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Today, Google announced it’s new web browser. In merely 48 hours, the Internet was drenched in all the hype caused by leaked comic book scans and screenshots an plenty of rumors, that in the end became true.

An hour and a few minutes have passed since the beta version of Google Chrome and it’s probably one of the most downloaded browsers in launch day, I dare say, like or close to Mozilla Firefox 3. This only proves that people love everything that’s Google related and that they trust Google.

Google Chrome is like Google.com homepage page: simple and effective. The Chrome team mishmashed a few ideas from existing browsers, like Firefox and Opera, used Webkit (from Safari) and applied some ideas of their own for security and stability. I won’t go in details here, you can read a lot about that in the Google Chrome Comic. The result, from what I’ve tested, is a piece of software that will change the way that we’ll use the web. It’s easy to use for the common user, powerful, stable, very user friendly and fast.

But Google Chrome is not just a browser. It’s the cornerstone of a possible Google OS. I can imagine now a small linux distribution with a small footprint, loaded with Google apps like Google Earth, Picasa and a fully integrated Google Chrome, transforming all those webapps (Gmail, Google Tal, Calendar, etc…) we use into applications (through the Google Gears module in Chrome). Boot that from a USB pen drive and you have a portable OS, a thin client ready for the web, using the cloud for storage, etc… the applications are endless. You can already have this, with Firefox and few quirks, but I believe Google itself will create and optimize it’s own web OS.

After all, the web is Google’s business and, the more it can keep us online, the better.

The Google Chrome: Google OS cornerstone? by Ricardo Saramago, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.