.

Your favorite videos and movies are on youtube.

Your documents are on google docs.

Your mail is in Gmail 

You chat with your friends through gmail chat.

Your photos are hosted by flickr or picasaweb and your camera directly uploads them.

...

Why you need a windows PC then?  You dont need it.

Imagine this.. 

Google launches a linux based minimal OS.  Itegrated tightly to it is Chrome, the browser. Once it boots (say in 15 sec), you are shown a new look desktop with an address bar on the top.  There is no minimize/maximize/close buttons. There are no icons on the desktop.  Instead, there are tiles of frequently used web pages.  On left bottom, there is a menu named favourites instead of the start button.  On the task bar there are tabs instead of task buttons.   

That's tomorrow's PC for you.