You must have noticed the adverts. Big, loud and ubiquitous. Even one at Vauxhall Bus station. I think they know what they’re doing. They want Chrome to become mainstream, because it’s not just a browser. It’s an operating system. Look at Chromium. Those who have seen applications run in a browser, now ranging from Google Docs, through Calendar, through to Doom online, know what I mean. Javascript running in a browser is now almost as good as a native app (yes, I know Doom Online is not JS). But not quite. Google docs is no MS Office. But what if you had a ridiculously quick virtual machine that could make it MS Office? That’s what Chrome wants to be.

And then it’s done, the old Sun ideal of “The network is the computer” goes live and kicking. Then you can sell a PC with a browser and nothing else. Look at Chromium.

What do you use a PC for? Browsing the web, email, social networking (browsing the web), reading and writing documents, possibly spreadsheets, if you’re a finance student, possibly games, possibly gambling and p*rn (Avenue Q fans, do the catch phrase), possibly playing music and film, possibly even TV (browsing the web?), account management, that kind of stuff. It’s all available in a browser now. Except, browsers are still no match for the native app. That’s what Chrome wants to achieve.

And it’s both fantastic and may be not so at the same time. It’s fantastic, because all the paraphernalia of yesteryear’s mass-computing, all the stuff that shoveled more money into the hands of the few in the know will be gone. Firewalls, anti-viruses, backups, DVD/CD-players and writers, office suites, everything. Just go to the right URL and you’ve got it. Fantastic, because you don’t have to go to the shop, buy a box with a DVD in it, and spend the weekend installing an troubleshooting. Want to share pictures? Open a Flickr account (or Picassa, as Google would prefer). No backups, no physical media (that you’re aware of), no wondering how to organise it, no sending DVD’s to auntie Matilda. What is it that you can’t do in a browser?

What’s more, they’ve now got Gears. Which means your processing power can be used to do stuff locally, reducing the need for more bandwidth. Now, imagine a Gears on steroids, where your computing problem (e.g. a Google Spreadsheet computation) is actually sent for execution on a number of random unsuspecting PCs that would have otherwise been idle. The network is the computer! Map-reduce will change the world. It’s not a question of how much memory, storage and processing power you have, it’s a question of how much memory, storage and computing power are currently available worldwide. A bit like electricity.

What’s possibly not so good about it? When it goes wrong, it goes wrong big time. The engineers at Google should know that. Mind you, I’m sure they do know that, and they’ve built in a lot of redundancy. With all the glitches, gmail, docs, etc are largely working just fine, allowing for the odd calendar reminder that comes three hours after the event. And five minutes later. And again.

But, largely, it works. Digital communism!

Oh, and if you want the hardcore stuff (you can’t really imagine running an IDE in a browser… (oh, unless it’s an IDE for the browser)), then get some specialised Windows or Linux machine and go play with the other geeks….