The first indications of where Google is headed with Chrome OS are trickling out. Here’s a concept video.
Chrome OS seems to be a pretty radical departure from the last 25 years of desktop UI. For starters, it has no desktop. It boots directly to something a lot like a browser view. It doesn’t seem to support pixel-level positioning for windows, either. It has only full-screen windows (with tabs) plus pop-up panels that can be docked to screen edges in sidebars. There also might be some provision (mentioned in other material) for placing multiple windows on-screen side by side if they need to be viewed simultaneously, but there still wouldn’t really be any window management.
Chrome OS also largely eliminates any sort of local file management. It only supports SSDs, not hard disks, and it doesn’t appear to have much of a file manager; I suspect local internal storage is basically just used to store the OS itself and databases for apps making use of HTML5 local storage features. It also supports external storage devices like USB memory cards, the contents of which seem to appear on the pop-up panels described above, so that, for instance, an image from a memory card can be uploaded somewhere.
As of right now, Google is only positioning Chrome OS as a system for small low-cost devices (netbooks, as far as I can tell). It seems like an interesting system for the fairly simple uses to which most netbooks are put. It will be even more interesting to see if they can (or will) try to build a more capable general-purpose computing platform up around the new paradigm.
The key to doing so would, of course, be allowing third-party apps more sophisticated access to local resources than JavaScript/HTML5 currently provide. It will be especially interesting if Google decides to provide such access by extending web standards, which I suspect is the approach they’d want to take. Imagine a world where you can point your browser at a URL and load a web app that provides, say, the functionality of iMovie, can ingest and work with local footage — and works on any platform with a (2012 or later model) browser.
