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Rumors spread yesterday about how Google was going to make a “Chrome Operating System”. Of course there have been rumors of a Google OS for years now. In early 2006, Ars reported on Google’s denial that it was prepping an OS distribution of its own based on Ubuntu. More recently, the (relative) ease of porting Android to netbooks led to plenty of speculation that Google’s full computer OS, when it appeared, would be based on Android. It turns out that’s not the case… it’s NOT going to be Android (though Google won’t preclude third-party adopters from using Android).

Last night at 9:00pm Google’s official blog raised the flag indicating Google was getting into the OS race. So what is the OS? It’s being Google Chrome OS and the operating system will center on Google Chrome and be targeted for netbooks (initially). It will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. While speculation was wild a few days ago about a Chrome OS, what wasn’t understood was how Chrome, a browser, could BE an OS…. a browser isn’t actually an operating system, what about hardware drivers, memory and processor management, and other red herrings. It turns out Google is cranking out a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel – welp, that solves issues about drivers and such.

So what’s the intention here? Google intends that the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using existing 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. If you do a lot in the cloud now then as TechCrunch put it “Don’t worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You’ve got Zoho and Google Apps. You won’t miss office. Chrome plus Gears plus Google Wave plus HTML 5 and web platforms like Flash and Silverlight all combine into a single wonderful computing device. The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.”

The timing of this couldn’t be any more bitter sweet for Microsoft. Windows 7 RTM lands next week with the full release for October. I have to wonder if Google was trying to take a bit of wind out of Microsoft’s sails since on of the things touted was how well Windows 7 runs on netbooks. The Google Chrome OS will only become available for consumers in the second half of 2010 – not that far behind the release of Windows 7.

Does this spell the end of Microsoft Windows? I’d say don’t count them out yet. Chrome OS will be new and will essentially require cloud computing. Sure, for most things I could get by on that, and as the web gets faster, HTML 5 hits, etc we will be able to do more and more in the cloud. In addition to the Microsoft has been developing “Gazelle” as an alternative to Internet Explorer. The browser acts like a self-contained operating system (sounds like Chrome OS) and is designed to address the fact that browsers like IE and Chrome have not been built by design to handle multiple processes and web applications in a secure manner. The browser relies on a “browser kernel” (5,000 lines of C# code) that helps enforce security rules to prevent malicious access to the PC’s underlying operating system. Built by the Microsoft Research team, company officials have been dropping hints that they are ready to talk more about Gazelle recently – perhaps as the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Google’s official blog post on Google Chrome OS

Offline Gmail has been updated to version 0.2. As with all Google Labs features it isn’t rolled out to all users yet but will show up soon. Once it’s out though you will be able to specify a maximum size for the downloaded attachments. If you don’t need to access attachments when you’re offline, you can disable the download of attachments.

A user of the Gmail Group has a workaround for those who don’t have the new version. “It seems to me that for existing users it’ll appear only when you disable and then again enable Gmail offline. And you won’t have to download your emails again; you can always choose them not to be removed while disabling Gmail offline.” To basically, disable Gears for Gmail, re-enable it once you have v0.2, and you’ll get the new enhancement.

Original source

The updates coming out of Google this week are fast and furious. Today marks the announcement of yet another labs feature. This one will enable multiple inbox panes in the Gmail interface. All you have to do is go into the Labs tab in your Gmail account to enable the new feature; you’ll then be able to enable Multiple inboxes tab in your Gmail interface. Once turned on you can pick up to five different panes. The panes can be set to display to the right of your inbox, above your inbox, or below it.

There are plenty of uses for this feature: If you pull mail in from multiple sources each can have it’s own inbox pane.  Alternatively, you could set it up to provide a quick view of important labels, starred, superstarred, or draft messages all in separate panels.

When setting up your multiple inboxes, you can use any of Gmail’s search operators to create any sort of search you want. For example,  inboxes might include searches like:

is:starred
is:unread
has:attachment

Again, this has been a big week of announcement for the Google camp. So far this week the following announcements have come out:

• First Official Description of GDrive – Google cloud storage drive
  
• Google Latitude – which lets you share geo-location via Google Mobile Maps
• Gmail added Folders – Adding a new move-to functionality to Gmail
• Google Offline Calendar – They then enabled Gears support to use Google Calendar in an offline mode

You can read more over at Lifehacker or as always hit up the Official Gmail blog.

Right on the heals of the announcement that Gmail Goes Offline with Google Gears comes the announcement that Google Calendar is getting the Offline mode treatment as well. Google’s help page mentions that users can decide which calendars are available offline. “Calendar keeps you on time, even when you’re not online. Offline Calendar allows you to access your events through your browser without requiring Internet access. It’s perfect for flaky connections or for when you’re in between meetings and have no idea where you’re supposed to be next. Note that while offline, Calendar will be read-only – it will not be possible to create, edit, or delete events.”

In a very non-Google fashion, Offline Calendar is being rolled out to Google Apps users FIRST. Typically, Google Labs swag gets rolled out to regular old Gmail users first, and then it will eventually make it’s way into the Google Apps users hands. This time around, Google Apps users get first dibs.

Offline Google Calendar will work with multiple calendars, but not on first sync. Your first sync will only grab your default calendar. No worries though, once you’re synced up, you get really basic options on your Settings page to manage which calendars you want synced to your account.

The only downside… it’s read only… at least for the time being.

You can read more About Offline Calendar from Google.

Google announced it will release a brand new open source web browser called Google Chrome. Yesterday a site went up, and has subsequently been taken down at http://gears.google.com/chrome/?hl=en (as of this morning clicking this link take you back to regular old Google).

According to Crunchbase the features include:

• Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it
• A distinct user interface that places tabs on top of the browser window instead of right below the address bar
• An “incognito” mode that lets you browse the web in complete privacy because it doesn’t record any of your activity
• A new JavaScript engine built from the ground up for speed
• Malware and phishing lists that automatically update themselves and warn you of bad websites
• A default homepage that displays your most commonly used sites and other personalized information

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