Chrome: It's not a browser, it's the first web OS

Sometime today, Google is due to release the first version of Chrome, which is being described as a Web browser. It's not that. It's transcendent. Chrome is a Web operating system.This should be no surprise. Since the earliest days of Netscape, the vision has been to make the Web the center of an applications universe, relegating the "desktop" to the dustbin. Microsoft's decision to "cut off Netscape's air supply" -- which led to a federal antitrust case -- was a reaction to the threat that vision constituted to its PC monopoly.In the years since then, Web browsers have slowly become capable of fairly heavy lifting. But developers of Web-based applications are straining those limits. And Google happens to be one of those developers. Google Mail and Google Docs can give your trusty old Web browser a real backache. If you've ever had your browser freeze because of a Javascript problem, or a Flash component, you've run into that.Then there's the offline-usage problem. Having your data in the Web cloud isn't a good thing if you're disconnected.The vision for Chrome, as documented in a 38-page Web comic, is to create an environment that optimally manages and coordinates Web-based applications. That sounds a lot like the classic definition of an operating system: "An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a computer
system that is responsible for the management and coordination of
activities and the sharing of the resources of the computer. The
operating system acts as a host for applications that are run on the machine."And yes, it'll be a browser, too. But the emphasis and the focus has suddenly shifted. Instead of the focus being on displaying Web pages, it'll be on running processes and storing data (fixing the offline-usage problem). Your "desktop" and your data will be both local and remote, automatically synchronized through Gears.Along the way, Chrome will fix some other issues. For example: Why is the address bar at the top of your Web browser, separated from the page? A lot of people don't know how to use the address bar, believe it or not. If you run a Web site, you can look at your own logs to see how many type your site's domain name into a search engine.I'm a big Firefox fan, and I expect to continue to use it for quite some time. But all things must pass, and Chrome -- which will run identically on Mac, Windows and Linux -- is going to be a game-changer.